The Action Poker Network has picked up in traffic lately and it offers a number of Asian card games as well as Black Jack. They have recently launched multi table scheduled tournaments which for a long time they did not have. The partners are reasonably differentiated in graphics and image and offer a variety of promotions that appear to apply to some but rarely all partners. The partners are not as obviously identical as the partners in the Tribeca network for example, but very likely the only difference you will experience is in the promotions that are offered and these do vary quite dramatically between the partners. Content, however, appear to be more or less carbon copied between the partners except for BetNetClub where there is absolutely no poker-related content whatsoever. Support and cashier functions are centralized for all partners except BetNetClub. I have been unable to find a rake table for the Action Poker rooms and as a result the rake rating has been reduced - I don't think it's really acceptable not to publish the amount of rake that you charge and most poker rooms do this.
Summed up, the Action Poker rooms are not a bad choice and they are worth trying out for a number of reasons: good promotions if you choose partner wisely, excellent software and if you hail from the far east or otherwise have a liking for Asian card games then this is one of the few places where you will find what you are looking for.
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The Dobrosoft software is in wide use by both MyPokerNetwork rooms (America’s Cardroom) and the Popular poker rooms. The client doesn’t make much of an impression: neither good or bad. If you haven’t played on a Dobrosoft client before but have played on other major clients you will have little problems finding what you want here.
The lobby gives you the standard options: a list of tables, waiting list options, tabs for different games and buttons for cashier and support and so on. The waiting lists and table information are no mysteries and the only non-standard feature appears to be that tournaments are not integrated in the table lists but appear in a separate lobby. This is in fact quite logical since this gives the poker room more options to customize which information they want to display about the games. For example, there is more useful information about a tournament than about a table and in this way a suitable size of the list can be used. There are drop down menus in the lobby although the fact that they appear as buttons makes one a bit unsure at first. One mildly irritating thing with the list though is that you can not move around in it with the arrow keys.
The game controls are simple and logical. Again, not much in terms of innovative grips on things here but the interface does what it’s supposed to do. You do have some additional features, at least in some incarnations of the client: the option to post a live straddle and the option to chop blinds. It is actually quite strange that more rooms don’t have the these options since they are so frequently used in brick and mortar poker rooms. When it comes to big bet games, the client works excellently. The pot limit controls have buttons for typical bet sizes (pot, half pot and amounts that are additive) and the option to type in bet amounts, no slider on all incarnations of the client though! When there is a slider it works great although you don’t really miss it very much when there isn’t one. Typing in amounts works well too, the amounts on the buttons are updated real-time which I think is very helpful because it kind of gives you a confirmation that what you tried to do works. You can specify a range of actions out of turn which is useful although it is by no means unique for this software. The action buttons have mouse-over effects and this too I think serves as a useful confirmation: among the most frustrating things with computers is when you are not sure what is happening or is about to happen. You have some tabs to choose between for the output window and these are simply the standard options: chat, notes and stats.
Playing many tables on the Dobrosoft client is a dream: focus transfer between windows works perfectly as far as I could tell and there are no strange sounds that can confuse you. I don’t know how many tables you typically can open but you can play more than three at least so this shouldn’t be of great concern. If there is an imposed limit below the number of tables you want you will simply have to play on several networks.
The graphics capabilities appear to be adequate although nothing to be excited about. Cards and chips are reasonably easy to read. A lot of the graphics are of course up to the graphics designers of the individual poker rooms so not much can in fact be said about this except for those graphical elements that are likely to be features of the software itself such as how buttons work and they must get high marks. They are clear, have mouse-over effects and you can clearly see when they are pushed and if they stay down (such as options to auto-post big blind).
In summary, the Dobrosoft client is very good. It has everything you can ask for and then a little more, it works perfectly for playing many tables and the tournaments section is logical and thought through. If anything, the fact that a poker room uses this client should make you more, not less, likely to play there. However, I must note that I had quite severe stability problems with two separate poker rooms using this software on two separate networks. I don’t know exactly why this happened but since a lot of players use this software on a daily basis I assume this to be a local problem with my computer. |
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