Noble Poker

Noble Poker is one of the less known Poker sites currently operating, however despite it’s lower advertising budget, Noble Poker impressed me during my visit. With top operations in place, such as Full Tilt, the competition for your online dollars is stiff, so here’s my take on how Noble Poker stacks up against the rest of the industry.

Starting from the Home page, Noble Poker has an attractive, but cluttered look. The pop-up for the software download, a la Pacific Poker, is also a little annoying, but we’ll let that slide. The menu the home page contains is also simple enough, with drop down menus linking you to the standard options and pages. The download is easily prompted (there are icons for it everywhere!) and it goes quickly and easily.

Once the software is installed on your machine, the easy Wizard runs you through the necessary steps to get playing; email confirmation is necessary, which is a downside if you’re a freeloader, but not really a big deal. After that step, you’re taken to the lobby, where two things become readily apparent; first off, the play money tables are not instantly visible- the brain trusts at Noble obviously want you to drop some cash during your stay, and secondly, there seems to be a distinct lack of tables and players compared with the big sites. This isn’t to say its dead, but it certainly isn’t the busiest poker room on the net. However, having said that, the game play itself is outstanding. Noble did an excellent job with the graphics and presentation of the game. All the colours are sharp, and there is even the very unique feature of watching the game in 3D instead of the customary bird’s eye view. The lobby is easy to navigate, except for the fact that the play money games are in a separate folder at the back, and the action seems to move quite quickly which makes for more hands in a given timeframe. Another great feature of Noble is the History option, which actually shows you which player took what action at exactly which point in the game and shows the corresponding community cards that provoked the action- this is very useful for analyzing a hand, and is far superior to the standard text history many sites use.

Player incentives and referrals are the norm among online poker sites, and Noble is no exception, however their promotions, while not anemic, just don’t seem as impressive as they might. For example, the “$13,000 WSOP Poker Prize” just didn’t amaze me after I had just dropped $40 going after Full Tilt’s $10 Million Dollar WSOP top prize. This isn’t to say that Noble doesn’t have promotions for its players, it’s just that the big operations can be a tough act to follow.
So what’s the word on Noble? Well, it’s a very attractive site, and the graphics and game play options are second to none, but it falls behind the leaders in some critical categories such as player incentive and player population. It is a very good site, but does have some work to do before it can compete with the leaders of this ultra competitive industry.