Having been very closely connected to the field of online poker & casinos for ages and seen the business from both an affiliate's side and from an operator's site, I know quite a bit about it.
Firstly, most (reputable) poker sites don't shave. As opposed to many other busiesses that involve affiliate marketing, there's relatively little shady stuff going on with poker sites. The reason is simple - this business is largely community-driven, at least 85% of the successful poker affiliates out there know one another and getting caught shaving revenues would do some major harm to the poker site's business as they would lose most of their good affiliates very quickly. Remember, the competition is fierce so switching the to another site takes an affiliate not more than a couple of days.
Having said, I would still stick with large, reputable names, such as the ones mentioned in one of the posts above. Take a look at
www.pokerscout.com and you'll get a nice overview of which sites/networks are large and which ones are small and/or new. Most of the poker sites run an
Another thing to notice is that even though it may be tempting to promote a smaller site because they generally offer far larger revshare percentages and CPAs compared to the large ones, I don't suggest you do it. That's mainly because if operating on revenue share basis (which I suggest you to do unless you intend to send crap traffic), large sites will bring you far more revenues simply because they know how to convert and retain players but also because the larger the site (network), the more liquidity they have, meaning the larger the possibility for your players to pay high rake.
Ahh, and whatever you do, DO NOT sign up below another affiliate, or even worse, through an affiliate network. You'll want to get as high revenue share percentage as possible out of each poker room you'll promote and with the margins being minimal in this industry, the fact that a poker room has to pay an additional 3-5% for the affiliate that referred you may (and will) decrease your chances for a better revenue share greatly.
I hope this helped and feel free to PM me if there's anything else you feel you need to know about this industry
