Why Pokerstars?
Hi everyone, I'm new to these forums and noticed that a lot of people here seem to play at pokerstars. Any particular reason?
I've been considering jumping into online poker and figure, since many of you are already there why not ask. I've read reviews of the different sites but nothing has really convinced me.
Love the forums here, especially the Canadian slant.
Regards
I've been considering jumping into online poker and figure, since many of you are already there why not ask. I've read reviews of the different sites but nothing has really convinced me.
Love the forums here, especially the Canadian slant.
Regards
Comments
As far as live play, many find the players and games alot tougher. The ability of the Pokerstar players seems to be higher. For that reason many people will play live games at Party Poker or one of a number of others. I myself play limit at Party, No-limit at Paradise and tournaments at Stars.
Your best bet would be to spend the time and check out all of the sites for yourself, figure which site's software you like, which sites offer the type of games and limits you like and then go from there.
Of course, Pokerforum tournaments are run solely at Pokerstars, so be sure to keep a modest balance there for those.
Good Luck,
Mike
Here's a copy of a post I wrote on RGP, in answer to the question: The fact that a chump like me can take 2nd in a 250K guarantee tournament?
;-) But seriously folks... I liked their tournaments before that. Why?
Everyone has their own reasons for liking/disliking sites, so I suspect
that some people will disagree with what I'm about to say.
-The fields are big.
-The selection is better than anywhere else I've seen... tournaments at a
number of limits start at a number of times throughout the day (all day
and night, in fact), and all seem to be well-attended.
-Software is fast, easy to use, hasn't given me any problems, aside from
the (very) occasional disconnection which I don't think is their fault,
but I don't know enough about computers to say for sure.
-Blinds are reasonable, particularly so in the $10+$1 rebuy tournaments,
where you get a *lot* of play for your money. Also, they don't take any
juice on the rebuys or add-on's, so with an immediate rebuy and the add-on
it's essentially a $30+$1 tournament with a 20K guarantee, but it's
usually more like 30 or even 40K. Tonight, for example, it's a $42,430
prize pool with 1st getting $10,600.
-Weak competition at the start of these tournaments lets you chip up fast,
but it does get tougher as you go (obviously).
-Support is on-hand at any final table to process deals between the
players (if they want to make them).
-And a number of other smaller things I'm probably forgetting.
(For those who think I'm a shill, I'm not a shill... just trying to answer
the question.)
As for other sites with good big NL cash games, I'm more of a limit cash
game player, so I can't comment. From what I understand Ultimate Bet has
big NL games, but again, I've never played in them so I'm not sure.
Hope that answered one of your questions, though!
Regards,
all_aces
It is not Pstars fault.
Usually this connection issue stems from somewhere on the toronto to stars hops on the Bell DSL Backbone (I have the same problems from time to time). Basically somewhere from where bell switches off of their network backbone onto someone else's network backbone on the way to connect to the stars server backbone there is a bad connection some where in those hopes. I have been logging the connection traces for sometime and have submitted to bell and stars about this bad router hop. Unfortunately there is nothing that can be done other than to report the connection issue to the appropriate system admin who manages those routers. On the plus side it hasn't happened to me for quite sometime now (going on almost 2 months now), so perhaps it has been fixed.
I agree with other posters (i.e. tracert results) but there is one small possibility. I noticed for the Empire Poker freeroll the other day (daily at 2pm) I was unable to properly register. After logout from EP, I couldn't log back in. I believe this was due to consecutive use of the hibernate feature on my pc. There's a respectable amount of swap space on the pc. While XP Pro seems stable, I still think Windows has memory leaks. After the reboot all was well.
I'm not slagging Empire Poker here - I'd expect other unpredictable results with online poker software on top of a still evolving operating system. I forgot to tell you I couldn't login to partypoker on the same pc. This is likely not surprising since they use the same skin.