Since the dawn of online poker over 10 years ago, Party Poker has really stood alone as the online poker room of choice among the world’s poker players. Having been dominant in the marketplace for years, they only slipped to the number three position in the world in terms of player traffic when they stopped allowing U.S. residents to play there. However, American players have pined away about the good old Party Poker days ever since, and if Party Poker ever opens their doors to them again, you can bet that they will flock there in droves again. If you’re not from the U.S. then consider yourself lucky, as this is truly still the best poker site you can find.
For years Party Poker has rested on its laurels, and already had so many great things going for it that it could afford to do so. What has propelled Party Poker’s success and popularity over the years has been the large amount of fish that play there. This is the one constant that’s always been evident and if you care about your results then this has always been the most profitable place to play online poker. Those who have left or have been forced to leave due to their country of residence have really missed the win rates per hour that they were once able to achieve at Party but were now unable to duplicate.
However a new day has dawned at Party Poker, where they have retooled their poker site with the goal of being the absolute best at everything, and they have succeeded in pulling this off. Gone is their tired old software sorely in need of updating for years, and they’ve gone from that to a state of the art software program that is now unrivaled. While their bonus program was decent and comparable to other poker sites, they now have in place a bonus scheme that is far more generous than they or anyone else has ever considered. They even stopped charging tournament fees, which if you play tournaments is truly a mind boggling change and will increase your return on investment dramatically.
Party Poker Is The Most Rock Solid And Trustworthy Poker Site
With all of the turmoil in the online poker industry these days, it’s hard to know who you can really trust. For years, as long as you stayed away from the smaller poker sites, you were usually good. Then came the cheating scandals at several large online poker rooms, causing players to wonder whether the poker rooms themselves could be trusted. Lately, huge poker rooms are falling like a house of cards, with hundreds of millions of poker players’ money not being paid out. Some players even have millions of their own money out there with no idea whether or not they will ever see it again, and others have lost tens or even hundreds of thousands without any real hope of getting it back.
So as some people predicted, the online poker business ended up turning into quite a mine field, and players who did not pay attention enough to risk ended up getting burned. While a lot of the victims were U.S. residents, who at least had an idea that something like this could happen, a lot of non U.S. players got caught up in things as well. Today, there probably isn’t an issue as important as a poker site’s business integrity, and those who do not pay enough attention to this do so at their own peril.
On the other hand, Party Poker has put themselves in a position to be fully insulated from any of these possibilities. They have taken every step to comply with U.S. authorities, including exiting the U.S. market when requested to, even though their new law only pertained to jurisdictions there where online poker was illegal, and at the time this wasn’t the case anywhere. Even today, several years later, it’s only illegal in a few states. Party Poker wasn’t messing around though. In fact they even paid a $300 million fine to the U.S. government for offering poker there in the years prior to the new law, being held to be in violation of an old law which their courts struck down as not applying to online poker. That’s how far that Party Poker goes to protect its operation from both legitimate and even illegitimate points of contention.
Instead of operating in some obscure small locale where you often wonder whether poker companies have simply bribed some officials and call the shots themselves, essentially putting them in a position of answering to no one, Party Poker is headquartered in the U.K. and is listed on the London Stock Exchange, and reports to its shareholders as well. The requirements of the Stock Exchange itself are very stringent and require that everything be completely above board. Party is really in a class by itself here and there’s no other poker site that comes close to offering its players the complete security and peace of mind that they do.
Nothing Matters More Than The Amount Of Fish
Party Poker players are in general not that strong as compared to players at PokerStars for instance. There you can already find good players at the lower levels, lurking to get your money. This is partly because Party Poker also offers other forms of games, like their Party Casino and Party Bingo. These other games attract a different kind of players, which you don’t see at PokerStars. Read more on what you can expect from Party Poker Player competition here, or continue reading our Party Poker review.
Game Variations
What would be a Party Poker review without mentioning what games they are offering. Party Poker offers all of the usual poker games you would expect like No Limit Hold’em, Limit Hold’em, 7 Card Stud (and Hi/Lo) and Omaha (and Hi/Lo). Besides from that they have a wide variety of other games which are all reachable from your same account. So if you like sports betting, casino games, real money bingo, real money backgammon, betting on the horses, or even placing bets on financial markets, Party has it all for you, and in fact is an industry leader in all these other forms of betting as well. If you do enjoy to gamble at other games, one of the big problems that you can run into is spreading your overall bankroll across several sites and several accounts.
This has the effect of spreading yourself too thinly at all of them, and therefore limiting your leverage. For instance, you will have to play much smaller stakes playing poker than you would if your money were all in one place. This also has you moving up the stakes much more slowly than you would be able to do so otherwise. The same applies to the other games you are involved in, for instance your sports bets would be smaller as well. Since you can do it all from the same account at Party, you could be playing poker and have some of the money in your reserve involved in sports bets, for instance. This can be a real advantage.
The best thing about all of this is that regardless of whether you participate in any of these other games or not, having all these different forms of gambling allows a lot of cross play, where a lot of people who poker isn’t their main game come over to dabble in poker on the side. If I were to dream up the perfect poker site it would have lots of players at the poker tables who love to gamble, don’t mind losing, and don’t really know much about what they are doing. This is exactly what these players from other forms of gambling bring, and they make a lot of difference in our poker profits at Party.
Party Poker’s Initial Deposit Bonus
By visiting them through our special link in this Party Poker review, they will double your first deposit with them, up to an additional 500 of the currency of your choice. They offer the ability to deposit in U.S. Dollars, Canadian Dollars, Euros, or British Pounds. It doesn’t matter where you live, as you can make your deposit in whatever currency you choose. I strongly recommend that you choose British Pounds, as this not only works out to be the biggest amount of bonus money, it also allows you to get more bank for the buck, or in this case the pound, regardless of the size of your deposit. This is because they treat the different currencies differently as far as how they pay out the bonuses, and British Pounds will get more money into your account quicker.
While most poker bonus deals make you remember a bonus code, there’s no need for one at Party Poker. Party goes all out to make things as simple as they can for you, and this is one more example. There is a spot where the software will ask you for a bonus code, use Party Poker bonus code SKYHIGH when you register your account with them. This way there is no fooling around or making mistakes and there’s few things more upsetting than thinking you will be getting something, only to find out later that you did something wrong and you won’t get it now. That won’t happen with our deal that we have for you.
How You Collect Your Bonus And How Party Points Work
Once you’ve made your first deposit, then you are on your way to collecting the first installment of your bonus money. You collect Party Points each time you are dealt cards in a raked pot. There are three ways that poker sites figure out how their points are calculated. The first is calculating how much you personally contributed to the rake. This is a great way if you are a fish as the fish put the most money into the pot over time. However for those of us who are not bad players it’s a bad way to calculate these things. The second way is to divide the total points up among those who have contributed to the pot. Once again this is good system for the fish as they like to play way too many hands.
The third, and by far the best way is to divide the total amount of points among everyone that got dealt cards in a hand. This is the way Party Poker calculates Party Points. This means that good players get as many Party Points as the fish do. So in other words you don’t have to be a bad player at Party Poker to get your share of the points that they give out. That’s what I call fair, and this will have you collecting your bonus, as well as their rewards which I’ll talk about in a moment, a lot faster regardless of what kind of player you are.
By the way, you also don’t have to wait until you collect enough Party Points to free up your entire bonus amount in order to get paid. Each time you get enough points to collect a tenth of the total amount, Party Poker pays you that amount into your account automatically. They have also made it easy for you to track how many points you have at any given time and how many you need for the next payday, as each player is given a personal web page on their site where this and much more is kept and constantly updated for you.
At Party Poker, The Bonus Money Party Never Ends
Once you’ve collected all of your initial deposit bonus loot, it’s time to move on to the next payout. Unlike poker sites where they just give you one poker bonus and then you’re done for life, Party Poker does the opposite, meaning offering you bonuses for life. In fact, once you’re done collecting your initial bonus, the bonuses that you collect going forward are at least as good, and for most players, they end up being much better. All this depends on how much you play there, and the more you play, the bigger bonus rewards you get.
Party Poker does allow you to exchange your Party Points for merchandise, and their store and their deals are the best around. However, their bonus program is even better, and provided that you play even a decent amount, it’s a lot better in fact. It all depends on how high up on the ladder you can climb as far as your VIP status is concerned, which I’ll now explain.
Everyone starts out at the Bronze level. This level is for infrequent players, and if you play even a decent amount, you should have no trouble moving up to at least the Silver level. Beyond that is the Gold level, followed by the Palladium level, and finally the Palladium Elite level, the ultimate VIP status.
You move up the levels depending on how many Party Points you earn in a given month or quarter. You don’t have to worry about paying attention to this though as Party will automatically upgrade your status and inform you whenever you achieve the requirements to get promoted.
So with your Party Points, you can either trade them in for merchandise, take the cash, or go for more money with their bonuses. If you are at least a Silver VIP member, the bonus offers come into play, and it’s always better to take the bonus deal, since the points that you need to free up the bonus counts as well toward the next set of bonuses.
So for instance, at the Silver level, once you get 750 points you can cash them in for $15 cash, or instead use them to buy a bonus worth $30. Once you get another 375 points, you get the $30. These 375 points are also applied to your next set of 750, so in other words, for this deal, you don’t need anything else but a little patience to double your money with the bonus offer.
The bonus levels are as follows:
- Silver
- $30 for 750 points
- $80 for 1500 points
- Gold
- $200 for 3000 points
- $450 for 6000 points
- Palladium
- $1000 for 10,000 points
- $3000 for 20,000 points
- Palladium Elite
- $7000 for 40,000 points
- $20,000 for 100,000 points
- a whopping $75,000 for 300,000 points
I know some players who collect the $75,000 bonus several times a year. You might think that this is a lot of points, and it is, but it’s all to do with the stakes you play, and perhaps some day you can move up the stakes like this as well and make that kind of super extra loot too.
This is all new by the way and Party Poker not long ago dramatically increased the amount of money that they pay out in bonuses for a given amount of play, and as you can see, this is all very generous, and like everything else about their poker site, they really do stand alone in the poker world.
Party Poker Promotions
Another one of the amazing features why Party Poker is the best poker site are the ongoing and special Party poker promotions. Some of the promotions include the refer a friend bonus, which gives you $100 in your player account for each friend you refer to Party Poker. Further they have lots of special tournaments and online qualifiers to live poker events like World Poker Tour (WPT) qualifiers and that up to the biggest tournament of all, the World Series of Poker (WSOP). Read more about these and other promotions, including the bad bead jackpot in our Party Poker promotions article here.
Party Poker Traffic
As I’ve mentioned, a great poker site has two main elements, which are soft competition and lots of traffic. There are quite a few poker sites out there where the competition is soft, but they really don’t have that many players playing there, so the amount of action they have falls short of what is desirable. On the other side of things, there are poker sites which have a lot of traffic but the players tend to be tougher. This is a situation that you want to definitely avoid.
Think of yourself as someone who shoots pool for money, and you are a pretty good player, and you’re looking at various pool rooms to play at. Pool room 1 has a few bad players there, you can beat most of them but you’re going to be spending most of your time waiting for a game, and therefore won’t make as much money as you want. Pool room 2 is full of players, wall to wall, and there are long lines for tables, so it’s too busy in fact. When you do get in a game, the players there are mostly very good, and it’s tough to beat them, so you definitely don’t want to be there.
Pool room 3 has lots of players, it‘s easy to get a table anytime, and the level of skill there is very weak. So that’s where you want to be playing. Party Poker is clearly the best poker room here when you look at the whole picture, which you need to do in order to put yourself in the best position to succeed. Your choice of poker room matters a great deal, and in fact this will single handedly determine your success or lack of success in your poker playing endeavors.
Party Poker vs PokerStars
Party Poker is the second most popular poker room in the world, with tons of traffic, and is second only to PokerStars. PokerStars is full of very skilled players though, and unless you want to hurt yourself intentionally, you’d be well advised to stay clear of this poker room, as your results will be considerably inferior compared to Party Poker, due to the increased toughness of the games at Stars. So in a nutshell, Party Poker is where the real party is, if doing well at poker matters to you.
Party Poker School
Many poker sites offer poker instructions, but most of it is geared toward brand new players, teaching only the bare bones fundamentals, such as hand rankings and the rules of the game. Party Poker offers this as well, but in addition to a beginners section, they also have a section for players looking to improve their game, as well as a more advanced section called “master the game.”
There is quite a bit of good content here in their poker school specifically designed to make you a better poker player, including both text and video tutorials. They even provide some free training software to you like their poker trainer and hand analyzer so you can really get into the learning phase. It all comes down to Party Poker giving their players what they want, and then looking to give them the best. This is just one of many examples of this.
Party Poker Software And Support
To be honest with you, Party Poker’s software had been simply awful for most of its history, although no one really seemed to care, since their site has always been the best place to play anyway. Personally I was absolutely sick of looking at all those same old tired tables for so many years, but on the other hand, my goal is to make money, not to be titillated with cool graphics and such. The growing money in my account with them worked perfectly and that was what it was all about.
However Party Poker has revamped their entire operation lately, not being satisfied with just being the best overall poker room on the internet. They wanted to be the best in every way, which they succeeded in doing, and improving their software to be super cool and super functional was one of their projects. Their software is now up there with anyone’s, and in fact when you take into account its ease of use as well as its ease on the eye, it’s definitely now up to Party Poker standards, which is to be the clear number one.
Party Poker has also rededicated itself to providing the best customer service and support out there, and while this has always been very good, they have ramped this up as well. In addition to their email support, they also offer toll free telephone support to players from any location, as well as their live internet chat service. I prefer the live internet chat myself and a helpful agent comes right on and takes care of all of your needs.
There are other poker sites who offer this but you can be stuck on hold for extended periods, which isn’t a lot of fun. Party Poker’s agents are prompt, courteous, and very helpful. The big thing here though is that at most of the other sites I’ve played at over the years, some might have some good support but you find yourself needing to use it quite a bit, due to things coming up that need to be addressed. The best support is the one you rarely need, because things don’t need fixing, and this is the way things are at Party Poker.
Party Poker also hosts a personal web page for all of its players, where all of your important details are, including how many Party Points you have, your pending bonuses, your progress and standings in their various competitions that you are involved in, and more. So at a glance you can check everything out and make sure you’re always on top of things.
Party Poker Deposit And Withdrawal Options
Whenever I am writing a review on Party Poker, or consider playing at any other poker room, the first thing I check out is how easy it is going to be for me to get money in and out of the site. This is one area which many poker rooms fall short on, especially when it comes to letting you know what they have. You often have to hunt around the site and still aren’t able to find out the information you need. I’ve had to email support at several sites and sometimes don’t even get a clear answer back as far as what you can and can’t do from the country that you live in.
Party Poker on the other hand has the best setup around, where you simply pick your country from the drop down list, and it instantly displays all of the options. Party Poker offers all of the best options by the way, without cluttering things up with a bunch of stuff no one really uses. They offer all of the options that I love and in fact your only decision here will be from among some excellent options, such as transferring money directly to and from your bank account. That’s the one I prefer as it’s just too easy. However there is lots of choice here and everyone will be able to find several that work perfectly for you.
Summing It All Up
I’ve been playing at Party Poker personally for over 10 years now and I’ve played pretty much everywhere else as well. I’m always curious about poker rooms I’ve never played at and there’s nothing like trying out a poker site to really get to know what they have to offer. I always end up coming back to Party Poker though and the reason is that they have been, are, and probably always will be the best. It’s not even close in fact. I’m sure this is obvious to you as well from reading my PartyPoker review here.
There are a lot of reasons why this is the case. You get their nice deposit bonus, and the bonuses go on and on unlike other poker sites. They pay you to try them out and then they pay you to stay. That’s the way it should be. The site is very fishy and even more importantly there are tons of fish as well. They have great promotions, top notch service, and really do treat you like you want to be treated, which is as a valued customer. They know what you want and they simply give it to you, and not only meet your expectations but consistently exceed them. They are also the most solid and trusted poker company in the world bar none. This is what you call having everything going for you.
If you do not currently have an account at Party Poker, I strongly recommend that you at least give them a try. Once you find out what you have been missing, you will be glad you did.