Poker Stars - Detailed Site Review

The popularity of PokerStars has risen exponentially over the last couple of years, and it is quickly gaining the reputation as the best site on the net. Through great advertising and fantastic customer support, PokerStars has developed a customer base to put them on top of the online poker world. While there are slightly fewer cash games available compared to PartyPoker, PokerStars is best known for the wide variety of poker tournaments they sponsor.

The last three World Series of Poker Main Event (WSOP) champions have all signed to promote PokerStars. Chris Moneymaker, Main Event champion in 2003, won his World Series of Poker seat through PokerStars for only $40. Greg Raymer and Joseph Hachem, the last two winners of the WSOP Main Event, also qualified for the tournament through Pokerstars’ satellites. PokerStars is the founder of the WCOOP, or World Championship of Online Poker, which is a series of online tournaments that, combined, pay out over $3,000,000. Pokerstars also holds its own WPT event at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas every January. Though PartyPoker has a wider variety limit games available, PokerStars is considered by many to be the only place to play online poker tournaments.

Their tournaments run around the clock, and are very rarely a victim of a technical glitch. Through they are best known for their major tournaments, they also offer a good number of free poker tournaments, or poker freerolls, to win real cash. Also, their rake is generally lower than that of other online poker sites, which is a huge benefit for any regular poker player.

The biggest knock against Pokerstars was their lack of limit cash games, but, in recent months, an influx of new players has helped increase the number of limit tables. This influx was started by their promotion of a new VIP system in January of 2006, where regular poker players could save their FPP, or Frequent Player Points, to purchase a variety of items. Most consider Pokerstars’ VIP program to be one of the best, and their FPP store carries gifts ranging from popular poker books, to entries to popular poker tournaments, to a new Porsche.

Their software and customer support are also head and shoulders above their closest competitor. Many professional poker players around the world make PokerStars their first choice in online play.

The site boasts an extremely fast Neteller payout times of one to six hours.

Pokerstars has as many as 90,000 poker players actively playing on any given night.