Betfair Poker - Review

Betfair Poker provides a reliable, secure, fair and friendly place to play poker against thousands of other players! Furthermore Betfair Poker makes it possible for you to save money on sports betting on the Betfair Exchange by earning points. Just by playing ring games, you will be able to reduce the commission rate that you pay on your sports betting. Betfair Poker are now part of the Poker Champs network and as a result offer some of the best value for money games around, whether it be at the microstakes level or the extremely popular high stakes games. Betfair are also sponsors of the World Series of Poker Europe - maintaining their commitment to the poker community

Betfair Poker bought the Poker Champs network in 2006, previously they were on the Cryptologic network. Becoming independent has allowed Betfair great flexibility in providing players with what they want.

Since an update in early 2007 there have been some great features added. The tables now look really slick, uncluttered and well designed. The gameplay is smooth and fast flowing. It takes a bit of time getting used to the betting buttons on the right hand side of the screen, but they have a nice sliding scale betting function along with bet pot buttons to make things easy for you. The cards are slightly on the small side, but they are easily distinguishable apart from there not being a 4 colour deck option.

Multitabling at Betfair Poker is a dream. You can resize each table to fit according to your screen, allowing you a maximum of opening 15 screens at once.

There are also a good working "player notes" function along with the usual hand statistics, but in addition Betfair Poker have released the "Poker Buddy" feature. The Poker Buddy tracks your results and gives you hands histories against specific opponents amongst other things.

The lobby doesn't have a particularly nice colour scheme and looks a bit dated. The names of the tournaments are also a bit cluttered in the tournaments section. The cash games section is well designed, easily navigable and features clear flop % and hands per hour stats.

Overall Betfair Poker have more hits than misses when it comes to software and playability.

Betfair Poker made the choice to become independent of any network quite recently, in light of this the traffic isn't huge, though it's not small either, but is growing all the time. At peak times there are around 1,000 real money players at the cash games, and 4,000 at the tournament tables.

The only games available at Betfair Poker are Texas Hold'em and Omaha. Unlike most other online poker rooms featured, at Betfair Poker there's a good range of stakes available at non peak hours. There's games NL-hold'em games full ring and 6 max games up to $10/20 and Heads up cash games for up to $250/$500 running! Obviously the 6 max and full ring games gets busier in the evening, but this shows that there's a wide array of cash level games available at all times. Betfair Poker really seems to be to be the place to play high stakes Heads Up poker, due to their low rake policy on these games.

Overall the traffic at Betfair Poker is surprising for such a small player base. There's a good selection of games at all levels, which is a welcome change from other sites which may have thousands of players, but who only populate the micro-stakes games.