But They're Suited!

I've now earned 5000+ comp points at Poker.com, which means I've played at over 1500 raked hands - even more counting those where everyone (but one) folded pre-flop. I've been playing the .10/.25 tables, and each raked hand earns 3 comp points. So I've played enough hands there to give it an overall review.

The software it uses requires you have the flash player version 8 installed. It will install it if you don't have it installed, so that is taken care of for you.

The play seems rather fishy, but beware - there are some educated sharks in those waters. At one table I sat at for over an hour one player literally limped in on every single hand. I am not exagerating. I had my QQ broken by him making a full boat of 9's over 4's on the river. Yes, he played 94o.

The software did have a tendency to make my laptop reboot sporadically. Sometimes it'd be an hour and a half into a session, other times it'd be 10 minutes in - though that happened after rebooting and logging back in. In the middle of a hand suddenly my laptop screen would go blank, then I'd get the "Starting Windows" progress meter on the screen. Fortunately most of the time I was out of the hand, but at least once I had people betting into me when I'd flopped a straight. Oh well.

On a positive note, it doesn't use the characters like Party Poker and others. It lets you have an icon along with your name similar to Stars. This works better for me as I tend to associate the picture with the player. They have a large variety of icons to choose from or you can upload your own.

Traffic is still somewhat of a problem, though. Whenever I logged in they had around 2500 players logged in. That makes for somewhat sparce table selection and when I was multi-tabling I managed to have some of the same players at each table I was playing.

They do have some interesting bonuses. First of all there is a bonus code to get a 100% match on your first deposit. It takes 200 comp points to earn back $1.00 in bonus money, and they'll pay it out to you in $10.00 increments. You also get an entry into a daily freeroll for those that have made their first deposit. The entry is good for a week, and you can use it every day for that week. You also get an entry into a satellite to their WSOP tourney whenever you earn 400 comp points in a 24 hour period. I also managed to earn an entry into a $4k freeroll for the amount of points I've earned, but I don't recall what the requirement was.

Edit: A couple of things I forgot in my first pass. First, when you fold in a heads up situation (that isn't an all-in - not sure why they do that), then you can check boxes to show only one card or both. I like that feature. Also, when you're folded to in a heads-up situation you can select the "rabbit" button which turns over your cards and plays out the board to see what would happen. That is kinda fun, too, in the right situation. (Props to g3poker for reminding me of that last bit.)

Overall I would rate it 2.5 out of 5. The majority of my experience is with PokerStars so everything is compared to it. Stars isn't perfect, so it only rates a 4.5 on the scale. Will I keep playing there? I might until I've earned my bonus money because it is fairly easy to earn. Will I stay there long term? Probably not.

If you want to try it out, go through PokerSavvy to sign up. You only need to earn 1000 comp points (approx. 333 raked hands at .10/.25, fewer hands at higher limits) and you get 750 Savvy points. 750 Savvy points = $75.00 in gift certificates at Amazon.com.

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