Full Review of Pacific Poker
Summary of Pacific Poker
Pacific Poker is a classic poker room known for its very soft games. You’ll always find juicy games with lots of action, especially at the Texas holdem tables.
The site is run by 888.com AKA the Casino-on-Net Group, one of the world's largest online gambling operators. This creates a major influx of casino players, which partly explains why the games at Pacific are so nice and loose.
Since the recent software upgrade, poker on Pacific Poker is better looking than ever. Now you can also now play multiple tables at the same time.
This poker room does not accept US players for the time being. Europeans dominate the player base, and the peak hours usually coincide with in European evening time, around 2 PM Pacific Time.
As for promotions, Pacific Poker offers a number of tournaments with guaranteed prize pools. They recently hosted a $250,000 guaranteed tournament with a buy-in of $88 +$8. There are always new promotions at the site, and the free rolls are well worth checking out, too.
Pacific Poker offers reload bonuses roughly every other month. The bonuses are usually very good with a 50% deposit match up to $300-$500. Referral bonuses and loyalty bonus are stimulating. Pacific Poker sports a nice refer-a-friend program that awards players a $50 bonus for each referred friend, while the referred player receives $25.
The bonus points program features points that can be converted into cash. For ten dollars bet in raked hands the player earns one point, and 100 points correspond to $1 in cash, at conversion.
Poker Traffic
The ring game traffic is mainly concentrated at the limit and no-limit holdem tables. Around 90% of the players can be found at the holdem tables, but there’s also some action at the Omaha hi-lo and Seven Card Stud high tables. During peak hours, there are approximately 2,000 real money ring game players at the site (March 2010).
When it comes to tournaments, Pacific Poker offers satellites to most of the major live poker events. Pacific Poker also runs daily $5,000 and $10,000 guaranteed tournaments, and there’s a healthy amount of tournament players at the site, up to 7,500 real-money tournament players at peak hours (March 2010).
By the way, peak hours on Pacific occur in the European evening time, usually around 2 PM (PT). Players looking to play long sessions or at varying times of day should be able to match the peak times of Pacific Poker with that of other sites, such as Full Tilt Poker.
Software & Graphics
For a long while, Pacific Poker only allowed you to play one table at the time, but they’ve made several large improvements to their software since. Now you can play up to four simultaneous tables. Play flows without trouble, and thanks to the mini view you can fit all tables onto the screen even without extremely high resolution.
The look and feel of the poker client has also been hugely improved. A great deal of customization is possible and you can redesign your playing environment by choosing from a range of avatars, different card designs and different backgrounds etc.
Pacific Poker has good note-taking functionality and statistical functions. There’s a great search function, and a Java client if you can’t download the Windows client.
Game Variety
Like its software, Pacific Poker’s game variety has improved significantly, too. There are limit, pot limit and no-limit holdem tables available, along with both high and hi-lo Omaha, and Seven Card Stud tables. Full-table and short-handed games as well as heads-up tables are all available for most variations.
As for tournaments, they are played out in Texas Holdem only. There’s a decent amount of freerolls, as well as tournaments with buy-in from $1 to hundreds of dollars. They are mostly extremely loose, no matter the buy-in. Quite a few of them offer guaranteed prize pools, and there are satellites to the big live events.
More About
888.com is a leader in the international online gambling scene with its Pacific Poker and Casino-on-Net, which are under a license granted by the Government of Gibraltar. Read more about
888.com and Pacific Poker.
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