PokerStars

Posted by Lassieham , 24/02/09

Overall score: 4.0 / 5

Network: Pokerstars (independent)

Country of origin: Isle of Man

Established: 2000

Accept US Players: Yes

EU Based: No

The site in general: PokerStars is the largest online poker room in the world, with massive action at all stakes and skill levels. It's the place to go for tournaments, with the world's largest guarantees, an impressive 24/7 schedule and excellent software. PokerStars also sponsors some of the world’s most famous poker players, including Daniel Negreanu and WSOP Main Event champs Chris Moneymaker, Joe Hachem and Greg Raymer, who you can find at the tables to play or chat with.

Big name pros: Daniel Negreanu, Chris Moneymaker, Greg Raymer, Joe Hachem, Barry Greenstein, Peter Eastgate, John Duthie, Tom McEvoy, Steve Paul-Ambrose, Vanessa Rousso, Luca Pagano, Victor Ramdin, Lee Nelson, Bertrand Grospellier, Humberto Brenes, Bill Chen, Katja Thater, Noah Boeken, Andre Akkari, Dario Minieri, Rain Khan, Raymond Rahme, Tuan Lam, Chad Brown, Gavin Griffin, Victoria Coren, William Thorson, Marcin Horecki, Ivan Demidov, Alexandre Gomes, Ylon Scwartz, Johnny Lodden, Dennis Phillips and Alexander Kravchenko.

Bonuses: 100% new player first deposit bonus up to $50! From time to time, PokerStars makes reload bonuses available to the existing players. All players are treated generously with a frequent player points rewards program known as ‘FPP’.

Software: The PokerStars software is the cream of the crop and performs perfectly fine with hundreds of thousands of players playing real and play money games from all over the world. The software was developed by professional programmers that understood online poker and built a perfect product, which has continued to stay ahead of the competition. Aside from its great feel, stability and aesthetic, it's also fast, highly customizable, stable, and caters well to multi-tablers. With a constantly growing number of players, the software is continuously updated and improved to accommodate them. The software in its current version handles over 120,000 real-money players at peak hours and does so very well. The PokerStars software supports advanced multi-tabling, with resizable tables and up to 24 cash games possible at a time. An unlimited amount of tournaments and sit-and-gos is also possible, basically letting the user decide how many tables he can play before he reaches his limit.

Tables: The PokerStars graphics are some of the most praised in the business; clean, crisp, easy to understand and highly customizable. Some players think the software is almost too clean cut, but in general, people appreciate the straightforward and intuitive look. Because of the great customization options, the look and feel can also easily be changed and every player can find a combination that makes him/her happy. To personalize the software, players can also upload an image to use as their avatar when playing. Thankfully, there is also the option to block player images and rid your poker table of cats, dogs and the occasional Playboy bunny. The software has several backgrounds and table layouts, and with some tinkering players can pretty much make it look and sound exactly how they want.

Layout:   

Special features: Special features are great, with new features being added constantly. Some of the latest are an auto-rebuy option for ring games, a find a player function and a range of new keyboard shortcuts. PokerStars has also added a hand replayer directly in to the software, allowing players to revisit recent hands without leaving the table. The software client is jammed pack with excellent features that include: resizeable poker tables, ability to request hand histories, buy and sell tournament dollars, visit the leader board within the software, a fantastic ring game/tournament filter and many more features. Overall, PokerStars goes to great lengths to keep its players happy and the features are second to none.

Player Traffic: PokerStars is the largest poker room in the world and is filled with players from all time zones, so players can expect outstanding traffic at all hours of the day. During peak times PokerStars will host over 22,000 real money ring game players playing simultaneously. The tournament traffic is the best in the industry with a wide variety of multi-table tournaments and sit and go tournaments running around the clock. PokerStars will have upwards of 160,000 tournament players playing simultaneously.

Ease of game: PokerStars is so enormously popular that you can find any game at any stakes with any level of player at any hour of any day that you’d like. The ring games at the higher limits tend to be pretty tough at PokerStars, and the viewed-flopped percentages at these limits are fairly low - meaning tighter than the industry standard for the same limits. On the positive side, there are many games to choose from and plenty of good players know how to exploit the tighter games. The tournament player quality is of a more varying level than the ring games and tends to be much softer. Of course, there are mostly strong players in high-stakes sit-and-gos and the main fixed schedule events. However, a lot of non-experts take part as well because, as the online tournament leader, PokerStars attracts many new tournament players. In short, the competition is of average toughness in the ring games, with softer opposition in most of the tournaments.

Game variety: PokerStars offers a solid variety of poker games and has the largest player data base to keep these games full of players. The games that are offered include:

Texas Holdem – Pot Limit, Fixed Limit, No Limit, tournaments and sit and goes. Available on heads up , 6 handed max and 9 handed tables.
Omaha – Pot Limit, Fixed Limit, Tournaments and sit and goes. Omaha games available on heads up, 6 handed max and 9 handed tables.
Omaha Hi/Lo – Pot Limit, Fixed Limit, Tournaments and sit and goes. Omaha games available on heads up, 6 handed max and 9 handed tables.
7 Card Stud – Fixed Limit, Tournaments and sit and goes. Available on heads up, and 8 handed tables.
7 Card Stud Hi/Lo - Fixed Limit, Tournaments and sit and goes. Available on heads up, and 8 handed tables.
Razz - Fixed Limit, Tournaments and sit and goes. Razz is available on heads up, and 8 handed tables.
5 Card Draw – Fixed Limit, Pot Limit and No Limit. Tournaments and sit and goes. Available on heads up and 6 handed tables.
2-7 Triple Draw - Fixed Limit, Pot Limit and No Limit. Tournaments and sit and goes. Available on heads up and 6 handed tables.
2-7 Single Draw - Fixed Limit and No Limit. Tournaments and sit and goes. Available on heads up and 6 handed tables.
Badugi – PokerStars will be adding Badugi shortly.
PokerStars also offers several Mixed games including: HORSE, HOSE, Hold’em Mixed, Omaha H/L Mixed and 8-Game.

Stakes start from micro-limits of $0.02/$0.04 up to high stakes games of $100/$200. No limit tables, with games of $0.01/$0.02 blinds and $1.00 buy-ins up to $10/20 blinds, $400 buy-in games.

Tournaments: PokerStars is the biggest online poker site in the world and is, hands-down, "the" place to go for tournaments. The high traffic ensures anyone looking for a tournament will find one that suits both his wallet and his game preference. Most events have low to medium buy-ins and run often, and the smaller buy-in tournaments tend to be quite loose and juicy. For the high-stakes players there are plenty of $500 or more buy-in tournaments, with prize pools often passing the $1 million mark. The bigger buy-in events, however, tend to have some very talented competition and are not very easy to win or cash in. PokerStars also hosts the biggest guaranteed tournaments in the world, including the infamous PokerStars Sunday Million. "The Million" recently had its $1 million guaranteed prize pool upped to a guaranteed $1.5 million, giving even more of an incentive to play the biggest Sunday major on the web. Lately, the numbers have been well above and beyond that even - recent tournaments have hosted more than 11,000 players and prize pools around $2.5 million. Aside from the guaranteed tournaments, PokerStars runs the most satellite tournaments to major live and online poker events, like the World Series of Poker, the PokerStars.com European Poker Tour and the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, to name just a few. PokerStars is always expanding its tournament offerings based on player feedback. Some of its latest additions are the "Double or Nothing" SNGs, in which half the field doubles their money, and multi-day events for special tournaments like the WCOOP Main Event.

Cash games: Ring game traffic at PokerStars is number one in the world. A relatively large amount of the players are also European and Australian, which makes the site very busy at all times of the day. PokerStars has peak cash-game traffic of 22,500 real-money players at peak hours as of February 2009.

Rake info: PokerStars' rake is slightly below the industry average, with better offers at micro-levels and a lot better at the highest stakes. All no limit games are raked at 5% with a maximum of between $1 and $3 per hand depending on the number of players dealt cards at the table. Tournament rakes vary according to the size of the game but are in line with the rest of the industry eg $5 0.50c, $10 $1, $20 $2 etc all the way up to a competitive $100 rake for $5,000 heads up tournaments, which equates to just 2%. The rake taken at Fixed-Limit tables also varies depending on the limits and number of players dealt cards in the hand. The average rake is 5%, with slightly better rates at the highest stakes tables and reasonable max. rakes at every level.

Rakeback: PokerStars doesn’t offer any rakeback but you can use your Frequent Player Points (FPPs) to purchase a PokerStars bonus. Purchase the VIP Reward Bonus from the VIP Store for 5,000 FPPs and you will be credited $50 to your account once you have earned 350 Base FPPs.

Deposit/Withdrawal:

Deposit Options: eCheck, VISA (Delta, Electron, Gift and Prepaid), MasterCard (Gift and Prepaid), Neteller, Diners Club International, ClickandBuy, Moneybookers, Solo/Maestro/Switch, cashier's check/money order/bank draft (minimum deposit of $100), local bank transfer, ELV, online bank transfer, Paysafe card, WebMoney.
Withdrawal Options: Visa, Neteller, Moneybookers, ClickandBuy, WebMoney, check, couriered check, direct bank tansfer.

Support: Customer Support at PokerStars is strong but limited. There are a number of email addresses listed on the homepage which operate 24/7 and send back an informative response within 4 hours. And while there is no 24/7 phone service, customers are able to email and request a telephone correspondence (either in Spanish or English.)

support@pokerstars.com

Back