Full Tilt Poker is perhaps the best known of the online poker rooms. It also I prefer playing. Full Tilt Poker is one of the few options available to players in the United States. As such, the site has been growing as other sites have opted out of the United States. Full Tilt Poker is best known for its stable of professionals known as “Team Full Tilt”. Some of the best players in the world are members of Team Full Tilt Poker including “The Professor” Howard Lederer, Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, John Juanda, Phil Ivey, Jennifer Harman, Eric Lindgren, Phil Gordon, Erik Seidel, Clonie Gowen, Andy Bloch, and Mike “the Mouth” Matusow. This is by far the highest ranked group of players to endorse any poker room. As a “team they have earned more than thirty WSOP gold championship bracelets.
Full Tilt Poker Site Limits and Rake
Full Tilt Poker has a wide range of limits which should satisfy most players. No Limit Holdem limits start at $0.05/$0.10 and go as high as $500/$1000. Omaha High/Low, Stud High/Low, and Stud limits reach as high as $1000/$2000. Full Tilt is one of the few site with many Razz games with limits that start at $0.25/$0.50 on the low end and top out as high as $1000/$2000. For the low end $0.25/$0.50 games the rake is very respectible, with caps at only $0.50. For the $1/$2 games the maximum rake is $1. On the higher limit tables the max rake is $3.
Full Tilt Poker is a High Traffic Site
Full Tilt averages about 10,000 poker players a day with as many as 40,000 players playing at peak times on about 10,000 tables. The site is always filled with players and you can find pretty much any game you want when you want. At its busiest you may find there are some queues for certain tables but most table games/limits limit the waiting.
Tournaments on Full Tilt Poker
There are many different kinds of tournaments at Full Tilt inlcuding Sit and Go’s of the multi-table and single table variety and many many freerolls. The World Series of Poker has begun to offer mixed game tournaments the last couple of years and now Full Tilt offers mixed games in tournament format as well. You have the option of entering a mixed Holdem game or HORSE tournament.
Full Tilt Poker Software
Full Tilt Poker offers a great software package. The software is highly customizable and has a myriad of settable options. You can select your choice of avatars, background themes and color pallettes. One of my favorite software features is the clock in the lobby which helps you know when tournaments are starting for your particular time zone.
Full Tilt Poker also has a Mac option, which is great news for all of us Mac fans out there. It is by far the most stable mac option for online poker that exists today. One of my favorite features is watching members of Team Full Tilt play. The chat feature gives you the chance to talk strategy or just chit chat with the Pros.
Full Tilt Poker is extremly busy site. Fortunately the software is robust enough to handle the busiest of days. The software copes with the madness quite well and the load times are relatively quick even with the great animations. The software uses industry leading 256-bit cryptography which ensures the security of your information and the reduces cheating.
Some of my other favorite things about Full Tilt are:
Full Tilt Points which you can use on gifts fromt the FUll Tilt Store, or on freeroll tournament entries.
Hand History - The software allows you to check the last 50 hands you played.
Notes - One of the keys to great online play is to learn how your opponent plays. The quick and handy notes feature allows you to do just that.
Stats - Full Tilt provides simple to understand % stats for given situations.
Find a Player -This is great for tracking down friends or fish.
Table View - Full Tilt offers two different table views: Classic or Racetrack.
Full Tilt Poker Customer Service
Fortunately, I have not had to call the Full Tilt Poker customer service or technical support departments. There are now advertised phone numbers for either so it appears that only email contact is allowed in dealing with Full Tilt Poker support.
Full Tilt Poker Bonus & Promotions
Full Tilt offers a $600 sign up bonus, which is one of the best available. Unfortunately reload bonuses are few and far between with Full Tilt.
Full Tilt Poker does have a solid player rewards system. You can earn comp points which can be used for special tournament buy-ins, or for merchandise at the Full Tilt Store. The Full Tilt Store has lots of Full Tilt Branded merchandise, and an impressive array of poker books and DVD’s. If you build up enough points you can even get a heads up match against a member of Team Full Tilt or have a custom avatar of yourself made.
Full Tilt Poker Deposit and Cash-out Options
Deposit Options: VISA & MasterCard, NETeller, FirePay, and e-/money transfer (***NOTE***Visa, MC, Neteller, Firepay, And Mycitadel No Longer Process New Transactions For US Players)
Cash-Out Options: NETeller, FirePay, credit card (for non-US players), and e-/money transfer
Party Poker Review Summary
Party Poker used to be the biggest kid the online poker block. Party Poker remains a very popular poker room, even though it is no longer the grand poohbah of the poker world. You can still usually find anywhere from 25,000 to 60,000 poker players on the site at any one time playing in sit-n-go tournaments, massive multi-table tournaments or your run of the mill penny ante ring game. According to published reports tournament are the most popular attraction on Party Poker. That doesn’t mean that you can’t find ring games at pretty much any level from 50 cent/$1.00 all the way to the big boy games of $100 /$ 200.
There are plenty of penny ante tables novice tables at Party Poker. More than any other poker room, the style of play is extremely loose and aggressive at all limits. Unfortunately, you don’t get stats in the lobby window which show the percentage of players which see the flop at each table. Picking a table can be tricky without these stats. The software is rock solid but lacks many bells and whistles. Fortunately Party Poker spent some money on a server upgrade so they can handle the player traffic on even the busiest days. It is very rare to have connection problems.
Novice players will enjoy special areas specially designated for beginners. This makes it easier to find players that are just starting out. Party Poker also has numerous freeroll tournaments for beginning players who sign up. Regular players will enjoy the fact that loose players exist at almost every level as you move up. Hard core multi-tablers will appreciate that they can resize up to four tables to fit on their monitors.
Software
I like the the software at Party Poker. The interface has a clean look and feal. The graphics are not flashy and playability isn’t the snappiest but overall the software provides a satisfactory poker experience. For me the animated characters are annoying. Party Poker recently invested in a server upgrade so they can handle the player traffic on even the busiest days. It is very rare to have connection problems. I found the lobby very straightforward. Navigation was a cinch. Different games are displayed on the left of the screen and your options for tables are displayed on the right. One great feature is you can set up favorites for future play.
Party poker quietly released a java version of their client to open up their system to Linux and Mac poker players. Party Poker recently joined Full Tilt by releasing a complete Mac client. The Mac version is not as polished as the Mac client from Full Tilt but it is great to see the growing Mac community get a slice of the online poker pie.
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Summary of Titan Poker Review
Titan Poker is one of the new kids on the online poker block The site is part of the iPoker network. It is very similar to Noble Poker–almost the same except for Titan’s unique blue interface. Overall, Titan is a pretty decent poker room with some unique features. Of course, one of the chief downsides of Titan Poker is that it is not open to US Players.
Software
Titan Poker’s software is quite frankly not very elegant. I do like how the lobby is laid out. You can all the information you need to choose the right table including stats on the number of players who see the flop, the number of hands per hour, and the average size of the pot. The graphical interface is nothing to write home about. Decent but nothing special. Multi-tabling used to be difficult due to resizing issues but recent software updates have improved this. A glaring hole in the software is a lack of note taking functionality. Come Titan this is a must have feature. There have been updates, and the software is now much more playable. A live help window now pops up offering you special bonuses when you enter the cashier section. The games run smoother and slower than the standard due to the long times a player may take to make a decision, which is ironic because the software is quite fast. It is possible to play at eight tables simultaneously with the new software updates.
The Titan Poker software download is Windows only. The Titan Poker software works fine on an Intel Mac running parallels or booting into windows with Bootcamp. No word on when or if a Mac version of the software will be available.
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Bodog Poker Review
Bodog started as an online casino in 1995. Poker was added in 2004. The Bodog poker site is one of the hottest rooms today and is growing very rapidly, thanks to great promotions and massive advertising. The player base is recruited through the sportsbook and casino, making a large portion of the players beginners and relatively easy to beat. The software offers nice graphics and functionality, is fast and has great playability. The functionality is good and offers some innovative functions, such as a three-in-one mode where three tables can be viewed and played in the same window. The games offered are all variations of Texas Hold’em, Omaha, Omaha Hi-Lo, Seven-Card Stud, Seven-Card Stud Hi-Lo, and Five-Card Stud. The games vary between No-Limit, Pot-Limit, and Fixed-Limit. Full-table games, short-handed, and heads-up tables are all available. The games are concentrated on No-Limit Hold’em, especially at the small and middle limits. One downside is that Horse tournaments range from extremely rare to non-existent on Bodog Poker. Horse is growing more and more popular, with several Horse events at this year’s World Series of Poker. This is a glaring gap on the Bodog Poker site.
Bodog Poker does offer plenty of tournaments and freerolls with great value. The traffic volume overall is in the higher segment of the industry. Real-money player statistics as of May 2007 show 4,100 ring-game players at peak hours, and 18,000 tournament players at peak hours.
No Bodog review would be complete without mentioning Bodog’s founder Calvin Ayre. Ayre, known for his hearty partying as much as his business empire, has held firm in the face of US law makers. Its nice to know that there is at least one guy out there who isn’t going to buckle under to the thugs in Washington. I just wish some of the other online poker rooms were as ballsy.
Overall Bodog Poker offers relatively loose games and great software that plays well and is fast. The software is updated frequently to ensure safety and stability, with little downtime as a result. Downsides include lack of a Mac client and limited multi-tabling.
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