Poker players have many poker rooms to choose between when they want to play poker. The most familiar online poker rooms are Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars, PKR and PartyPoker, but you can find smaller poker rooms such as LuckyAcePoker, Doyle’s Room and William Hill Poker. The disadvantage with the smaller poker rooms is also the advantage: The smaller rooms have fewer players, and the chance to meet the same players more than once is bigger than if you play at e.g. PokerStars. That makes the note function in the small poker rooms very important, since you can take notes about a player and when you meet him again, you know exactly how he plays.
Of course, the note function is also a great tool in the bigger rooms, but the chance of meeting someone you have written a note about is small and if you don’t play online poker every day or maybe just one or two times a month, you should consider not using the note function. This is a basic rule about the poker rooms.
The User Interface
The bigger poker rooms are all different. Full Tilt Poker has a beautiful user interface and if I should choose to play at a poker room, based on the user interface only I would definitely choose to play at Full Tilt Poker. The user interface at PokerStars is very old looking and I actually don’t like it. It somehow reminds me of parchment paper from the time of Leonardo Da Vinci, which has nothing to do with poker. PKR is very unique when it comes to user interface, which of course is because it’s in 3D and you can interact with your avatar, but many find it frivolous and I think the average age of PKR’s players is low.
The Prize Money
Poker would be a whole other game, if it wasn’t for the money. The different online poker rooms arrange tournaments and actually a lot of tournaments daily. Not only is the main prize a percentage of the user’s buy-in to the tournament, it’s often prize money that the online poker room gives away. When it comes to prize money, PokerStars turns out to be the best. You can always find a tournament with a huge money prize. Full Tilt Poker is also good, but they have too many satellite tournaments. PKR’s tournaments are fun, but the amount of prize money is incredibly low.
The Amount of Players
The amount of players on an online poker room is actually very important. If there are few players (below 10,000) it tells something about the difficulty, and the basic rules are if the prize money is low the difficulty of the poker room is also low, because good players will never play low stakes poker. According to numbers, PokerStars has far more players than any other online poker room, and it is all time of the day. The reason to this could be the fact that PokerStars runs commercials on many different channels. Full Tilt Poker has almost as many players as PokerStars, but PokerStars still has the most. Real poker players will not choose PKR, because they play for the money, not for the experience.
Overall rating
Of course there are many factors why a poker room is better than another, but there three factors are relevant to all poker rooms. PokerStars tops two out of three with Full Tilt Poker as follow-up. That’s actually funny, because they offer the same bonus when you sign up.
