True Poker

True Poker - With notoriety in the popular men’s magazine Maxim, I was looking forward to my first visit to TruePoker.com. Having been impressed with my recent time spent at sites like PokerRoom, I was interested to see how TruePoker stacks up to the competition.

True Poker starts with a pretty basic homepage, but it’s nicely laid out and fairly easy to use. The download and introduction pages are nice and easy. The whole experience is very easy to use, and it’s obvious that the pages were designed to be friendly for a first-timer to use, as there are step by step instructions all the way through.

True Poker’s download is easy, and they offer the choice of high or low resolution, depending on the file size you are willing to download. The download seems a bit slower than some other software I have downloaded, but that’s not a big deal as it’s still pretty quick. After the download is completed, a confirmation code is required before you can actually start playing, but you are immediately taken to the player’s lobby. The lobby has a nice background, but isn’t all that convenient to use. Every category of game, and type of game (real or play money) requires another server, which slows things down quite a bit. On the subject of servers and rooms, there really didn’t seem to be all that many people online when I signed on to True Poker; the game counter said 3200 players, which seemed higher than what was displayed, but even so, that’s a relatively low count.

Once you get going, True Poker’s gameplay is mixed; while the graphics and 3D view are very cool, the actual gameplay lags a bit. The controls are basic, and the chat and history has the look of an old BBS. It’s not all bad though; True Poker has the unique feature of allowing your character to put their cards on the table, then to see them again the player has to pick them up again, which is shown to all other players at the table. This helps make the game a bit more lifelike.
On the tournament front, True Poker runs midpack; while there are lots of tournaments, they are all low limits. The promotions, while not too bad, can’t compete with the industry leaders.

So what’s the bottom line? What we have here is a decent site that’s geared towards recreational players, and players who haven’t played for money before. It pales in comparison with the players of the industry, but isn’t a bad site on its own. The market it’s aimed at is evident in the sizes of the tournaments, and the lack of sophistication in software.