Party Poker - Review

Party Poker is the best known online poker site in the world. Since coming online in 2001, PartyPoker.com has always aimed to deliver the best games & service to its customers worldwide. Despite US restrictions, Party Poker still is one of the busiest sites around with a large selection of games at all limits. Party Poker is a great place to start playing online due to to the general poor standard of play at the lower levels, hopefully you'll be a winning player in no time. In our experience the customer service has been ok - though sometimes responses to emails take a little longer than other sites. I guess this is a small price to pay for playing on a site with some of the juiciest games around.

Party Poker have developed their own software and are not part of a network. This allows them to constantly improve and update their software, making it better for their users.

The tables are quite bright, which is a refreshing change. They use a classic green colour for the baize and have crisp avatars for the players and dealer. The cards are a good size, although it's advisable to use the four colour deck option. The gameplay is relatively fast & smooth, and the software has some nice features too; like the hand history and the player statistics. There's also a good buddy list to tag the fish and friends.

The Party Poker software allows users to play at up to twelve tables at once. Multi-table play runs smooth and relatively problem free and has good audio and graphics functions for alerting a player to make an action.

The lobby is not so great. It's seems too crammed and cluttered for my liking. Despite its appearance it's quite easy to navigate with everything in a tree-like tabbed menu. You can apply filters to drill down Unfortunately on the Cash menu only hands per hour and Average pot size is shown, not the most important statistic - Flop %.

Overall the Party Poker software gets an average score.

Party Poker were one of the first online poker rooms. In its heyday Party used to have the more users than any other online poker room. Since the U.S. ban on internet poker the players have dropped, but they still have substantial traffic. There are about 10,000 players at the cash table and 60,000 players at the tournament tables.

There's a good mix of games available. At non peak times you'll be able to limit Texas hold'em from microstakes up to $100/$200. You'll be able to play No Limit Texas Hold'em all the up to $25/50m and Pot limit Omaha up to $10/$20. At peaks times the games get much bigger and there are more to choose from. For 7 card stud fans, there's usually a games going up to 5/10 at non peak times too.

Party Poker used to be regarded as a fish pool, meaning full of very bad players and therefore easy to win if you're a competent player. Since the US ban the games have tightened up considerably. There're still some soft games about, but the general standard of play has improved since the glory days of fish paying everybody off with bottom pair.