Tonight I started playing the Empire Poker tables. I’ve had a very, very good experience at Paradise and a so-so experience at Party (nothing to do with Party, it was totally my run of cards) but my move was motivated by just a touch by greed. I was recently contacted by someone from Empire who offered me an excellent opportunity to help them promote the Empire site. You’ll be seeing some links to Empire going up on the site over the next few days as I get around to it but bottom line is that you’ll still get accurate reports regardless of where I play. If Empire sucks, I’ll drop them. I don’t run this site with the intention of making a profit so I’m not beholden to any advertiser.
Just to give you the quick and dirty after my first evening on Empire. The word on the street (I consult Huggy-Bear whenever I can) is that Party and Empire run on the same network. If you play Party you’re likely to be playing against people who are signed in from Empire too. Not surprisingly they have similar software. I’ve never been a big fan of the avatar approach to playing poker which is what both Party and Empire use but diffent people like different things so it’s not a ding against either one. I just get distracted when my avatar doesn’t have a cool goatee like me :-)
Overall I found it to be just as fishy as any other online spot. I cleared close to 40BB in 3 hours and 250 hands of play.
If you don’t have an Empire account, allow me to do my part as an Empire whore and offer you a 20% bonus up to $100 on your first deposit. Just follow this link and when asked for a promotion code give them HOLDEM162 as your promotion code.
Hope to take your money soon!
Bill
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.

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that comes down to about 80 hands per hour. No wonder they call Hold’em the ‘crack cocaine’ of poker. “Don’t like those cards, sir, hold on 45 seconds for some new ones!”
I dare you to try to sit thru 3 hours of Omaha H/L split. Just watch your limbs start to shake from the lack of action. The sweat beads will start froming on the forehead after 30 minutes.
Then I start to think of the rake at 80 hands per hour times all those tables in play and wonder why I even try to write software for clients. It would be much better to be the house.
Well, I was playing multiple tables. I tend to play too loose if I only play one table because I don’t have the patience to sit there and wait 10 hands to get a playable hand when you have half the table who keep timing out making each hand seem like forever.