Is PokerStars the new PartyPoker?

Is PokerStars the new PartyPoker?

I was really blown away by my experience at PokerStars last night.

When I started playing online poker, I played PokerStars. At that time it was the biggest and best known. Then about a year and a half ago I started playing PartyPoker pretty much exclusively. At that time I still preferred PokerStars software, and cashouts are always very fast. Also, at that time I was playing mostly limit poker, and PartyPoker had rebuy bonuses and the games were definitely fishier.

Recently I withdrew a bunch of cash from PartyPoker, as my bankroll there had gotten bigger than I like to keep in one place (shameless brag). So last night I’m fooling around with Neteller, and on a whim decided to deposit a little money at PokerStars. I only played four little $11 Sit-N-Gos, but I was blown away. First, the play was absolutely atrocious compared to what I’ve seen recently at PartyPoker. In two of my games we were down to six players in the first round. People were pushing half their stacks in to steal $20 blinds, and no one had any clue about bet sizing. There was also a tendency to severely overvalue hands with people calling all-ins early with things like KJo. I ended up with two wins and a third out of four games.

That was the good news. The bad news was that PokerStars formerly great software was horrendous. It seemed really unstable and I lost connection a couple of times. These were problems I used to have with PartyPoker but that they seem to have mostly fixed.

As I said, this was the first time I’ve played PokerStars in quite awhile so I’m not sure if my experience last night was normal or not with regard to either the software or fishy play, but if you’ve been playing sit-n-gos at PartyPoker awhile, you might give PokerStars a shot.