Party Poker

Party Poker recently revamped their Lobby and Table interfaces.  The Lobby interface shown to the left now provides a dashboard-like interface with information on your account, Party Poker news and, most importantly, table information broken down by game and limit.

On this particular image you can see that there are over 11,000 people playing poker at that moment and a number of very full $3-$6 tables.

The bottom line is a great looking lobby literally packed with information.

The small dollar sign image in the lower left hand corner takes you to the cashier where you can deposit or withdrawal funds from your poker account.  Withdrawals from Party are typically very speedy with people reporting the funds in their Neteller or Firepay accounts within a couple of hours.  Of course if you have deposited via e-check they force you to wait until your check has cleared before allowing you to withdrawal funds.
 

The individual tables still sport the same goofy avatars as always, but the images have been improved somewhat.  Most importantly for people who cannot run at a 1600x1200 screen resolution, but table can now be resized smaller (unfortunately not larger) and all controls and images are scaled.   There's even a feature to automatically tile multiple poker windows.  Nice.

This means easier multi-tabling at lower resolutions.

Game speed is very decent at Party, and because of the sheer number of players you can always find a juicy table to sit at.

Unless you like losing money in the long run you should avoid the side bet tab which allows you to wager whether the next flop will be all red or all black.  Likewise avoid blackjack and casino gambling from the lobby unless you're doing it purely for entertainment because it is a long run loser and can decimate your poker bankroll.

Party Poker Bad Beat Jackpots

Party Poker has recently started running "Bad Beat Jackpot" tables.  An additional 50 cents is raked from each pot and placed directly in the progressive bad beat jackpot pool.  The jackpot is won when 4 8's or better are beaten and both hands use both hole cards (an example of a board with a jackpot would be:

Flop		Turn		River

If player one has

Player 1 Hole Cards

(for a straight flush jack high)

and player two has

Player 2 Hole Cards

(four nines)

then the 70% of the jackpot is awarded (with 20% seeding the next jackpot pool and 10% going to administration fees).  The losing high hand gets 50% of the prize pool and the winning high hand gets 25%... The remaining 25% is distributed to the other players at the table that were dealt cards during the hand.  Recently the jackpot got up to over $400,000.00 which means that the actual awarded jackpot would have been about $300k of which the high hand loser (four nines) would get half (about 150k) and the high hand would get a quarter (about 75k) and then the remaining 75k would be distributed to the other players at the table (10k each at a full table).

The administration fee of 10% may seem high, but compared to brick and mortar rooms where there is no accounting of how much administration fee they collect (and it is more than 10% believe me) it's quite good.

If you want to play at a table like this you can focus on suited connectors and pocket pairs 8 or over.  These are also hands that play strongly at a typical loose low limit table.

Party Poker Bonus Codes

You can use the following bonus codes when creating your Party Poker account:

LOWLIM150 - Get a 30% bonus on your first deposit up to $150

LOWLIM25 - Get a $25 bonus on your first deposit regardless of deposit amount

LOWLIMPPM - Get a free satelite entry to the Party Poker Million tournament (A $65+ value) when you use this bonus code, deposit at least $50 on your first deposit, and then earn 100 party points.