If you’re on the prowl to find infos about older and newer poker rooms, you might want to consider dropping by pokerintensity.com. There you’ll find a comprehensive list of safe online poker rooms along with reviews of those sites, which cover the company details, Traffic, Rake and all the other little details that might make your decision to join a poker room easier. Another nifty little feature is that you can recommend a site to a friend with a simple click of a button.

Apart from the poker room reviews, which includes all the major trusted poker sites online like PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Bodog, there’s a lot more to explore on the site. There are tools, like the poker odds calculator, a blacklist, which lists poker rooms that are non-licensed, had payout problems in the past, etc, and a description of different deposit methods. This might be one of the most interesting parts of the site for a lot of visitors as it’s getting harder and harder for US based players to find a suitable deposit and/or withdrawal method and it’s hard to keep up with such services appearing all over the net.

One of the things that meets the eye while visiting the site for the first time is that it’s a little rough around the edges here and there. Now don’t get me wrong, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all the site has been around for well over 2 years and has been constantly revamped, after all it’s normal that a portal about poker is in constant change. One of these changes that I’m personally looking forward to is the future integration of different languages (french, spanish, german 🙂 , etc.), which isn’t completed yet.

So if you’re looking for a site to find information about top online poker games, give pokerintensity.com a shot…I will, especially the section entitled Online Poker Tips as I’m a sucker for new tips, who knows maybe you’ll learn a thing or two as well….

As we all know, most computers are running some version of windows these days, but what about those who don’t? Are you running linux or Apple’s MAC OS? Then CompatiblePoker.com is for you.

You can find out about poker rooms offering native version of their poker client, as well as about poker rooms offering webbased versions – including Java based clients – for both MAC and linux.

While most people prefer native clients, the reality for MAC and linux users is that most poker rooms still don’t offer one. So what are they supposed to do? Either play at one of the few rooms that offer native clients (Mac: Full Tilt, PartyPoker) or use one of the java or webbased alternatives. But is that really all you can do? Not really. There’s always the possibility to use a dualboot system or a run time environment (e.g. WINE) to run the native windows versions. Both possibilities are outlined on the site, although the “Option 2”, as they call it, running poker clients with WINE is all little more in depth than “Option 3 – Dual Boot”, which is only mentioned – I guess that’s understandable as it’s too hard to give a complete guide on how to do it with all possible combinations of windows versions and linux distributions.
All in all, a good guide for all linux/mac users looking for a place to play online poker…and even if you’re not using a linux or mac based system, let’s say you want to know which sites still accept US players, then you’re in the right place, too…just checkout the USA Poker Sites section…so, what are you waiting for, checkout CompatiblePoker.com!

The Gaming Directory – The definite UK gambling resource. At first the site title seems to be a little cocky and after having a look around the site, I gotta say that the first impression might be the right one. Now I won’t start claiming that I’m an expert for casinos/pokerrooms in the UK, I’m not, but I have some points to be made.

When I visit a site for the first time, especially when I’m asked to do a review, I’m looking for ups and downs, good things, “bad” things and try to get an  overall impression, before providing, as I hope, constructive criticism:

When I visited the GamingDirectory.co.uk for the first time, I immediately noticed the design and I got to say, it’s pretty simple, which doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, although a little “eye candy” here and there will probably have a better and longer lasting impression on your visitors than a simple blue layout. The next thing I noticed is that the footer isn’t quite uptodate – ” © 2004 ” isn’t really what I want to see on a site if I’m looking for information about a (landbased) casino I might plan on visiting. So, dear webmaster, please replace that with something more current like 2004-2007 – sometimes it’s the small things that matter or maybe I’m a little nit-picky.

So, let’s have a look at the content, which is the more important thing. Once again, I might be a little nit-picky, but I’m not really overwhelmed by the content of most sections. Let’s take the Casinos page as an example – there’s not much info there and the formatting could be a little bit better. A new line or empty line here and there and the text would look a lot better. Or the landbased casinos page – nice that you listed them all and provided a link to a mapquest map, which should make it easier to find the places. The problems:

1. the links don’t work (at time of writing this).

2. there’s no additional infos on the casino(s) – what games are spread (if there is any pokerroom)? what games are available? at what limits?

A little more info and maybe even a picture or two would really help here. The same rings true for most of the other parts of the site. It’s a good start, but it seems that some sections need a little brush up while others need a little beef up to provide the user with enough info…

After my prior review of the site itself, I’ve been asked to review the poker tables section of Cardroom Supply this time.

At first glance, you’ll notice that there are lots of tables to choose from. Around three dozen different tables and folding table tops are available and no matter if you are looking to setup your weekly home game with a cheap low-end table or if you’re looking to build you very own home casino with an original casino style table, at Cardroom Supply you’ll find it. Best of all: There’s no additional cost for shipping and handling on all orders over 100$, so the listed price will be your final price. Even if you’re not looking for the classic poker table, there might be something for you – just have a look at wooden dining tables which can be transformed into nice and comfortable poker tables on your poker night.

My personal favourite is the Weber deluxe table with it’s classic look and comfortable arm rests. Now if I could only find the room to put this thing in my home, it would surely bring a true card room feel into the home game, especially with the matching Kestell chairs.
Anyway you look at it, if you don’t find what you’re looking for here, it doesn’t exist. So, get your home game to the next level and check out the table selection at Cardroom Supply!

The name doesn’t mislead you, Cardroom Supply, Inc. could be your supplier of cardroom  related items. Their offerings range from my favourite playing cards (copaq plastic), over different chipsets and low-end folding table-tops to high-class poker-tables made of beautiful wood.

First impressions are important, so I was pleased to see a familiar icon during my first visit to the site. The Yahoo icon instantly hit’s the eye – or maybe it’s just my geek eye, who knows. That’s not a bug in your favourite browser, but due to the fact that Cardroom Supply is using the complete Yahoo shopping solution. The banner in the left hand column shows the whole five stars for top service, but as I’m not familiar with the Yahoo shopping solutions, I can’t tell you if that’s the rating of the shop itself, or a bold claim by Yahoo – one way or another, I tend to trust solutions using big players a lot more than home-coded shopping carts though. What adds additional trust is that by using the Yahoo shopping solution the shopping cart’s encryption is up to par (256bit AES) and hence your data, especially of your credit cards, is secure and the fact that there’s both an Info and about page telling the visitor and potential customers a little about the company’s background and showing all contact details including mail address, email address, fax number and even a toll-free number.

After checking out the background infos and the shopping cart itself, it was time to take a deeper look at the shop and it’s products and let me tell you: I’m impressed, especially by their wide range of different poker tables. I didn’t even know that they made such beautiful (and sadly rather expensive) poker tables out of wood. Even if you’re not a fan of such elegant tables, there’s a good chance you’ll find what you’re looking for, as the casino (style) tables are up for grabs too, as are the low-end (home-game) tables.

And what could be even more important than a nice table? Yup, the chairs you sit in. I almost immediatly fell in love with this chair, too bad that flying such chairs across the great pond doesn’t seem to be a +ev proposition 😉

Add a nice chipset (or order some real clay-chips), a tournament timer and some playing cards and you’re all set for your next home-tourney, although there’s one setback – they won’t deliver the beer and snacks with your poker stuff.

Almost forgot to tell you: You’ll be please to hear that there’s free shipping on all orders above 100$ and there are regular specials – and who doesn’t love special deals. What I can’t tell you though is if the prices of the items are a steal or not, I’m not familiar with the domestic US gaming supply landscape, I leave that up to you to decide once you visit the shop yourself…

Well, what brings me to this topic? The fact that a new site opened yesterday. It’s called ReviewMe and is offering bloggers an opportunity to make extra cash.

The concept is quite old, but the platform is new, although basically the same as with text-link-ads (aff). You register an account and add your blog(s) to the marketplace, where people looking for advertising opportunities can find you. They can order a review of their site/product/whatever from you for an automatically calculated amount x – which is based on stuff like Google PR, Technorati Ranking, etc, so the more “blog juice” your blog has the more money you will earn for the review. If someone orders a review, you get a message telling you that there is a new request. Then you can have a look and you can either accept it, or decline within the next 48 hours. If you accept it you’ve got another 48 hours to write the post, which needs to be clearly labeled as being sponsored. Once you’re done, you submit the link (to the sponsored review) to the system and that’s that. The cut of ReviewMe is 50% which sounds steep, but they hand you the customers and handle all the payment stuff etc, so it’s basically alright. Especially due to the fact that you can be sure that you’ll receive your money in a timely manner and I prefer having 50% in my pocket opposed to chasing down the promised x > 50% on other sites.

As for poker-tastic: as it’s my poker-blog and basically an almost ad-free zone (if you discount the fact that I slapped some poker room banners on it, which have earned me the whooping sum of 0$ thus far and some text-links, which are earning nice cash), I decided to only accept reviews that are related to poker-products/poker-sites etc.

So, I just wanted to let you readers know that there might be some review posts coming up in the near future (truth be told, the first one is already lined up as I got the first review request within 4hours of signing up)…I hope you all don’t mind, after all I gotta pay the server somehow and I dislike using part of the (ever so small) poker roll… 🙂

[This sponsored review has been brought to you by ReviewMe]