Review Date: July 31, 2005
Revised: June 16, 2009

Absolute Poker is a medium sized room with a very good table layout. When you first enter AP you are presented with a pretty standard lobby. There are tabs for the games and within each game tab are tabs for the the subtype. There is a nice filtering option to also help you zero in on the tables of interest.

For example, the Hold’Em page for example shows all the Hold’Em cash games. You get to see not only the stakes, but the number of players and waiters, hands per minute, average pot, and players per flop. A couple things of note are the six player tables and the full size tables are only nine players (seven for Stud), rather than the 10 player tables found at many other online poker sites. Look closely at the table statistics in the image below and you should notice low percentage of players per flop as well as high hand per minute rates. What this means is fast tight (well, maybe not real tight, but tighter than many) poker, especially on the six player tables.

Absolute features a very intriguing bad-beat jackpot. As you can see in the images above it was $461K when these shots were captured. This jackpot pays every few days.  In a nutshell if you suffer a bad-beat of quad 8′s or better, both the beater and the beaten hands must use both hole cards to qualify. The beaten gets the biggest share, the beater gets a smaller share, and the remainder of the non-sitting out players at the table share the rest. See AP for details. The down side is that players will call down hands that they may fold at a normal table, which results in more suck-outs.

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Review Date: June 15, 2009

Have you ever dreamed, or pehaps had a nightmare, about playing poker against a top poker pro?

Here are a list of pros you can find (or avoid) at Full Tilt Poker. Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey, Chris Ferguson, John Juanda, Jennifer Harman, Phil Gordon, Erick Lindgren, Erik Seidel, Andy Bloch, Mike Matusow, Gus Hansen, Allen Cunningham, Patrik Antonius. That’s just “Team Full Tilt“. There are dozens of other pros, including the “Full Tilt Pros”, the “Hendon Mob, and the “CardRunners”. For those of us who would not be too keen about going up against one of these pros, there are more than enough tables for amatuers.

Full Tilt Poker is the only online poker room conceived, designed and played by professional poker players.

• Learn: Access their library of poker lessons written by the game’s best players
• Chat: Get answers to your questions directly from the pros at the table or in the pro chat sessions
• Play: Sit down with any of the 100+ pros, who play more than 1,600 hours every week at Full Tilt Poker

Full Tilt Poker offers a wide variety of online poker games including No Limit Texas Holdem, Pot Limit Texas Hold Em, and Fixed Limit Texas Holdem as well as varieties of Omaha, Stud, Razz, and nearly every permutation of the mixed games HORSE, HOSE, HOE, HEROS… Full Tilt has ring games, Sit and Go tournaments, and multi-table tournaments. If you can find it in a poker room, you can probably find it at Full Tilt Poker.

Full Tilt offers plenty of action. With tens of thousands of active tables and players there is nearly always a game.

FTP Lobbhy

A couple things to note about the lobby. Red table have a pro seated. There are tabs to select the table type. Filters enable selectively limit your view. Game types clearly show you additonal icons that identify special table features. Take a look at the number of active tables and players! No shortage of action.

FTP $5/$10 Stud Table

The screenshot above shows a $5/$10 Stud table. This skin is very nicely laid out and the action is very easy to follow. There are other skins available. You can choose this overhead view or the first person view. Full Tilt also has animated avatars which can be displayed or not. Molly thinks the avatars are silly and don’t belong in a grown-up poker room, but not everyone is like Molly.
Full Tilt Poker is top notch, maybe the best online poker site out there.

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