| TruePoker has been around since 2000 and it is a serious poker room that is dedicated to providing good service to its customers. Some players love TruePokers and others don’t like it at all. Quite often, I feel that people dislike it for reasons that aren’t entirely fair. For example, the games aren’t very slow here due to the rich graphics. There are many much simpler poker rooms with slower games. They are by no means among the fastest but neither among the slowest. At the TruePoker tables you will soon know most players by their name and appearance and you will also know the hosts, who you can interact with directly during the game in a very informal fashion. So, if you think you would like a poker room where you will recognize most of the players and like to chat then there is a good chance you will like TruePoker. On the other hand, if very fast games on many tables is important and/or you play very low or a bit higher and you never chat anyway when you play then there are better places for you. Promotions are pretty good, both in terms of cash bonuses and other types of promotions such as satellites for large tournaments. The most important support channel is the host chat function in the client but you can also contact support via email and phone. In addition to the poker room you also have a number of community functions on the web site and quite a bit of general poker material and services. For example, they offer tutoring by Mason Malmuth and David Sklansky (costs $20). |
This is a very long review of a very unorthodox client. Very little is standard about the Yatahay software and if Yatahay doesn’t ring a bell then maybe TruePoker does. TruePoker’s niche has always been to provide a poker experience that is as true-to-life as possible with as little slowing down of the game as possible. They combine this remarkably well in my opinion although functionally the client is really not all that good. The tables feature very detailed avatars that can say a number of pre defined sentences (which also appear in bubbles). Had these one-liners not been so hilariously conceived and recorded this would probably have been extremely irritating. However, they walk this thin line with great success in my opinion and I have had quite a number of good laughs over semi-conversations between avatars using their amusingly limited and predictable vocabulary.
It was only recently that they opened up the possibility of playing many tables in the Yatahay rooms. This works perfectly as far as I can see, and I think I could have told them this a long time ago. This attempt to speed up games by limiting the number of tables that a player can have open is futile and, I think, bordering on stupid. It is also one of my favourite complaints so please bear with me a couple of lines. Of course, everybody at the planning meeting must be loyal to the company, but a fact of life that you have to live with is: people know about and, yes, even play at, other poker rooms. If someone wants to play five tables and you offer only the possibility of playing at one table they will not go “oh, well, I guess I’ll only play one table then”. They will, in the best case, play four tables with someone else and one with you – which is if anything slower than playing all tables using the same client. In the worse case they won’t even bother play any table at all with you. There is nothing to win and everything to lose from imposing an arbitrary limit to the number of tables people can play.
With that off my heart I start out by noting that even though the interface is not standard it’s not awfully hard to navigate. There is a strong sense of community at TruePoker (which is almost synonymous with Yatahay) and there is a common chat room directly in the lobby. In fact, you can even see the avatars of the people that currently are in the lobby! Yes, even the floor person can be seen sitting there unless he or she is currently in tending to a table. The floor persons have a much more tangible presence in this client than in any other client as you can easily send one line messages directly through the interface (the “host” button) and have a conversation in this way. There is no slow loading of some Java chat box and waiting for an operator you don’t know if it really exists.
There are no buttons in the lobby at all but instead a guest book (player search) and ATM (cashier) and a floor person (help, preferences and options). The lobby is in fact divided into no less than three windows: the table list, the lobby itself (quite literally) and the chat window. The table list window contains a rather standard tabbed list view of tables. The main difference between the Yatahay lists and most other lists lie in the absence of buttons. Instead of pushing buttons you click a table in the list and a menu appears. This works reasonably well although sometimes these eternal popup menus can get in your way. Also, you don’t get a whole lot of information about the tables. To see who’s seated or waiting you have to select “Who’s here” and “Who’s waiting” in this pop-up menu. This would be more of a problem if the rooms that use this software had a lot of tables going. But, with the moderate-to-low (but faithful) traffic that they have today, you pretty much know where you are going anyway so you don’t have to browse very much except for the first times you get here. I don’t care too much for unnecessary additional windows though so I don’t think it’s a good thing that they lobby is separated.
The tournament lists are also a bit non-standard. You have three tabs: Sit’n go, scheduled tournaments and tournament tables. To access a tournament table you look it up in the list under this tab and then select it rather than going through a tournament lobby as in almost all other clients. Registering and unregistering also takes place using these little pop-up menus and one of the things you can produce through the tournament pop-up menu is an information window about the tournament. It works once you figure it out but if anything I’d say it’s less user friendly than the standard way of doing in. The tournament lists are a little bit confusing I must say, I don’t feel I have as good an overview here as I do in most other clients. Still, it works and you can get used to it.
At the tables, the game controls present some problems. Although the buttons are clear and concise the interface can be slow because its easy to make mistakes that take a long time to correct. If TruePoker is slow at times it’s not as much because of the rich graphics as it is because of the rather poor controls. The slider in big bet games is far from optimal. First of all it’s linear rather than as in many other clients having more and more coarse resolution the further to the right end you drag it. Here, half the slider is half your stack and those fortunate times when you’re sitting at the $500 no limit table with $2500 it will have increments far greater than what is practical. You can’t type amounts either so your only option here is to push the incremental pre-set buttons above the slider. This works ok but if you accidentally bet too much then you can’t decrease it again with the buttons! If you try to correct it with the slider this will seem to only bring you to a random amount, so you usually have just slide it to 0 and start over with the buttons.
Focus shift between tables doesn’t work very smoothly either, especially not if you are using several clients at the same time. If I play on TruePoker and other rooms at the same time, I’d say that 90% of my time-outs will be on TruePoker. The evil eye that the dealer gives you when you are taking too long can unfortunately not be seen if the table is hidden behind other windows. It seems that focus shifts correctly (or at least you are given an audible paging) sometimes but not always, which is even more frustrating in fact. The player that is to act is indicated by its avatar blinking which works rather well and if someone is sitting out he or she turns into a ghost-like outline leaning back on the chair. This effect is frequently used as a jest: by repeatedly checking and un-checking the sit-out box the avatar will jerk back and forth in a comical way.
The Yatahay software is considerably better at creating a nice, relaxed and intimate atmosphere than it is at providing a convenient interface for playing poker. It is the anti-thesis of PokerChamps: game controls are rudimentary and community functions and graphics are splendid. Still, if you think you will like the atmosphere that this rather unorthodox software creates it’s well worth trying out. One can get used to the interface, at least to the point where it is acceptable. |
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