Poker Stars

Why Play Real Money Poker at Poker Stars.com

Poker Stars is the largest online poker room in the world. They have over 70,000 players in their cash games at any time. Poker Stars is known for their large tournaments and offer over $2.5 million dollar in guaranteed tournaments every Sunday. Poker Stars is open to US players and they actively market in the US with their Poker Stars.net commercials and print ads. Poker Stars is known for having software that doesn’t look flashy but works excellent and is part of the reason why the poker room has been so successful. Poker stars has numerous deposit options and they accept credit card, checks and many popular payment processors.

Poker Stars.com Overview

PokerStars.com is the largest online poker room in the world. They are US poker friendly and offer some of the biggest tournaments in the world. They are currently running the pokerstars.net/millions poker tournament which is the biggest freeroll tournament in the world. In the poker stars millions tournament they will be giving over 100,000 in prizes!

Poker Stars.com Review

Poker Stars Basic Info

Poker stars is one of the oldest and largest online card and poker rooms available on the internet. Established in late 2000, their claim to fame is currently for being the starting point of two back to back WSOP champions; in 2003 (Chris Moneymaker) and 2004 (Greg Raymer). Both of them qualified for the World Series of Poker through tournaments held on Poker stars. After his win in 2005, Joseph Hachem also signed on as a spokesman for the site; making Poker stars.net is the home of 3 WSOP Main Event champions.
PokerStars player traffic

Poker stars.net is one of the largest, if not the largest, online poker room available on the internet. At the time of this writing, 21:35 EST, there are 95,481 people at the cardroom, with 14,382 active tables.

Poker Room Features

The poker room itself is very well done. The lobby makes it easy to find any game or tournament you are looking for, it is very user friendly and easy to navigate. There are separate tabs for everything – allowing you to drill down from Hold’em – to Fixed Limits – and then branching off into High/Medium/Low/Micro stakes.

Poker Star.com offers the most tournaments out of any online site. As of 2007, they have run over 10,000,000 tournaments, far ahead of any other poker site. No matter what you play, there is always a game going at Poker stars.net. Also, every tournament you play moves you up the Tournament Leader Board. At the end of every week, the player with the most TLB points gets to play a $1,000 Heads-Up match versus one of Pokerstars ambassadors: it just might be Chris Moneymaker.

The game offerings are limited to Texas Hold’em, Omaha variations, and 7 card Stud.

Poker Stars Software
The software that Poker stars uses is of their own design and is not licensed to any one else. All in all, it is very functional, but appearances and graphics are relatively bland. It’s like the Volvo of online poker rooms, it gets the job done and does it well; but lacks the sexiness. They do allow you to upload a picture as a custom avatar; as far as graphical options, that’s about it.
The note taking ability is restricted to a tab in the lower left hand corner, which is somewhat awkward. I feel its much easier to take notes on players by click on them or their avatars. The tournament lobbies are effective and allow you to easily gather information about your ranking as you approach the final table.

One of the newest updates allowed resizing of tables, allowing you to fit as many on a screen as possible. With Pokerstar.com, it is possible to play up to 5 tables at once. Another software feature that is being implemented on more sites but was unique to Pokerstars, is an internet connection display on the lobby window; letting you see if you’re having any connectivity or latency issues.

Like most sites, Poker Stars allows you to redeem your Frequent Player Points for a variety of things, including tournament buy-ins and fees.

Poker Stars Support

Poker stars only offers email support. While it is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; the lack of live support hinders them in some aspects. Email support can resolve the majority of problems in a matter of hours, but sometimes it takes longer.

Security

Pokerstars.net is a registered business based out of Costa Rica. They are licensed by the online gambling regulatory body known as the Kahnawake Gaming Commission. The random number generator used at Poker Stars was developed originally by Intel, and has been verified and tested by numerous firms. User information is kept secure and confidential, behind a 256-bit encryption scheme.

Banking: Deposit & Withdrawls

Pokerstars.com supports the following deposit options for their online poker room:

• InstantEchecks
• EPassPorte
• Visa/Mastercard
• Cash Transfer Express Payment
• Western Union
• Diner’s Club
• Money Order Cashier Checks
• Solo/Maestro/Switch (UK Player’s only)

Poker Stars has a $25 dollar minumum deposit. Cashouts are available to most of the deposit methods sans visa/mastercard. You can also request a check that takes about 7 days to arrive to your door. UK players can also cashout to Switch, Maestro, and Solo accounts. On cashout, you can select which currency you’d like to receive: US dollars, Canadian dollars, British Pounds, Euros, Australian dollars, or several other currencies.

Stars Poker.com Summary

Pokerstars is the place to play, if you can look past the no-frills software and lack of bells-and-whistles. Despite its graphically shortcomings, it is one of the best places to play. It is safe, secure, and the standard for online poker rooms. You can always find a poker game immediately, no matter what stakes; and the tournaments are the by-far the best available online. 50,000+ registered users can’t be wrong.

Online poker can be played at www.pokerstars.com, www.pokerstars.net…This is the largest online poker room in the world!