Winning Online Poker

Note: All ratings out of 10 possible, 10 being the best and 0 the worst

Overall real money rating: 8 (Site security: very secure)

Overall play money rating: 6

Intertops Poker is a skin of Party Poker. (What is a skin?) Almost all the comments that apply to Party Poker also apply to Intertops.

Maximum Tables You Can Play at One Time: 4

Beatable Games: 9

Thanks to the rampant advertising of Party Poker (Intertops's sister site), the games on Intertops are easily better than any of the other big sites like UltimateBet, Poker Stars or Paradise Poker. Generally speaking, if your goal is to make money, this is the place to do it, regardless of what game or limit you play.

Game Selection: 8

Intertops only offers the five big games (hold ‘em, Omaha, Omaha H/L, 7-stud, 7-stud H/L), but they have a huge number of pot-limit and no-limit games running, and you should be able to find a table at any game and limit you want, although the wait lists are sometimes long for extremely profitable tables. All limits from .50/1 to 15/30 will have plenty of tables running for all games, although they limit the number of tables for very high limits such as 30/60. They do have one annoying restriction: the maximum buy-in (relative to the blinds) at pot-limit and no-limit tables is now half that of the other major sites (50 big blinds instead of 100), making them slightly more expensive to play. Also, the ante at low-limit stud games is much too high, forcing you to play looser so the rake doesn't kill you.

Player Traffic: 10

With the recent spate of World Poker Tour and World Series of Poker TV viewers joining Party Poker, Intertops's sister site, there is always an enormous number of players on the server. Finding a game is never a problem. Even games like limit Omaha high that you will never see on other servers are usually running here.

Deposit Bonuses / Player Rewards / Jackpots: 8

At Intertops you can get a 20% deposit bonus (up to $100), simply by creating an account (click here) and making your first deposit. They only require 5 raked hands per dollar to clear the bonus, making it very easy to clear even at low limits.

Another nice bonus offer exists. If you have a checking account you can register with IGMPAY, and use bonus code IGMPAY to get a 20% bonus up to $100 the first time you use it to deposit at Intertops.

Software / Peripherals: 4

No online site can be perfect, and Intertops’s major downfall comes from their software. The cards and chips do not look particularly nice, and the lobby has no %/flop feature, depriving you of a vital clue in finding loose tables to sit at. Intertops has recently released a software update that is an improvement over the old one in lobby design, but it is still buggy.

Tournaments: SNGs 9, Multi-Tables 3

Intertops offers a bigger selection of single-table tournaments than any other site, with a huge variety of games and limits. Also, these games are populated by players who are literally giving their money away. Though they do not offer a big selection of multi-table tournaments, the ones they do offer are good and relatively easy to beat. Most of these events are on weekends.

Customer Support: 6

Intertops does offer 24-hour live help at the tables, which is a great feature. However, their employees are not especially competent, and it can be frustrating to explain your situation to them over and over while they don't comprehend it. Still, it is nice to be able to get your problems solved reasonably quickly. Cashouts usually take under a day, which is not bad.

Server Quality: 5

This is one area where Party Poker (and thus Intertops) has improved markedly over the past year. There used to be a daily post on 2+2's Internet forum titled "Party down X:XX EST". Now the server has far fewer shutdowns, making for much smoother and less frustrating play.