Full Tilt Poker

Full Tilt Poker has shown remarkable growth for such a relatively young poker room. While places like PokerStars and Party Poker were launched in 2001, Full Tilt Poker didn't launch until 2004. The amount of action and players who frequent the site is a testament to both how well their online cardroom is run and how well their marketing machine works.

One huge aspect of that marketing machine is the team of famous online poker pro's who represent the site. Some of these pros include:

• Chris Ferguson
• Howard Lederer
• Phil Ivey
• Andy Bloch
• Phil Gordon
• Clonie Gowen

That's the short list. There are half a dozen more full-fledged pros who are considered to be part of "Team Full Tilt", and another couple dozen less well-known players who are part of the "Full Tilt Pros". Every week, Full Tilt Poker sends out an email and posts a new strategy article on their site written by one of these Team Full Tilt poker players. This feature is called "Tips from the Pros". (These might be ghost-written, but whether they are or not, they're a great promotional tool for the card room.)

Full Tilt Poker Signup Bonus

The signup bonus at Full Tilt Poker is one of the best bonuses in the industry. It's a 100% matching program up to $600. (Deposit $600 and get $600 in bonus money on top of your deposit.) Ring game play and tournaments both unlock the bonus money based on how much you play. For each dollar contributed to a raked pot you participate in, you earn 1 point. Each point is worth $0.06 in unlocked bonus money. Every dollar in tournament fees earns 7 points. You get 120 days to unlock your entire bonus.

Full Tilt Poker.com Poker Software

Full Tilt Poker uses proprietary software. When Full Tilt Poker.com first launched, poker players complained that the avatars were cartoony and distracting. Even then, the graphics were superior to any other poker room.

Those vibrant colors and pretty pictures come with a price though. The Full Tilt Poker software is a larger file than most poker softwares, and I've heard people complain that the software slowed down or locked up their computer.

I haven't experienced this, and I think players with newer computers won't have this problem.

Recent software upgrades give the player the option to remove the cartoony avatars from their screen altogether. This pleased a lot of players.

Another cool feature that Full Tilt offers include the ability to see what happened in the previous hand with just one click of a button. This is far superior to the procedure at most online poker rooms, where you have to request a hand history via email. You can also select from several different cardroom "look and feels", including a Vegas skyline, a hunting lodge, and a space station motif. (My favorite is the Vegas skyline.)

Click here to visit Full Tilt Poker now.

The software is intuitive and easy to use. I've never been confused about how to find something using the FullTilt Poker client, which is more than I can say for some of the smaller poker rooms online.

I've heard more players complain that they think the software at Full Tilt doesn't deal a fair game than just about anywhere else, but I don't believe it. I think I hear this about Full Tilt more often than I do about other poker rooms for the simple reason that Full Tilt has more players. (No online poker room has an incentive to deal anything other than a fair game, really, and I've never seen any legitimate stats to suggest anything but a random deal. Next time someone tells you the game is rigged, ask them to show you their PokerTracker stats for proof. Since lots of players use PokerTracker, if an online poker room were dealing anything other than a fair game, someone would have enough data to point it out with a reasonable amount of certainty.)

Full Tilt Poker Deposit Methods

Making deposits at Full Tilt Poker.com is still easy, even for USA based players. Full Tilt accepts Visa or Mastercard, but many credit card companies and banks (especially in the USA) routinely decline any kind of transaction that might be online gambling related. For people whose credit card declines, multiple "online wallets" are available, including ePassporte and Click2Pay. My preference is ePassporte, which works at a number of Internet poker rooms. You can even get an ePassporte credit card which draws money out of your ePassporte account when you buy something.

The banking and depositing interface at FullTiltPoker.com is easy to use.

FullTiltPoker.com Player Volume

The only online cardrooms who are in the same class as Full Tilt Poker in terms of player volume are Party Poker and PokerStars. The rest of the online poker sites are all jockeying for a distant 3rd or 4th place, if not runner up status. It's not unusual to see between 5000 and 9000 real money players online at Full Tilt Poker at one time, and they're playing a variety of games and limits.

At any given time, 50% to 60% of the players at Full Tilt Poker are playing no limit Texas holdem, which really isn't a surprise, since Texas holdem has become almost synonymous with the word "poker" in recent years. But for those of us who know better and like to play other games too, FullTilt has plenty of action at the Omaha and Stud tables too. Omaha is the 2nd most popular game on the site, with Stud being a distant 3rd.

Players at Full Tilt Poker.com, especially at the lower limits, are generally pretty weak, and they go on tilt. A lot. I see more people complaining about bad beats and rigged software than at any other online poker room. Since complaining in the chat box is one of the most reliable tells online, a wise player has an advantage at the lower limit games at Full Tilt right away. (Complainers are usually on tilt, which is information you can use to your advantage.)

A buddy of mine was telling me that he's experienced the same thing. He was talking to a poker player who said that Full Tilt must be rigged. When he asked him what he meant by that, this guy said that it seemed like Q9 suited won more often than not. My buddy had a good solution for him. He told him he should just push all in every time he got Q9 suited. For some reason this guy didn't seem so convinced that Q9 suited would win most of the time when he was presented with that strategy.

The sit and go tournaments at Full Tilt Poker fill up fast too, especially at the lower levels. This is true of both the Texas holdem and Omaha SnG's. If I have to wait a long time for a SnG tournament table to fill up, that kind of defeats the whole purpose of playing, doesn't it?

If you're into high limit online poker playing, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker are really the best 2 choices online. At the time I write this, Stuart Paterson is online playing $100/$200 Limit Omaha Hi/Lo. David Chiu is also playing $5/$10 Pot Limit Omaha. There are also a handful of people playing heads up $200/$400 Texas holdem games, and a couple of no limit $10/$20 games are happening too. This is in the middle of the afternoon.

Full Tilt Poker Recommendations

Full Tilt Poker is a great place to play poker online. The only people I wouldn't recommend Full Tilt too are players who have older, slower computers, and to them I would recommend saving up for a newer faster computer. The poker room at Full Tilt Poker.com alone is worth it. Even Mac users can play poker at Full Tilt.

Be sure to visit our sister site for information about Full Tilt Poker referral codes too. (That's our website about the best poker bonuses online.)