Texas Holdem Press

Is it a good name? Cake doesn’t come to mind, when I think of poker. Their tag line is, “get a piece of the action”. Cute, but not memorable, or poker-specific. The ‘Home Page’ has a picture of a humanoid cake, of sorts, with a fork in one hand and a glass of milk at the ready in the other? Huh? A second tag line is “Why Settle for Crumbs: Cake gives all players a bigger piece of the action?” A big promise. What would the old cowboy players say? All Hat and No Cattle? We’ll see.

I do have to say that they are consistent with their message, and there is little or no effort to reassure new players about things that they probably didn’t worry too much about in the first place. That is, new players aren’t going to thrown their cash down and say, let me at ‘em. They’re going to want to get a feel for the site, first, see if they want to stay a while.

“So why settle for crumbs” it reads at the bottom of the first page, “when you can have Cake”

1:31 p.m., beginning the download process.

A fairly large 12.9 mb file is installed and, it says I’m ready to go after just a few seconds. That was fast! I’m not a techie, but I always worry about file sizes. Maybe that’s not as relevant as I thought. Of course if you are playing on an old, slow PC – with little memory to spare, it could be very relevant for you
Okay I’m ready to play, and I notice that the emphasis on rewards that I noticed on the home page, is consistent, page to page. There are gold stacks, and gold chips, and gold cards, and ‘share cake’ and FP points, and Gold Spree Status and, if I scroll down, Frequent Player Rewards. I don’t know what any of it means, but I am impressed by the consistency, and interested in seeing whether those bonuses and rewards are available to free players as well? I would hope so. If they really want to convert the free players to cash players, there might be no better way than to give them something to play with.. (the house’s money, so to speak).

The main screen itself is nice and clean – with my cash and play bankroll featured to the left, and bonus/reward status to the right. Above are 7 fairly large buttons: Ring Games, Tournaments, Cashier, Rewards, My Account, Help and.. Options.

One thing I don’t see is the statistic of how many players at how many tables? Cake is a bit smaller than some of the biggest sites, so perhaps that’s why they aren’t bragging about numbers of players and all – and may have something to do with all their ‘loyalty’ rewards.

After a little exploring I click on accounts – and then choose from above, Ring Games, and what I see is typical of the sites I have visited recently. Only Full Tilt is different – emphasizing options about types of games and limits before dropping you at a table. Here again is a small screen with small print and columns of info. Lets see if I have learned anything. …

Oh, wait, I see: there are pre-select buttons. So if I choose Texas Hold’em, then Play Money, then stakes of 5/10, and a Fixed Limit, there are only two tables to choose from.
Before I start I notice that there is an interesting statistic for one of the tables: under the category Plrs/Flop, it says 93%. I think that means that 93% of players at a table of this kind, stay in the game until the flop – which suggests, I think, fairly reckless, amateur play. Is that the case? Should I try it, or look for something else? Lets try.

One of the features I notice is that when you win a hand, there is applause. I like that, but then notice that you only hear applause when you win (a bit silly). Maybe they could modify that so that there is applause when someone wins a big pot (a certain percentage over the average for that table), or when they are dealt one of the rarer hands.
I wish they had the ‘best hand’ feature.
After about an hour of play (I was up and down and finished just shy of even) I noticed I was beginning to tire of the pace of play again. Now that I am a bit more familiar with the terminology I will look more closely at the characteristics of the tables before I take a seat.

Again my overall assessment is positive. Cake seems simple and straightforward, was a quick, small file to download, and I like the emphasis on rewards for loyalty. Then again, if they want more players I think they should award people who spend time at free play – give them a few tastes of cash play as a reward. But what do I know.