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Party Poker
An Unbiased Review Party Poker: The Nuts and Bolts: What we like about Party Poker: Party Poker: Online Poker Room Review: A final note: If you find this page helpful we urge you to use the banners and click- throughs provided here and elsewhere on the site if you intend to open an account with Party Poker or any of our other sponsors. The only we keep afloat is through referral fees, and we don't get credit for the referral unless you use our links to download. Thanks for your support! Question 1) Is Party Poker the best place to play online poker? Well, yes and no. To answer that we'd really need to know what game you're looking to play, and at what limits. Assuming you're playing Texas hold em, then yes: Party Poker is the best online poker site around for anyone playing $15-30 hold em or any hold em game smaller than that. It's also the best site for texas hold em tournament players, owing to the large number of events that Party Poker holds every day. For real big players ($50-100 and up), however, you'd want to play at InterPoker, which gets most of the big action from the rich European players. And the micro limit games ($.50-$1.00 and smaller) at Noble Poker are the fishiest we've seen. That being said, the Party Poker micro limit games aren't exactly a shark tank either, and plenty of players have achieved nice win rates in the small Party Poker games. Overall, if you had to play Texas hold em at one online poker room for the rest of your life, I would say your best bet would be to play at Party Poker. The software can occasionally seize up, and Party Poker customer support is mediocre, but cashouts are always processed at lightning speed and the games are soft (for more info on the 'nuts and bolts' of Party Poker and other online card rooms, check out our online poker room reviews, which give you the low down on the 'nets most popular online poker sites). This actually segues into an interesting tangent. I have a theory on why some players think Party Poker is rigged, and I'll share it with you now. First, when you play online you can't hide your losses. The world has no shortage of players who have deluded themselves into thinking that they've been 'beating the game' for years, when in fact they've just made a habit of conveniently forgetting their losses, choosing instead to dwell on their big scores. This works OK when you're playing in a casino, since you can throw away your ATM receipts. But when you have to make an online deposit there's no way to kid yourself; if you're putting more money in than you're taking out then, well, you're losing. Many players can't deal with the revelation that their game is actually sub-par, so they do the natural thing-they blame the software. (Hopefully this won't be you. Study our Texas hold em starting hands guide, and peruse the content in our Texas hold em article library, and you'll be well on your way to establishing yourself as an online poker winner.) Second, Party Poker games have been traditionally characterized by lots of loose, aggressive and generally wild play. That doesn't make the games unbeatable, of course, but it does mean you'll have bigger swings. Six years ago you couldn't find a pro player in a casino who would ever admit to having had a 400 big bet downturn, since downswings like that just didn't happen to strong players. But nowadays swings of that size are almost the norm; or at least they are on online poker sites like Party Poker, where the action is fast and the play is aggressive. So it's possible that a few otherwise successful pros have just hit the downside of a variance curve when playing on Party Poker, and have wrongly assumed that the culprit was Party Poker's software. Question 3) Are Party Poker games the softest on the Internet? No. Or at least not as of April 2005, which is when I'm writing this. In 2003 I would have answered the question with an unequivocal 'yes', since the softness of the Party Poker games two years ago was the stuff of legend. Many players, myself included, had never seen play this bad, either online or in a casino, and Party Poker became our personal gold mine. Since then the Party Poker games have toughened up, although they are still very beatable. If you want to find the softest poker games online you'll want to go to either Pacific Poker or Inter Poker. Both these sites have more beatable games than Party Poker as of this writing. Question 4) Do I need to worry about collusion at Party Poker? No. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that making collusion profitable is much tougher than it sounds. And it's very hard to do if you can't be to obvious about it-which you can't be at Party Poker, since they have a whole staff whose job it is to monitor games and look for colluding behavior. Collusion is not a problem at Party Poker, or for that matter at any other online poker room. The reason people scream about collusion is the same reason they denounce online poker as rigged-they're finally forced to face the fact that they're not as good as they thought they were, and sometimes the truth hurts. |
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