PokerStars.com is a fun and safe place to play poker with people from around the world, for real or play money. They realize there are plenty of places you can play poker online, but Poker Stars is the only one where you'll be treated like the poker star you are! They have put together a dedicated and professional service team, and the best online poker software with the most features to keep you playing at their poker site.

PROS

• Simply the biggest
• Very professional staff
• Great tournaments
• Offers a $1.5 million weekly guaranteed, largest in the world
• Massive volume and unmatched tournament schedule
• Large and well-known pro team to rail, chat and play against
• Great software
• Very responsive to player feedback, adding new features, games and tournaments often
• FPP store with good stuff
• World's best heads-up and sit-and-go action
• Inter-player cash transfer

CONS

• Only e-mail support
• Tough games at the higher levels
• Tough opposition in high-stakes tournaments and cash games
  
  

Summary of Poker Stars
Each summer, several truckloads of satellite winners from Poker Stars appear in the WSOP. With the new US gambling legislation from Oct, 2006, Poker Stars took the market lead in online poker tournaments as well as online ring games.

Poker Stars opened for play money beta testing September 12th 2001 and began offering real money games in December 2001. As the leading tournament online poker room it has produced players who won their way to become the 2003 (Chris Moneymaker) and 2004 (Greg Raymer) World Series of Poker Main Event Champions.

Home to the World Series of Poker* main event winners from 2003, 2004, 2005 & 2008 - PokerStars takes great pride in the fact that they have so many recent champions. An amazing 20% of players at the 2006 WSOP main event won their seat online through PokerStars satellite tournaments.

Poker Stars is also known for the best turbo table structure in the industry.

Promotions and Bonus Information
A lot of special events open up for nice surprises. Poker Stars spreads large numbers of well-filled satellites to most of the big tournaments. Most of all, of course, you'll always find plenty of satellites to the WSOP. Several years in a row, Poker Stars has "delivered" around a third of all entrants in the WSOP Main Event. This is truly the home of online poker tournaments.

As of Aug 1, 2009, PokerStars now offers an up to $600 first-deposit bonus at 100% match for all new players.

Players will then have six months to earn the full bonus amount.

The biggest online tournaments, the World Series of Online Poker and the World Cup of Poker are all held at PokerStars too. And every Sunday there is over $US 1 million guaranteed prizemoney in the the Sunday Million tournament.

Additional deposits after the first, must be made within 60 days of the first deposit, to get the 100% match on them.

Poker Traffic & Competition
Poker Stars has kept its doors open for US players through these harsh times of stricter gambling legislation. One argument being that they have nothing to do with online casino gaming, a breed completely unrelated to poker, as poker players keep expounding. It is the belief of many commentators that poker will eventually be excluded from the scope of the UIGEA, being a skill game and a strong American tradition.

Lower limits and tournaments are still flush with bad players, say up to the $6 and $11 SNG level, but there are literally thousands of strong players trolling PokerStars daily looking to make a living, so expect some tough competition scattered throughout your games.

Up to 15,000 cash game players and 100,000 tournament players can be found at the Poker Stars tables during peak periods. This makes Poker Stars by far the largest online poker room for both cash game and tournament poker

Huge room, huge fish. It seems a large number of the ex-party poker fish swam their way over to Stars. There are some good players at Stars, and many of your more famous online pro players can be found here. There here for a reason of course; the pond is full!


Software & Graphics
Besides, you can replace the classic but perhaps not so pretty Poker Stars look by a number of other Poker Stars themes - more or less useful according to taste and preferences.

On public demand, Poker Stars finally released a Mac compatible version of their poker software. A magnificent addition to a great site that finally permits all hard-balling Mac partisans to use the poker client without hassle.

Many people really like Poker Stars' software. I think it's a bit too colorful, and I do not like the sounds.It's a bit too 'clunky' in my opinion. However, I do think the software works well for tournaments. Under your "info" tab, it will display your position so far in the tournament. This is nice so you can quickly keep tabs of where you stand in the tournament. Many people consider Poker Stars software to be the clear industry leader for poker tournaments.

PokerStars is a standalone poker room, meaning that they are the only brand to use their poker software. Their software is known as being the most stable and scalable online poker platform.


Game Variety
PokerStars was the first online poker room to introduce really, really low-stakes games, with blinds starting at $0.01/$0.02, and with no rake at all! This concept is more worth for the large community of poker newbies and voluntary small-timers than we can really put in words

The highlight of the tournament schedule at PokerStars is the weekly $1,000,000 guaranteed tournament on Sunday afternoons. It's $215 to buyin or you can win your entry through smaller buyin tournaments that run every day from as little as $2.

They also run satellites to the WSOP, EPT, WPT, Aussie Millions, World Cup of Poker, and World Championship of Online poker.