Absolute Poker Review

I've spent the past two weeks playing at Absolute Poker. I consider it a pretty decent online poker room for a couple of reasons. Lets get the easy stuff out of the way...free dough.

They've got a great first time deposit bonus. At 35% up to $100, it is one of the most generous in the market. Practically every weekend they offer reload bonuses of up to $200 per weekend (these usually come in the form of 15% up to $100 per deposit - $200 max bonus per weekend), and comparatively speaking, their bonuses are pretty easy to work off as long as you're playing at least .50/1.00 limit hold'em. Lastly, on the $$-front, its simple to get a 10% Rake Rebate every month playing there. Hell, on the $$ side alone it's probably worthwhile to at least check the room out.

Action. AP has roughly 6,000 - 7,000 players online during peak playing times (7 - 12 EST). The vast majority of these players are playing Limit and No Limit Texas Holdem. As a holdem player, you should have no trouble finding a game, however, at the lower limits (.10/.20, .25/.50) the majority of the tables are shorthanded, 6-player tables. There's usually at least 1 or 2 9 player tables, but they're not nearly as plentiful as the 6-players. Now, if holdem isn't your game, you'd be well advised to shy away from AP as you're likely to struggle finding a table - especially during non-peak hours.

Negatives

Every room has to have something wrong with it, right? Well, Absolute Poker has a pretty glaring one. Their software can be very resource-intensive. That's a kind way of saying, "Absolute Poker brings my computer to it's knees." If you like to play multiple tables at once, I hope you've got a really powerful computer. I'm a technical guy. I write code for a living. It is quite sad to me to see what could be a really great poker room crippled by such a silly problem. AP, if you're reading this...please, hire some real programmers and get your software back in shape.

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Long story short, Absolute Poker is a pretty good poker room to drop some cash into. Hell, with the rake rebate and weekly bonuses, you could play break-even poker and still come out three or four hundred bucks ahead every month. Hopefully they'll soon find the memory leak in their software so that multi-tabling is a little less painful. Yeesh.