Full Review of PokerStars
Summary of PokerStars
Poker Stars is sponsored by three recent WSOP champions, and a range of other great pros have joined the Poker Stars Team, such as Daniel Negreanu and Isabelle Mercier.
Each summer, several truckloads of satellite winners from Poker Stars appear in the WSOP. With the new US gambling legislation from Oct, 2006, Poker Stars took the market lead in online poker tournaments as well as online ring games.
This poker room has a very extensive program of both scheduled tournaments and sit-and-gos. The software has absolutely top of the line functionality, and the graphics are well-tried. Obviously, with so many players and games, you’ll find any kind of opposition at Poker Stars, from true beginners to really seasoned professionals.
PokerStars offers quite good promotions for the typical player and gives back plenty as promotions and loyalty bonuses. There are frequent deposit bonuses, and through Poker Junkie you get a 100% bonus match up to $50.
A lot of special events open up for nice surprises. Poker Stars spreads large numbers of well-filled satellites to most of the big tournaments. Most of all, of course, you’ll always find plenty of satellites to the WSOP. Several years in a row, Poker Stars has “delivered” around a third of all entrants in the WSOP Main Event. This is truly the home of online poker tournaments.
There are a lot of freerolls at Poker Stars, but rarely with any significant value. They are very good exercise, though.
Poker Traffic
The traffic at PokerStars is market leading, and with a good margin. Sure, there are fewer players in ring games than in tournaments, but this is a truly academic issue seeing that Poker Stars is simply the biggest poker room on the Internet.
At no other site will you find tournaments with several thousand entrants on a regular basis. Some of them are really high buy-ins, but there are also cheaper tournaments, such as the weekly Sunday $100K with a buy-in at $11. They always run without technical problems, against all odds you might think.
Poker Stars has kept its doors open for US players through these harsh times of stricter gambling legislation. One argument being that they have nothing to do with online casino gaming, a breed completely unrelated to poker, as poker players keep expounding. It is the belief of many commentators that poker will eventually be excluded from the scope of the UIGEA, being a skill game and a strong American tradition.
Despite Americans being welcome, quite many players at the site are based in Europe, and there is good poker action at European evening time. Peak hours typically occur around 2 PM, PT. At peak hours, the number of real money players in ring games often crosses the 20,000 mark (Feb, 2008).
Software & Graphics
The Poker Stars software is dedicated to serve the serious poker player. Their focus is on playability and usability more than anything. Expensive tournaments with several thousands of entrants run on a regular basis, and they never ever run into any problems. What then if the client is not the most aesthetic in the world of online poker.
Besides, you can replace the classic but perhaps not so pretty Poker Stars look by a number of other Poker Stars themes - more or less useful according to taste and preferences.
The individual time bank is a great feature that lets you ponder important decisions deeply while keeping up the pace in the majority of hands.
Player notes and statistics functions have been in place for years in the Poker Stars software.
On public demand, Poker Stars finally released a Mac compatible version of their poker software. A magnificent addition to a great site that finally permits all hard-balling Mac partisans to use the poker client without hassle.
Game Variety
Poker Stars offers good game variety including High and High/Low versions of Omaha and Seven-Card Stud. You can also play H.O.R.S.E. and Razz, as well as Omaha High/Low with a rarely found no-limit structure.
PokerStars was the first online poker room to introduce really, really low-stakes games, with blinds starting at $0.01/$0.02, and with no rake at all! This concept is more worth for the large community of poker newbies and voluntary small-timers than we can really put in words.
More About
Poker Stars arguably has one of the best poker teams in the world. Few other teams, if any, have four WSOP Champions as members – Chris Moneymaker, Greg Raymer, Joe Hachem and Tom McEvoy. Along with players like Daniel Negreanu, Barry Greenstein and Isabelle Mercier they make a very impressive poker team. Read more about
the Poker Stars Team!
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