Tight Poker

[tightpoker]

EmpirePoker.com Review



Please post your thoughts and opinions of the site here. Things to consider:

Popularity - Total players, game selection, tournaments, etc
Competition - Toughness of ring games and tournament games
Software - Quality of interface, multi-tabling, audio cues
Security - Operator integrity, certification, gut feel
Promotions - Sign up bonuses, bad beat promos, deposit bonuses
Support - Quality and speed of technical or game support
Ethics - Trustworthiness of site, true customer oriented site

Overall - 1 to 10 overall ranking of the site

[blatman25]

It's probably no surprise, as no one has posted anything here, but Empire Poker is all but dead.

They gave me a $10 bonus, so I went and played there for a while.

I can't BELIEVE how dead it is there now.

For those of you who don't know, Empire was a Party Poker skin, so they shared players with Party Poker. Then Party kicked all the skins out, and they each only have their own players now. This was a nightmare for Empire, apparently. I played 25NL 6-max, and there were only about 5 or 6 games at MOST. On Party, there are usually about 20-30 or more.

Don't waste your time here. Go where the players are.

[hiho]

Agreed with Blatman25 but if you didn't have an account with them then they have the beginners tables and I've had good luck at the 5 NL and 10 NL in clearing the bonus. You can only play those for the first 45 days from when you open the account. For the freeroll whores they also have 5 NL turbo freerolls a day that require no points to join just a money account.

[realyreal]

I played the 175 hands on low-limit tables there to earn their $35 new player bonus, and I agree that it was dead. I was surprised to find that the competition was actually pretty tight/aggressive for a low limit game (.10/.20 I think). Almost every hand was raised pre-flop, and usually 2-3 people were calling from a table of 10. I think I was playing with a bunch of other bonus whores, haha.

[snickers99]

Well, I just recently completed the sign up bonus at Empire that I got thru this site, so I thought I'd jot down my thoughts. First off, thanks MJ for the offer. I probably wouldn't have tried Empire if it wasn't for the offer. I finished my 540 raked hands, all at .50/1 limit, made about $25 on top of the $90 bonus. Not fantastic numbers, but it's better than losing. All numbers below are from .50/1 limit ring games. I didn't play NL or tournaments.

As others have said, Empire is pretty dead. But that can work to your advantage if you have PT. Usually when I played (generally weeknight evenings, or Saturday afternoons), there were between 5-6 thousand people logged in. There were usually 4 to 6 tables going. Wait times to get on a table were usually 5 to 10 minutes. Because of the small number of tables to choose from, PT and Pokerace HUD really came in handy. What I usually did was open up 4 tables (the maximum allowed) and let PT and HUD track the tables. Since Empire was a Party skin, they import 'observed' hands onto your hard drive, which you can set up PT to import. After a few minutes, you can see the average amount of people seeing the flop, average preflop raise, etc. Pretty easy to pick the right table. More on the advantage of PT in a moment.

The play was your typical play for a low limit game (think Party Poker). People drawing, staying in until the bitter end (and hitting, of course), playing any ace, etc. If you play your standard tight/aggressive game, you should do fine. Sure, you'll get bad beated(?), but you'll get it back in the end. I'll spare you the boring details of my adventures. And as usual, fancy tricks don't play well at these limits. Most players won't realize what you're doing or they won't care.

I can tell you three people I ran up against on a pretty regular basis who you might want to watch out for. Potsiee, Jessicarabbt, and SANinja1. If they were at a table I wanted to join (and they all usually multi-table, so it was hard not to be at a table where at least one of them were at), I tried to make sure I was as close to the left of them that I could be. While they aren't neccassarily good players, they are very aggressive. A lot of preflop raises, blind stealing, and post flop aggression. Again, play your game and you should be able to take advantage of players like these. You know they'll be betting the whole way, so you could let them do the betting when you have your monster (with timely raises, of course). Just know that if you see the flop with these people, 9 out of 10 times, they're gonna bet out.

Now, back to another advantage of PT with Empire. With so few tables going (again, at .50/1 limit), I always had four tables going, mining for information (playing at one, observing 3...I don't multi-table). So, every time I played, I'm gathering more and more information on the few players that are there. This really came in handy when I would sit at a table with someone new, yet thanks to PT, I have over 100 hands in my database on them from the observed hands.

All in all, I didn't think Empire was bad. The graphics are just like Party (different colors and avatars, but same set up). I had no reason to contact support, so I can't comment on that. They track your raked hands for your bonus (just like Party) and the bonus was immediately in my account the moment I made my 540 raked hands. I don't know if I'll play there much in the future (I think I'll be spending most of my time at PokerStars due to bonuses I need to clear), but if they offer me a reload bonus, I would have no problems playing there. One more thing with the amount of players. I tried to log on once during my lunch at work. There was ONE .50/1 limit table running, and it only had between 3 and 4 people playing. So, if you usually play on the 'off' hours (based on USA time), you might have trouble finding a table.