| PokerChamps has reasonable traffic and if you don’t play extremely high limits you will find a game here most of the time. Poker Champs is the creation of poker celebrity Gus Hansen. The logic behind the design is one that makes good sense: real world poker and Internet poker have different advantages and if you try to combine them it is not obvious that you will get something good. The result is a very simplistic interface where you have a lot of small tables displayed together in one single gargantuan window. Well, gargantuan at least if you choose to play six tables at the same time. Unfortunately I don't like this poker room as much as I though I would but to some extent this is a matter of taste. You would for example expect that a simple interface would give you a fast game, but to my dismay I discovered that the games are no where near fast. They're excruciatingly slow and this defeats the whole purpose of the software. I can play six tables at other poker rooms with a lot clearer and better looking graphics much faster. I can live with a minimalist interface but I expect it to be a tradeoff for something else. I don't really see what I get for living with the blocky graphics. Also, the only game that is offered at this point is Texas Hold’em. The information about the games and how the bonus system works is examplary, absolutely nothing to complain about here. Support is however only available via email. Promotions are good and if you plan on playing a lot they're even excellent. In particular this is due to the CashFlow program that gives you up to 50% back on your rake. There is no general poker content here to speak of. In summary, although I think that this room isn't as good as it could have been it does appear to be operated in a very serious and professional way. It's worth trying out. |
This software deserves a lot of credit for its innovative features: it doesn’t look like any other poker room and I don’t mean on a superficial level. There is a good side and a bad side to this. On the one hand, it does many things better than other poker rooms; on the other hand you will not know exactly what to do when you first get there. The good sides do however outweigh the bad. It is quite obvious that this software is developed with multi player games in mind and by people who know the game. It is therefore not surprising to see that it has been developed under the supervision of Gus Hansen and he has no doubt made a very good job.
At start up you are presented with a number of table layout options that let you select how many tables you want to play at the same time, ranging from one up to six. This means that there are really no focus-issues between the tables and you won’t have to deal with that swarm of identically-looking window entries in the Windows activity field. This is very good. However, it appears that the client is pretty hard on the CPU – my P4 laptop at 2.5GHz quickly kicked in a higher gear when I sat down at a couple of tables.
The controls and the graphics take some getting used to since everything is very small but they make good sense as soon as you have figured it out. The text inputs, however, look a bit Java-like in the sense that they do not behave like most text inputs do. You can’t for example mark text to delete it all with one hit on the delete button. You have to hit delete several times to get rid of what’s there. To add to this, you have to click a button before you can type in bet amounts so you can more or less forget about typing in bets here. On the other hand, the slider and other elements for controlling bet sizes in big bet games are excellent so you don’t really need to type. Since the interface is very compact there are certain things that have been put in there in unorthodox ways. For example, there is no dealer tray to click and to bring in more chips you click your own seat instead. Again, once you get used to it this presents no problems.
It is very hard to say much good about the graphics apart from that it is reasonably clean and looks ok considering how small everything is. I am aware that many trade-offs have been made and in the end most of them I think appear to have been well advised. With tables this small I guess one will have to be satisfied as long as it doesn’t look horrible – and it doesn’t. I weigh this into the graphics score: it looks worse than a lot of other clients but it’s for a good reason.
The lobby, or should I say lobbies because you’ll have a lot of lobbies and tables in the same window, are small but functional. There are not a lot of features available but I would imagine that for the target group of this poker room this is not of great concern. They manage to cram in most information about the tables that you could wish for: view flop percentage, seats, average pot and so on – even a list of players and the size of their stacks. I have never managed to figure out how to join a waiting list and it seems I’m not the only one here since the waiting lists all appear to be empty.
The overall impression of this software is, I must say, excellent. If you like TruePoker because it looks like a real poker room you will maybe hate this software. On the other hand, if you like playing lots of tables at the same time then this software is very good. |
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