| Online Poker Room Review |
| Full Tilt poker has reasonable traffic in its Texas Hold’em area and some also in its Razz games. During peak hours there might also be a small number of Omaha games going. Full Tilt is endorsed by a whole universe of poker stars including Phil Ivey, Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson, Erik Seidel and even two female pros (Jennifer Harman and Clonie Gowen). There is however not a lot of general poker content here which is a bit disappointing, I expected articles and tips from the multitude of world class players on the team. Support is available over email only which is also a little bit disappointing. When it comes to promotions there is indeed nothing to complain about here: bonuses are among the best in the industry! |
| Poker Network |
| This poker room is not part of any network. This is not necessarily a drawback as some of the best poker rooms with long track records and busy traffic are stand-alone. |
| Poker platform |
The Full Tilt software is used by the card room with the same name. The lobby gives a very good impression and the only mildly non-standard feature here is that the information panel is located to the left rather than to the right of the list view. The list view is large and provides a good overview over games and you select game types with buttons directly above the list view. Below the list view are three buttons where you select whether you want to display real money games, play money games or both. You have all information you could wish for in the lists and the list can be sorted according to any of the eight columns. If you select a game you get a list of players and the waiting list in the information panel. Joining waiting lists is done with a single click on the “join list” button which is simple but doesn’t allow you to join whole sets of waiting lists at the same time. The cashier is reached through a large chip-shaped button that I didn’t at first realize was clickable. There is a clearly visible server time clock and there is a drop down main menu where you can reach all the features and function in the software. There isn’t a whole lot of features: no buddy lists (although there is a player search) and no hand histories. You select avatars from a gallery but there aren’t all that many to choose from so they probably won’t help a lot in visual player identification.
Both scheduled and sit’n’go tournaments have lobbies and you open them by double clicking the tournament’s entry in the list. You get most information in the list although for sit’n’go’s I would have wanted to be informed about who is seated and the payouts without having to access the lobby. The lobby lets you register and unregister for touraments and you have lists of tables and players that can be sorted in various ways. You can watch tournament tables by either double clicking a table in the table list or by double clicking a player in the player list. The latter I think is good since the reason you want to watch a tournament table is usually that someone you know is playing. In addition you have the standard information: average, largest and smallest stack, current level, next break and so on. Note that you can get information about blind level and break schedule and all payouts but it is not at all easy to find this: you have to click the three top payouts in the bottom panel of the tournament lobby or the tiny “tournament info” button in the top right hand corner. I was almost about to write that this information wasn’t provided when I finally found it!
You can play a maximum of four tables at the same time which is quite sufficient. The graphics are not very good: blocky chips and strong colours. The hole card are a bit on the small side I think and I had problems quickly seeing if I had cards or not. Buttons aren’t as visible as they could have been either. The controls overall are not overly good: there is no slider but instead three buttons and a type-in option. This would have worked much better if your amount of chips had been displayed in connection to these controls. Focus passes reasonably well between the tables but the sound effects are not very informative, the check boxes that allow you to define your actions out of turn are rather small and it’s not very visible whose turn it is to act. Overall, I think I don’t have a good overview of the game although one can possibly get used to the interface. You can view the previous hands but only the final state of the tables – it would have been nice to be able to replay the hands completely. You can also view some stats about your recent play.
All in all, the FullTilt software is not among the best on the market. It is however not at all useless. I didn’t find any outright bugs and most of the features that you use are there. If the controls and the overview over the games would have been better this client would have been pretty good. |
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