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The EWorld software is used by UltimateBet and some smaller skins that share traffic with this large and old (by Internet standards) poker room. The EWorld client doesn’t look quite like most other clients and there is a lot of material apart from the games integrated into the client. The startup screen contains news and using the main menu to the left one can navigate to the different sections.
The games lobby is easy to navigate, it is a standard list control with some information about the tables and tabs for different types of games. Selecting a table you are provided with the usual options and information about who is seated and who is on the waiting list. Stack sizes are, however, not provided and you have to open the table to see how much different players have. The tournament displays and controls leaves a lot of room for improvement however. First of all you see almost no information about the tournament in the list: how many are registered, how many can join etc. It is hard to understand how for example the tournament id number could receive higher priority when deciding what should be displayed in the list than for example number of registered players. When you double click at a tournament you are taken to a very brief information page where you have to click on a web link to see who is registered. Another piece of useful information that is missing is a count-down to when the tournament starts. Players are logged on from around the world and might play with poker rooms in many time zones so a time and date is not very informative even though the server time is displayed discretely in the bottom right corner of the lobby.
When you sit down at a table your seat will always be in the middle bottom position – the table is rotated. This is, I think a good feature, since it can be confusing (not terribly but somewhat) to have four or five tables open where you sit in different seats. The layout of buttons and controls is very good and to aid multi table play you have the mini view option. The mini view lets you play in a very simplified environment. Before you get used to it this is extremely disorientating but once you figure it out it works really well and it simplified multi table play considerably. It is a bit strange that others have not copied this feature.
A wealth of options can be set from the tables’ options button including but not limited to table themes, chat detail level, sounds and the amount of messages and warnings that should be displayed. Here you can also view stats and hand histories, bring in more chips, bring up the main screen and so on. As mentioned, the layout is great and the buttons are clear with mouse-over effects where relevant. The first time you use the software you will have to kill a lot of warning messages such as “Do you really want to bet the pot?” and so on. These messages are maybe useful for some players but few will probably want to see them more than once.
The slider and other bet size controls in big bet games are excellent. You can click in the slider interval to move the slider by large increments, drag it or type in the bet size without disturbing extra input or erratic behaviour of the input box (such as extremely slow cursors, not being able to mark text for fast deletion, no transfer of what you type to the buttons). In my opinion, it’s hard to think of a better interface. You can sit down at a maximum of three tables at the same time although it is possible that this limit can be negotiated.
Overall there is no doubt that the EWorld software is excellent. It is, however, not as good as it could have been. The graphics works but it could have been better and especially the tournament section can be improved considerably. Also, the client is some weird cross between Windows and Web since most layout formatting appears to be made in HTML. In some sense this gives you the worse of two worlds: the poor speed of web interfaces crossed with the poor portability of Windows programs. Because of this, there is a lot of information to load for every page you want to look at. This makes me think twice before browsing around more than necessary and on a modem I actually avoid going anyplace that I don’t absolutely have to in the client interface. |
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