There are lots of good reasons to play at Pacific Poker, which is the poker room where you probably will encounter this software but the Random Logic software isn’t one of them. In fact it is probably the buggiest software on the market and had it not been for the exceptionally good games here I would never dream of using this client. If you are playing here: never do anything that will close or open new windows or otherwise anything that has any chance of disturbing the game that you are in. To add to the disaster, you can only play one table here.
Let me take an example. When reviewing the software I entered a $20+2 sit’n’go to try out the big bet controls. I realized directly after joining that they had in fact just started to offer no limit and pot limit ring games but too late, the tournament had already started. Anyway, while in the tournament I browsed the other tournaments a little bit and looked at the lobby of another tournament where I decided to check out what the “News and Events” button did. Big mistake. The tournament table was promptly closed down and I was brought to a web page. I then tried to find some button for rejoining the table. No luck here. Well, I then decided to locate the tournament manually to join it again. However, in the list and the information panel you don’t get any information about who is playing in a sit’n’go and every time you open a tournament lobby you have to close it to access the list again and when you get back, the list has the default sorting order and you are positioned in the top of the list. Finding a tournament is therefore extremely time-consuming. Finally I managed to find my tournament and pushed the “Please seat me” button that I found here. When I did this however I simply got the message “You cannot be seated in this tournament”. When this obviously didn’t work I closed the software, logged in again and once again took the time to locate my tournament. This time I could join it but my stack was reduced from 2200 to 43! I was the chip leader at the 25/50 blind level when it malfunctioned and no more than two or three rounds could have been played so I couldn’t have been blinded off this much. To verify this I summed the stacks of the players and the count was in fact much lower than the total amount of starting chips. This is of course completely unacceptable and I haven’t seen bugs of this serious kind anywhere else in fact. Other client may crash and they may be horrendously designed but they never lose your money.
The lobby is maybe the part of this software that works best. Tables and games are selected using a tabbed list view. You get an excellent overview over the selection of games and tables, all information you could ask for, and you can easily find what you are looking for.
Both scheduled and sit’n’go tournaments have lobbies where you register, unregister and get information about the tournaments. Two big drawbacks here: you don’t see who’s in a sit’n’go without opening the lobby and if you open the lobby the sorting order and position in the list is gone when you exit the lobby again. Apart from this you get a reasonable amount of information and the lobbies contain most relevant information: players in a sortable list, tables and players on the tables as well as payouts, blind level, blind level schedule and max/min/average stack size. Unfortunately, however, the payouts are not calculated until the tournament starts. You can view tables but I advice strongly against doing so if you are in a game yourself. In fact, as previously mentioned, I advice against doing anything at all outside the table window if you are playing.
The graphics are ok but nothing. It is not too bad and experience playing at the single table you are allowed to have opened though: the controls work reasonably well and it is clearly visible whose turn it is to act. On the other hand, be prepared for two things: the client sometimes decides to start using extreme amounts of system resources and will cause everything on your computer to run slowly (the game will go in slow motion) and sometimes it will crash on you. If a player times out and nothing more happens: restart the whole thing and cut you losses. The chat is in a separate small window that gets lost the whole time. It does work better than most separate chat windows though since the chat button flashes when something has been entered in the chat so you know when you should push it. You can enter some actions out of turn using checkboxes that appear as needed. The slider is more or less useless: if you use it you will always end up betting amount like $12.31 which is pretty irritating I think but you can type in amounts and this works reasonably well.
Summed up, this client is really not good at all. It doesn’t have a lot of features, it has bugs that can lose you money, it crashes and you can only play one table and so on. You might find yourself wanting to use it anyway because the games at Pacific are generally really good but be careful: don’t provoke this client by clicking any buttons except those that you absolutely must click. |
1. 
2. 
)
)
)
