Poker Stars Review
Wow: a big difference in style, at least from TitanPoker. Pokerstars opening screen exudes confidence – is not covered with assurances that you are safe, is clean and direct and includes a large picture of perhaps the most popular Poker player in the world, Daniel Negreaneau.
Welcome to PokerStars”, Negreaneau says, “where you’ll find more tournaments and games than any other poker site, with 24/7 support, secure deposits, fast cashouts and award-winning software. This is where champions are born, and you could be next.
Where the Titan site was a bit too busy, and might make the novice nervous, the PokerStars site has a kind of retro look – as if they were selling whisky, or Caddilacs. Prominent on this page are status terms, like “VIP”, and “award-winning”, “World’s largest”, and the like. According to PokerStars they have 195,000 players online right now – though spread over 6750 tables. No, Im sorry: that’s not tables, its tournaments? And there is a big green card with the words, “FREE Download” printed on it. So here we go.
The time is 10:55 a.m., as we “click here”… It says it will take less than two minutes to download 9.4MB of data. True to its word, the clock reads 10:56 and we are finished downloading. Now the executable file, uncompressed is 50MB in size, and before I could type that in its finished.
Of course now I have to get an account, and a password, and validate by email. I set up the account in about 15 minutes, and am waiting for the email validation.. (by the way, most sites I have visited refer you to their ‘lobby’, but none have a link to a ‘lobby’. Its usually just the opening screen once you are registered, but it might be nice to have a link to that lobby..)
Okay, so I don’t like the introductory screen right away: tiny little letters and numbers that references tables, limits, seating… but hard to tell what’s going on. And, that confusion leads to me getting into a one on one game, at a fast speed, and I am not sure what is going on. Did I play that hand? Did I lose that hand? WTF!
I got out, tried a few other tables, and finally settled on a larger table (7-9 players) for relatively modest stakes (5/10), at a reasonable speed. It took me a while but, surprisingly, I did very well – earning about 7500 chips in about 45 minutes. The level of play seemed good, the action not too fast, the players skilled (most of them). But then again, I didn’t like the avatars (if you didn’t provide your own picture, you had a blank disc), and the game was too noisy (cards shuffling, loud ‘knocks’ for check) – and I missed Full Tilt’s little time count-down.
Remember though, this is just a novice’s perspective. More experienced players may love being able to choose certain tables, at certain speeds. I’d prefer to have those selections made up front, from large buttons, so that I knew for certain what I was getting into.
Of course, like most people, I didn’t take advantage of the virtual game area, where I could have become familiar with the pace of play, the settings, design, etc. I’d recommend that everyone take advantage of any free training that is available, on any site – before leaping into the fray.
All in all the download was fast, I was able to begin play quickly, and perhaps most importantly (for reasons I am not quite certain of) I got a sense of the way the game was being played. That may be the most difficult thing for online poker sites to accomplish – creating the feeling that you are really playing against other people, which can make the game far more interesting and, I think, manageable.