PokerStars Review

PokerStars Summary

PokerStars, established in 2000, is the world's largest independent poker room. They offer all popular poker game variants, but also some of the lesser known types as several Draw variations, Mixed games and Badugi. You can always find a table that suits your level because of the large amount of traffic, even at off-peak hours. PokerStars accept players from nearly everywhere, including players from the United States.

PokerStars Sign-up

In the following part of our PokerStars review you can read in-depth information about PokerStars' client, website, security & integrity, traffic & games, bonuses & promotions and support.

Poker Client

The colors used for the default PokerStars application are one of the ugliest around, but the feature to customize the client makes you instantly forget about that. You can adjust the background by uploading your own images, or choosing for one of the many predefined themes to change the overall appearance. The table sizes of all poker games can be adjusted to your preferred size, which comes in handy when playing multiple tables.

Just like all other great poker rooms, PokerStars offers features to keep player notes, game statistics and tournament statistics, and very detailed hand history - including a sophisticated hand re-player.

As PokerStars is one of the industry leading poker rooms when it comes to innovation, you can expect cool things to be added very frequently.

PokerStars First Deposit Bonus and Promotions

At PokerStars you're eligible for a bonus of 100% up to $600 when making a first deposit. This bonus offer is perfect for every type of poker player, beginners or advanced players, as it's an incremental poker bonus. Besides that, you have a time frame of half a year to clear it, which really is quite a long time compared to most online poker rooms.

Actually, PokerStars offers so many extras that it's not only their poker bonus what makes most poker players choose for them. They are one of the very best poker rooms when it comes to special promotions (see below).

• Read our in-depth review about the PokerStars First Deposit Bonus

PokerStars is well known for really big promotions. The most famous promotion on PokerStars is the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), an online equivalent to the WSOP. Speaking about land based events, PokerStars is the owner of the EPT (European Poker Tour) brand and because of that they run tons of satellites to EPT events, including the yearly PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in the Bahamas, the only EPT event outside of Europe.

If you visit Poker For Free frequently, or subscribe to our RSS feed, then you can read all about it, as we cover the biggest promotions in our articles. Of course, PokerStars.com is even a better place to watch out for them.

PokerStars Sign-up

Security and Integrity

All communications between the PokerStars client software and their servers is encrypted. Since encryption itself does not guarantee privacy, they also spent a lot of effort designing their security system and policies.

PokerStars is also very clear about cheating in form of collusion, where two or more players signal their holdings to each other. Security personnel will be automatically warned if their detection methods catch any unusual play patterns. A thorough manual investigation will be taken to investigate all players' reports about suspected collusion.

Traffic and Game Variation

As the top poker site in the industry, PokerStars assures you to be able to find traffic at the tables 24/7. They easily reach over 150,000 simultaneous players at peak hours. About 85% of those players are participating in poker tournaments, while the remaining 15% (up to, and over 15,000) are playing at the cash game tables.

In February of 2009 PokerStars dealt their 25th billionth hand and they ran several promotions to celebrate this happening. During these promotional days, where they rewarded players participating in milestone hands with cash, they reached over 250,000 players logged in at the same time.

The huge guaranteed poker tournaments often draw over 10,000 participating players thanks to the tremendous amount of tournament traffic.

PokerStars has the following poker games and poker tournaments available through their secure poker software: Texas Hold'em, Omaha, Omaha Hi/Lo, Stud, Stud Hi/Lo, Draw, 2-7 Triple Draw, 2-7 Single Draw, HORSE, Razz, 8-Game Mix and Badugi. Of course they offer this wide range of games in all different betting structures (Limit, No-Limit, and Pot Limit).

PokerStars.com Website Review

PokerStars Website

PokerStars.com looks awesome, it's really professional and consist out of quite a lot of sub pages. The main menu leads you to pages where you can find detailed information about the poker room itself, tournaments, how to play for real money, the PokerStars VIP club, team PokerStars players and how to contact support.

The multi-lingual website comes in the following languages:

English, Greek, Czech, Danish, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Russian, Romanian, Slovenian, Swedish, Finnish and Ukrainian.

This enables poker players from about everywhere in any language to understand their website completely.

Next to general information, you can find detailed information related to several live events sponsored by PokerStars, including the EPT, which by the way they also broadcast live when it's happening - or you can simply watch reruns in their TV section. Besides live reports of live tournaments, you can also watch reruns of scheduled online action, such as the Sunday major tournaments.

Another thing to watch out for is the PokerStars.com blog. This blog covers everything about PokerStars, both online as offline. If you decided to join PokerStars, then make sure to subscribe to their blogs' RSS feed to get the latest news and stay up to date about promotions.

PokerStars Sign-up

Support

In case you have questions, we suggest you take a look at the PokerStars FAQ section before contacting support. Their comprehensive FAQ covers almost every aspect of their software. If the FAQ doesn't bring an answer to your question, then you can contact PokerStars' award winning support department via e-mail. Unfortunately this is the only contact method they provide, but since the response type is very high this should not be considered a problem.