Here you will find my personal reviews of online poker sites I have played before, and a few I havn’t.

Lets begin.

Absolute Poker Going way back, this is the second poker site I took to playing on back about the fall of 2005. I tend to be exclusive to playing one or a couple poker sites at a time, and I played Absolute heavily for about a year and half.

The Skinny: When I first got to Absolute, I took to it because it was a very close knit community of poker players. I would describe it at the time as the Cheers of poker rooms, where *Everybody knows your name.* It was really enjoyable. I’m not sure what the size of the site is now. I know they’ve grown recently having merged with Ultimate Bet late last year, and added some larger gauranteed tourneys so they should be drawing more players. Also some of their tournaments are now counted toward pocketfive rankings.

At any rate, I can’t vouch for whether they still maintain that same small-town feel or not. One thing that I always loved about the site is that their software has always been top notch and functionally sweet (with one notable exception I won’t go into here.) In fact, any time I would try to branch out to other sites I would get so annoyed at their two-bit graphics and features (like clumsy betting buttons and slides) that I would quickly head back to Absolute.

Unlike other sites at the time, and still many today, Absolute also allowed you to upload a personal photo as your table player icon, which again, added to that element of personability.

Games:

This was the place I first honed my online tournament abilities. I was a small fish in a medium sized pond when I showed up. What was really great were the tournament payout structures. The tables sat nine, and payed out to the top nine for 45 to 99 entrants, and top 18 for above 100, etc. For the nightly guarantees, at that time, often for the higher buyins they weren’t getting many more that 50+ entrants so the odds were great - paying out 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 players in some cases. As a rookie thats beautiful. (As a seasoned player top heavy payouts can be more worthwhile)

Here I learned that No Limit Holdem is truly an art. I would rate the level of play as average. I learned there were a handful of players to watch out for, and everyone else I just played. It was a good mix, because some were there to challenge you - which raises your level of play - yet overall it was not the kind of game that got discouraging. There were wins to be had.

I also broke my teeth on cash games at Absolute (having started out as strictly a tournament player.) The competition for cash games I do not recall as having been that tough at the time I was there during ‘05 - ‘06. After building up my bankroll to about $4500 playing multi-table tournaments, I was able to easily double it on the cash tables. (Easy come easy go though, as I soon learned the finer points of bankroll management.)

That said, I came back to Absolute Poker for a spell in ‘07, and found that games had tightened up quite a bit and I could not get a leg up after about a month of play. There were definitely many more tables running, now that I recall. You shouldn’t have trouble getting the game you want anyway. Seems that the comp may have stiffened up a bit since the old days though. No doubt they have pulled in some players from other notorious sites.

Also they now have a bad-beat jackpot that gets ridiculously huge I’ve heard.

If you haven’t played Absolute Poker before you should definitely give it a go. Especially if you’ve been floating around a lot and your the kind of player that’s looking for a place to call home.