As I mentioned also in our Party Poker review already, the best thing about Party Poker over the years has been the sheer amount of weak poker players that play there. This has always been true regardless of the stakes. Some poker sites have soft play at the lower stakes, but as you move up, the competition gets tougher. Some don’t even offer much action at the mid stakes and none at the high stakes.
So there are several important considerations here, which are how tough or soft the competition is generally at a poker site, what volume of soft players a poker site has, and how this desirable softness is spread across the various stakes and the different games they offer. There is only one poker site in the world that gets top marks in all categories. The number two poker site is way behind. Party Poker is the top poker site by far in each of the categories as a matter of fact.
Now if you are wondering how important this all is, all I need to do is ask you how important doing well is to you. Do you want to be in a position to get the best results from your play, or do you only play for fun and therefore don’t care about how much you win or lose? Maybe you want to play at the tough places, where the level of skill is much higher, so you’ll either win a lot less if you’re a good player, or lose a lot more if you’re not.
You might be thinking that only an idiot would choose the tougher places but if that’s true, then a high percentage of online poker players are idiots, given that the top two poker sites in terms of traffic, Poker Stars and Full Tilt, are by far the two toughest places to make money at, and the skill level of their players is much higher on average than at Party and any other poker site for that matter. Many of these players are American and can’t play at Party, which at least is an excuse, but a lot of the better players from other countries play there as well.
I won’t bother getting into the why here but I can tell you that I’ve been playing online since the start, and I’ve been wise enough to play at Party Poker all along and have made a lot more money over the years due to this. I’ve tried out the tough sites and I’m an expert player and more than good enough to beat these people, but it all came down to winning small pots there versus big pots at Party. Why would I settle for small pots when I can win big ones? Well the answer is, I don’t, and neither should you.
The thing about doing well at poker is that it’s not just a matter of having the best players win the money in the end. The amount of winnings here vary by degree as well, and the weaker your competition is, the more money you make, regardless of your own level of skill. A decent player will lose money in a tough game, and make a profit in an easy one. A bad player will lose a little in an easy game but get creamed in a tough one. A very good player will make a small profit in a tough game, but make a lot more in an easy one. So regardless of where your game is at, this matters, and it matters a great deal, more than any bonus you will get. The Party Poker bonus is just like any other bonus a nice extra on top of the most important thing, easy of competition, since that will last.