I keep going off about it, but I think it’s worthy of going off about.  GPokr.com is the best place on the internet to play poker for free.

I keep trying to get up into the higher tables, and I succeed enough to play for a couple hours every month.  But I always get overanxious and take a risk and end up handing my hard-earned winnings to another person at the table.  Then it’s back down to the newbie tables for me!

We’re halfway through the competition this month, and I need to really step up my game play if I’m going to have a chance at getting a medal this month.

Free poker on the web was never this sweet. GPokr launched their new version today, which offers very few new features, but a complete programming overhaul. It wins from my book simply because it’s playable in Firefox on Ubuntu now. There’s paid memberships now, but it’s still plenty playable and fun without it.

I’m really impressed with the one big feature, though: the Favorite Players list. This shows you a list of your friends who are playing, gives you a link to their table, and shows you how well they’re doing. It’s a very active little piece of content, with lots of value.

If you enjoy hold-em, it’s a cash game, with 10-minute $1,500 refills. The lower tables are still annoying, but the play at the higher tables is quite good.

http://www.gpokr.com/

I play as Vir4030, so say hi if you drop in.

Yesterday I purchased High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition in the Playstation Store.  This game is only $9.99, and I thought I’d have some fun with it.  Here are the ups and downs of the game.  The online play is great.  Microphones and headsets are supported, and it seems lots of people use them.  Be warned, though, that it seems nearly everyone who plays this game smokes pot while they do so.  Lots of coughing and bong noises can be heard in the background.

The game boasts five different variations of poker, but Texas Hold-em is the only one I’ve heard of, and the only one anyone was playing.  There were ten different tables going last night, though, so there’s lots of options there.

The play is very fast.  There aren’t too many people only half paying attention to the game like you find with web-based poker games.  Unfortunately, though, the game only supports six players per table, which I find a bit revolting, actually.

So, the bottom line is, if you smoke pot and have a headset, then buy this game to make some new friends.  Otherwise, take a pass.

Poker is all about the money.  If you’re a serious poker player, you know that when there’s nothing on the line, the game breaks down.  Try playing a game with your friends for fake chips, and it’s meaningless.  You can go all-in at the drop of a hat without worry because you can always just get more chips or start another game.  In order for the game dynamic to work, you need to have some meaning to those chips, some value or worth.  So if you lose them, you really do lose something of value.  The easiest way to make them have some worth is to give them a dollar value and play for real money.  Recently, however, this has become impossible for people in the United States for legal reasons, and many people don’t want to risk real money.

So the question is, how do you build some sort of worth into the chips without using money?  The answer is gpokr.  You’re given a bankroll of $1500 that you can replenish every ten minutes if you run out.  The lower tables are pretty much a free-for-all with lots of people going all-in, exactly what you would expect when poker breaks down because chips are meaningless.  But if you manage to put together about $100,000 chips, you can get into the higher tables where the money actually means something, because nobody wants to be reset back to $0 and have to climb back through the lower tables again.

This website stands out from the moment you join, seeing that you’re immediately brought to a table to watch, right on the homepage.  Each month, everyone gets reset back to $0 to start over, and the top 100 players get recognized with a medal that appears next to them in the tables.  The best players have a whole row of them.

The lower tables can be a little tedious, but this is what creates value at the higher tables, which really has an excellent game.  Give it a try, it’s a lot of fun.

 www.gpokr.com