Genre: On-line multi-player card
Developer: Electronic Arts (EA)
Game Description: An addictive on-line poker game using virtual chips featuring Texas Hold ‘Em and Omaha styles of Poker.
Platforms: Mac, Android
Price: Free
Gambling is addictive. Nuff said! But what makes this game doubly addictive is that you’re not only playing with virtual money, you’re also playing against real, live people. This renders the game unpredictable and realistic and also makes for an extremely entertaining way to spend your time. And spend your time you will! If you’re lucky to get a table full of friendly, chatty and witty players, you won’t want to leave. But sometimes you get cranky or vicious players (who mostly hide behind an avatar and have names like “K$$mya$$” or “Usuk”) who pester, harangue and rage against someone who gets under their nose, which can be extremely unpleasant and distracting. I’ve played this game for weeks now and I’m finally able to give you the low down on how to maximize your experience.
Friendly chatter
World Series of Poker is an online poker game that’s fun, easy-to-use and a great tool for learning how to play the game like a pro (more on that later). It has a clean and simple interface and a number of basic tutorials that will help get you set up quickly and effortlessly. Offering two poker styles, Texas Hold ‘Em and Omaha, WSOP also offers two tournament arenas where you can win a WSOP Bracelet and a WSOP ring – last person standing gets the trophy and the top three win modest prize money!
You’re a winner!
You have two options to sign up to the game – either as a Guest or with your Facebook account. Each player is assigned a small round token which features either an avatar or a profile pic, along with any name of your choice. If you choose to go the guest route, you have a number of free avatars to choose from, from simple card symbols to canned characters. If you log on with your Facebook account, your profile pic is automatically loaded, along with your first name, which you can replace with any name you want (but with a restricted number of characters).
This is what your basic profile looks like showing your game stats.
Once you have set up your profile, you are given $16 000 worth of free chips and 5 pieces of gold. If you want to purchase more, you can visit the store and purchase chips and gold (gold helps you to buy avatars and gifts) – just tap the “Buy Chips and Gold” button on the main page. You can choose to pay $2.99 for 750 000 chips, right up to $99.99 for 112 000 000. It’s pretty easy to buy a stack of chips and burn through them in one sitting, so be careful! But if you’re lucky (and cautious), you can play continually without spending a penny! I’ve been playing low to medium stake games for two weeks now with just the free chips I’ve earned, while trying to improve my ROI (Return on Investment). So how do you earn free chips, you ask? Well, every day each player is awarded bonus chips, which supposedly ranges from 1 000 to 1 million chips, but the most free chips I’ve ever won has been 5 000, the average being 1 500.
Free daily bonus chips
Another great way to earn free chips is to rack up a ton of friends. Whenever you play at a new table, look out for the friendly players, touch their avatar and tap the “Add Buddy” button. Similarly, when you get friend requests, you can either accept their friendship or refuse it. Make it a habit to spend a few minutes every day to send free chips to your friends – when they accept your gift, free chips are automatically sent back to you – literally a gift that keeps on giving. Again, you could get up to 1 million chips at a time, and the more friends you have, the more free chips you get. It’s a great joy to sign in to the game each day and see that you have 30+ gifts waiting for you, all offering varying amounts. It’s a sure fire way to boost your chip count. Once your friend count is in the hundreds, it can become tedious (and time consuming!) to send chips to all your friends – regular players will keep sending you chips anyway, so to save time, I send chips to those who’ve made it to the leader board, which shows the top 50 ranked players among your friends. These players tend to be regular players anyway and will ensure the river of free chips keep flowing!
A quick way to save time and earn guaranteed free chips is to send to your friends who are on your top 50 ranked leader board.
Finally, it’s time to talk about How to Become a PRO at WSOP! This is a hot topic among WSOP newbies who try and fail to gain PRO status (I originally being one of them). After I had been playing for a few weeks, I became frustrated that I couldn’t crack PRO status and started googling for tips and advice on how to become a PRO on WSOP. I found zip! nada! niks! All I could find was a few mentions here and there that you need to earn more than you lose and after 100 hands, you become a PRO. I also found a reference to this nugget: Play high stakes games and you’ll soon be a PRO. Well, I bought a few $4.99 bundles of chips, joined the high rollers and got lucky! At one point, my coffers were full at 32 million chips! Did I become PRO? No! I maintained my stack for 100 hands, 200 hands, then 1000. Still no PRO status. So I sent a friendly email to customer support (support@wsop.com) asking very nicely how gaining PRO status works. I informed them that in my opinion, you only get one shot at PRO status – your first 100 hands. And that you’ll never get PRO status after that, no matter how profitable your playing. Well, I got no reply from them at all. I understand that it must be frustrating for the game administrators to get emails of this nature (and they must get a lot! judging from the in-game comments and discussions I often come across). If it’s a hassle getting this kind of query, they shouldn’t ignore users – rather send out a standard mail response or provide in-depth details on their website for clarity. So, I decided to do some experimenting of my own. I immediately logged out of my Facebook profile, then logged on as a Guest. I set up a brand new profile with an avatar and using my free chips started to play. I played conservatively and made sure that my tally didn’t dip below the original 16 000. If I was losing at a table, I left it and tried another. I made sure to play low stake games and after 100 hands, my total number of chips sat at just over 18 000 and low and behold, I achieved PRO status. However, I really wanted to use my Facebook profile, and realised that I couldn’t have both my old FB profile and keep my new PRO status (I still maintain that if you haven’t achieved PRO status after your first 100 hands, you never will) and thus needed to create a new Facebook profile. So I logged out of my Facebook account, created a new account on Yahoo (and thus got a new email address), then used that new address to create a new Facebook profile. Using my new FB profile, I created a new profile on WSOP, then did the same thing by playing conservatively and after 100 hands, achieved my PRO status once again. This time for keeps.
I finally achieved PRO status!
The only thing I am upset about, is that I have not only lost my amazing stats (I had won loads of bracelets and rings) but also the hundreds of friends that I had made, many of whom were great fun to play with. I am slowly building my buddy list up again and have managed to come across some of my previous buddies, but it’s not the same. So, if you’re keen to play this game,(and you’re a first time player) here’s some advice. Log on to WSOP as a guest, read through the various tutorials and try your hand at some tables using the free chips that you get. Once you get a feel for the game and have more experience regarding when to fold and when to be aggressive, sign out and sign on again using Facebook (either your original profile or one set up especially for gaming) and create a new profile. Play your first 100 hands conservatively and make sure that you end up with more chips than you started with. DO NOT PLAY ANY TOURNAMENTS until you have achieved PRO status. Tournaments play havoc with your ROI because of the high buy-in fee. Only the top three win money, so if you get lousy hands and don’t get placed, your ROI drops dramatically! For general guidance on how agressively to bet, use the hand strength meter, but don’t swear by it, it can be misleading! If a hand is bad, the meter bar is red and short. For better hands the bar is longer and green. Best hands, such as straights, full houses and four-of-a-kind will show a full, green bar (see image below).
An example of how the hand meter works.
When I first started playing WSOP a few months ago, the game was quite unstable and at least two or three times a game, the app would drop. This is not only extremely frustrating, it can be expensive too. If you’re in the middle of a tournament and you get dropped out, you lose your stake (it costs 50 000+ chips to play for a bracelet and 10 000+ for a ring) which is maddening. And I’ve often seen other players mysteriously drop out half way through a hand. However, in the past few weeks, the game has stabilised radically and it doesn’t happen as often. Once, the app completely froze and I couldn’t get it to work. I solved the problem by rebooting my iPad.
All in all, World Series of Poker is loads of fun and a great way to spend your time (and money!).
**UPDATE**
I still play this game regularly and it’s a firm favourite. Here are some recent updates that have just added to it’s appeal. The free chips you get from friends yields greater returns now, I frequently get higher amounts – the most single offering so far has been 25 000. Previously, you got amounts of mostly 1 000 chips, but now it’s higher and I only occasionally get chips of 1 000.
Higher amounts of free chips are coming my way!
WSOP now has a “High roller room” for players with more than a million chips. When you log on, you see the following screen:
High rollers welcome!
You are then whisked onto the red carpet:
Onto the red carpet and into a waiting limo!
And into the high roller room where you get to play against some pretty insane people who like nothing better than to play chicken with you with some pretty audacious bluffs. Definitely not for the faint hearted!
Champagne anyone?
Great Games for Women 