Doyles Room review

Doyles Room is endorsed by Doyle Brunson, and the fact that he is “behind” the poker room is a positive for a number of reasons. For one thing, it should lead to a lot of new players joining the room, especially with the release of Super System 2, which does its fair share of advertising on behalf of doylesroom.com.

For another, it speaks to the site’s integrity and overall stability, since one imagines that a shrewd operator such as Doyle would never take the side of a losing proposition. Doyles Room is part of the Tribeca Table poker network. Some of the other skins feeding players to this room include Golden Palace, the famous casino, and Victor Chandler, a UK sports book. With all due respect to the patrons of those two sites, the kind of poker players that are referred from these two skins alone should be softer than Sally Struthers’ midsection. So, it’s an excellent network in terms of competition. It also features a lot of predominantly non-US players, as a lot of the partner sites refuse to take on US clients (Victor Chandler for one).

Now, I’m not arguing that non-US players are inherently weaker, but it certainly makes for a nice change of pace. In fact, the feel of Doyles Room is unlike other poker rooms, from the way you access information in the lobby, to the table graphics. I like it because it is different, but still intuitive to use, and there are a couple of individual features that I appreciated. The traffic is decent at all levels, and you can find a game for high-stakes as well as a number of guaranteed tournaments, which are always juicy to play in. They guarantee purse money for a remarkable 60 tournaments a day at a variety of levels, which is reason enough to sign up there.

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Software

The graphics take a little getting used to, but the important point is that they don’t have a cluttered feel, which I dislike when I’m playing online poker. Spare me the huge photos of your babies, pets, or one eye staring back at me. The avatars on this site are flattened to some extent, and don’t intrude. The functionality is good, and I especially like the right-hand action window, which is separate from the table window. This action window contains player chat, dealer responses, and betting information, and the fact that you can visually differentiate it from the poker hand is an excellent feature. All poker rooms should follow suit and do this. When there is a showdown at the end of the hand, the dealer announces it complete with an exclamation mark, and then the cards involved are magnified (perhaps so that old-timers like Doyle can see them? Kidding.)

There is other good functionality like live poker managers that can be contacted while you are playing, and buddy lists. The lobby does not have the advanced statistical information that one comes to expect from online poker lobbies, however. There are no view-flop percentage details for tables, or average pot sizes. That’s an omission they would do well to fix going forward.

Traffic

They have a lot of guaranteed tournaments of different values so that negates the importance of traffic to a large extent for tournament players such as myself. I’d prefer it if they had poor volume because then every tourney becomes an overlay for me to play in, and I love overlays. As it so happens they’ve counted the beans and they generally have very good traffic for their tournaments. Ring games are a bit more sporadic, but they do have high-limit tables that are active (usually just for hold ‘em) and if you want to play low limit tables there is a lot of choice. This is a solid network that should continue to grow, so this area is not a big concern as is so often the case with new poker rooms that use proprietary software.

Rake

The rake policies for Doyles Room are standard, and one can have no complaints in this regard.

Admin

Overall their admin is first-rate. There is live assistance, not only from the poker managers while you play, but also from customer support. You can even call them, which should be a standard feature in online poker, but mystifyingly is not, and of course you can drop them an e-mail. The cashier functionality is also in line with industry standards.

Promotions

Doyles Room offers a number of free-roll events, always popular for a certain type of poker player. They also have decent-size sign-up bonuses and a good player loyalty program in place. The main advantage of joining a skin is that you get the perks associated with a new poker room but the poker room itself isn’t new so the functionality is….functional. There are no growing pains here, but good incentives to join, so you get the best of both worlds.

Summary

The majority of fish might hail from Liverpool and Oslo on this poker network, but fish they remain, and best of all the chat window is detachable and can be consigned to the outer reaches of your monitor so that their inane chatter doesn’t have to bother you. Doyles Room is a very solid poker room, backed and endorsed by the grand old man of poker himself, “Texas Dolly”, and bristling with enough promotions and guaranteed purses to keep every level of poker player well satisfied. It’s an impressive site overall and well worth joining.

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