| PokerStars is one of the major online poker rooms and unless you have tried it out already you should do so now - regardless of what you play or your preferred stakes. There is something for everyone here and I speak warmly about PokerStars simply because it is a great poker room. It is also one of the most professionally and seriously operated poker rooms out there - none of the cheap tricks found in other many other places. This is what you get when the operators understand that quality of service is the most important thing in the end. Marketing is important but if you are marketing something that isn't worth buying anyway you won't get very far. This is especially true when it comes to services such as poker where you are depending on returning customers. PokerStars offers a wide variety of games and limits, both ring games and tournaments. It also has a high volume of traffic even on the higher tables so you will find tables going at most times of day here. The rake hits the $3 max rake a bit sooner than on most other poker rooms (e.g. at $70 instead of $100 for high fixed limit) but in my experience this is not a problem. Also, even if you pay a tiny bit more rake you do get something in return here I think. There could have been a bit more of community functions and content here I think. You do have tournament leader boards and a lot of promotional and special events but with the player base that PokerStars – including a lot of great poker players regularly seen at the higher tables and the large number of WSOP finalists they have generated over the last years. They could do something interesting here that most other poker room would have a hard time copying. There are profiles of Greg Raymer and Chris Moneymaker but that appears to be all there is. Although there are no cash bonuses listed at the web site at this time I know they periodically have 20% deposit bonuses, usually with a maximum at $120 – which is good. They also have a frequent player points program and you can use you frequent player points basically to buy merchandise and participate in tournaments. The only downside of the frequent player points program is that if you play a lot you will soon have ordered everything that’s worth having in the store, so they should really have some more expensive things there. Unfortunately, support is only available over email but I know from experience that this works well. I would prefer to have the option to call as well though. |
The PokerStars software is among the best out there. It is a stable piece of software with frequent updates, nice graphics and excellent very user-friendly controls. The PokerStars poker room is very successful (celebrating their billionth dealt hand around new years 2004-2005) and PokerStars has been willing to re-invest some of the money they have made on keeping their software updated and free of bugs. This strategy seems to not have been adopted by some of the other large poker rooms that should be able to comfortably afford to put a lot of more work into their software.
You can play a maximum of five concurrent tables on PokerStars and the game controls are distinct and user friendly. The buttons and check boxes are large and easy to read and the only thing that could have been improved here would be to have some mouse-over effect that clearly indicates what is a clickable control and what is not. Focus shift between tables and game turn indication is exemplary: playing a large number of tables could not have been much smoother. The slider in big bet games works really well although it would have been useful with some quick buttons for pot bets, all-ins and such. Overall, however, the bet size controls are very good: a good distinct slider and a fast typing option that changes the text of raise and bet button as you type. The previous action of a player remains displayed a short while but then disappears, it could have been useful is the action information remained in some discrete form until the round is over. When playing many tables this is useful since it allows you to get a picture of what has taken place. Most of the time you don’t need this information but when you do it does speed up the game if it can be readily seen. The size of the pot is also displayed and you can get information about the amount in any graphical chunk of chips on the table by moving your mouse point over it. The dealer/chat window has a number of tabs that allows you to set the type of information that you want to see: chat, notes, stats and info. Detail level of chat and dealer output is however set from clicking the dealer tray. There is a bug in the function that lets you bring in more chips: you can add up to the maximum stake even if you have money in a pot. Thus, if you move all in in a no limit game, fill up really quickly and then win the pot, then you can build yourself quite a stack without winning it. This bug is however only something you notice after using the client for quite a long time and on the other hand this means that you don’t have to get annoying messages telling you that you can’t bring in more chips. When all players in a hand are all-in the cards are shown so you can follow the suspense when the remaining cards are dealt. This is naturally not only a feature that is there to increase the excitement of the players but also a way of making some types of collusion harder to pull off.
The tournament on PokerStars is one of the big reasons for playing there (although they could use some more regular tournaments in my opinion) and the facilities for playing are good. Apart from the usual information about tournaments you can here also search for players (useful if your friend is playing a tournament with 1500 entrants) and see detailed information about blind levels, breaks and such. Even single table sit’n go’s have lobbies and this is both good and bad. The good thing is that you can follow what happens better and the bad thing is that you end up with a lot of open windows. One thing that I think could be improved is that the pay-outs are not presented until registration has closed. It is not hard to implement dynamic payouts that are updated every time someone registers or unregisters and in fact many poker clients have this feature.
The PokerStars client has some extra features although not terribly many. You can choose to auto-rebuy, which saves you the hassle of having to fill your stack up time and again on those dreadful days when this is necessary – a nice feature. You can also upload your own pictures for the avatars that are displayed along with your screen name. This used to be something of the trademark of PokerStars but is now available in quite a number of other clients as well so it can not longer be listed as a unique feature. You can also search for other players and set whether or not others are able to search for you. The graphics are clean and nice and are just about right in most respects – not too rich and not too sparse. Contrary to what some poker rooms claim (by conclusive action) I don’t think there is any contradiction between nice graphics and fast games with clear information. PokerStars is a living example of the truth in this. Sure, you could probably compress the tables a bit but I don’t think you would gain a whole lot by doing that. At least not when focus transfer between tables and game messages work as well as they do here. |
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