Full Review of Party Poker
Summary of Party Poker
Even after closing the doors to their gigantic pool of US players, Party Poker has managed to remain one of the world’s biggest online poker rooms – hat off. And that goes for ring games and tournaments alike. You’ll find great action at most levels and in most of the variations that are available pretty much around the clock.
Beside the large player base, there are many other advantages with Party Poker, such as loose games and a range of fine promotions.
Party has download versions of their poker software for PC, Mac, and even Linux – which proves their commitment to accommodate the whole poker playing community.
Party Poker offers you to play blackjack and backgammon using one and the same player account. Side bets on the flop and deal making in tournament end phases have also been introduced in the software, like it or not.
A lot of soft games together with very good loyalty programs and promotions grant Party Poker a natural popularity among players. Numerous special events and a generous program for membership referrals are offered.
Party Poker organizes a huge tourney called the PartyPoker.com Million with a guaranteed prize pool of one million dollars. Other big guaranteed tournaments are held regularly, as well as plenty of satellites to big events.
Loyal players enjoy regular cash bonuses from the site, usually smaller amounts that are made available for play without preambles. There’s also a great player points scheme with points that can be redeemed for cash or merchandise as well as entries into special tournaments and freerolls.
Poker Traffic
Party Poker used to have the world's highest ring game traffic. Real money traffic used to peak at 18,000 ring game players and as much as 95,000 tournament players (September, 2006). With the U.S. Congress passing the UIGEA bill (on Unlawful Internet Gambling) in October 2006, Party Gaming decided to no longer accept U.S. players - despite that more than 50% of their registered players were Americans.
Nevertheless, PartyPoker has remained one of the really big online poker operators with 9,000 ring game players and 60,000 tournament players at peak hours (February, 2008).
Party Poker's rake leaves a bit to be wished for, unfortunately. Particularly on low-stake games the rake in individual pots may get as high as 10%. Tournament fees too are rather elevated. Hiding them by only specifying the total buy-in for a tournament doesn’t change this fact.
Software & Graphics
Historically, the Party Poker software was often not quite on par with the site’s huge popularity, but it has seen quite a few enhancements since then. You can resize tables at your liking, and the lobby is much better than before.
You can filter the game lists on a number of parameters and choose to hide various elements to make better use of the narrow space. The cash game waiting list might be the best on the internet.
Playability is good, even if the interface is not the cleanest on the market, and the usability is not fantastic.
Game Variety
There's a respectable but not amazing range of poker variations in the Party Poker gaming rooms: Texas Holdem, Omaha and 7-Card-Stud in the usual high and high-low combinations. Most of all, we miss a couple of things: heads-up matches and micro-limit sit-and-gos. Plus of course, one or two more exotic variations would be welcome at this huge site.
Lately, Party Poker has performed a large and very good revision of its tournament structures and has introduced some improvements, such as deeper starting stacks and time-based blind levels in sit-and-gos, rather than the old hand-based levels.
On the contrary, the well-known Party Poker “rebuy bug” has not been fixed, so it’s probably more correct to call it a feature. In rebuy tournaments you can move all your chips in the middle and make one or two rebuys while the hand is being resolved. No matter if you win or lose the all-in, the rebuys will be in your stack at the start of the next hand! In this way, it’s possible to boost stacks to fantasy sums, and players do this.
This is okay, if you’re aware of it and can adjust to it. You must be prepared to make lots of buy-ins, and expect the tournament to last very long. When the rebuy period is over, the chip leaders will usually have huge stacks and the tournament will behave like a deep stack tournament from then on. The crazy play from before the break will change into a serious, hard-core freezeout battle.
More About
It all started back in 1997 with the launch of Starluck online casino on a communications arena that was very young in those days, called the World Wide Web. Ten years later, Party Gaming is a world leading online gaming operator, running its own software since 1998. Read about the glorious
history of Party Poker!
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