| Along with the link to the poker room on Linesmaker's web site there are also links to a sportsbook, casino and racebook. Player's Only appears to be a large and reputable betting business and it has been in business on the Internet since 1997 - an eternity with cyberspace standards. They markets themselves as the 'World's sexiest sportsbook' and whether that makes you less or more likely to play there is up to you to decide - there is a section with lightly clothed females, nothing nude though as far as I could tell so it's by no means a porn site. The help center is exemplary with chat, email and phone support available and you can even track your support ticket online. In correspondation with us a representative described Player's Only as: 'World's Sexiest Poker Room. Sportsbook, Casino, Horse Book, Poker room, and tons of hot girls. A Sportingbet Plc brand, traded in the London Stock Exchange.' |
The Boss poker client has a slightly different feel than most other clients, which is not necessarily bad. Most of you will probably want to turn off the "theater mode" in which it is launched however: it blocks out everything else with a black background. This is, however, easy to correct by simply clicking the “restore down” button in the top right-hand corner of the Windows (a Windows button - not one of the client). Once back to a more normal size the lobby doesn't look very different from what you are probably used to: the tabbed list of tables and tournaments. A nice feature of this software is that when you click on a table row you will see a miniature table where the stakes and max rake of the table is shown along with the nicks of the players over the seats. The list is unfortunately a little bit too low to provide a good overview: no more than six tables fit in the same view.
In the lobby you get a number of options that can be accessed from the rather small button row along the top of the lobby. You can set your personal details, access the helpdesk, look who's playing using a very nice-looking ledger, look at news, go to the cashier and change your settings (not very many).
The tournament lists have an additional row of buttons that let you filter out the tournaments that you are not interested in. However, with the small display it is a little bit of a job to scroll down to find the tournaments that are open for registration and no good overview is offered. The single table tournaments are presented in a small window and you register, quite logically, by pressing the button labelled "register". The information provided here is very good, you can see the payouts, the registered players and their stack sizes if the tournament is running, how many chips you start out with, buy-in, and so on.
For the multi table tournaments you get a much bigger tournament lobby, also this one with a lot of information and a nice layout. Note that you have to use the tab control here to see the tournament info. The "back to lobby" button is a bit on the small side I think and I had to look for it for a while before I found it (it's in the top right-hand corner).
When you sit down at a table the first thing you notice is the graphics: it looks very good. In fact, it's one of the graphically most appealing tables that I have seen: the chips, the cards and not least the animations. It is beautiful! The controls are a bit too crammed to be really good I think and the chat window is either tiny or it blocks half the table. The arrow that indicates whose turn it is could have been complemented with something more visible. If you move your mouse over your own hole cards you are shown which is your best hand at the moment and if you move over the little "table stakes" sign you get information about the table stakes, limits, time limit and maximum rake. It is commendable that they are very open with the amount of rake that they charge. The buttons are nice with good mouse over effects. The slider is ok although a bit jerky in its movements and the type option is unfortunately completely useless.
Now to the thing I like the least with this software: you can only play one table! It is
a mystery to me what they imagine that they attain with this limitation. Nobody is going to go from playing five tables with PokerStars to playing one table on the Boss software. It doesn't matter how good the games are and how nice the graphics might be. The best thing that can happen is that they play four with the other room and one with the Boss room, but the most likely is that they will simply not bother to play at all in the Boss room. Now, in the former case the game will be even slower since the player uses two interfaces at the same time and in the latter case they will lose a customer. I have, honestly, tried to figure out what the logic here might be. The only thing I can come up with, besides the completely invalid game-speed argument (which TruePoker used before they started to allow more tables), is that they scare away the sharks in this way. This would make moderate sense since it appears that they attract traffic from associated casinos. In the Boss client that I tried out, the "To The Casino" button was disabled but its presence suggests that it might be used by
other rooms. But still, if I play four tables (which I do at the same speed as I play one) I am worth four times a player who plays only one table. I simply can't work out the economics here.
Still, if you can live with the one-table limitation then the Boss client is excellent. I would say that it is especially excellent for new players since everything is very informative and clear. Thus, for example, if you play poker because it's fun and the main thing is the experience (you are not trying to make $30k a month) then the Boss client is for you. For more serious players, pros and semi-pros, I would say that if you can stand having a single room with a quite different interface, then why not? I'm not giving it a 0 on the "many tables" score because you can of course play on other rooms at the same time. |
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