Complete character control + a whole new dimension — is it good?
Um, yeah. PKR was designed to enhance the visual experience of online poker, to add more to the game, and to bring it a bit closer to live play. They did a good job.
No, it’s not as fast — you’ll probably see about 2/3rds of the hands you’d see at the pancake rooms (the flat ones).
So for 16 tabling nuts-only robot-grinders, your hands/hr won’t be as high. You’re better off sticking with Full Tilt or Stars.
Good riddance anyway, in my opinion. Poker androids like that just take up space at the table.
Besides, sifting through as many hands per hour as you possibly can was never what PKR was supposed to be about. In fact, come to think of it, it was never what poker was supposed to be about either.
PKR ends up halfway in between, combining (and exaggerating) the more personal aspects of live play with the speed and convenience of online games.
Poker is a game of adjustments
It’s about understanding characters, recognising tendencies, spotting patterns, putting it all together and altering your strategy on-the-fly to exploit the situation.
To do any of that, you need information and simply put, there is more information available to you about each player at PKR than any other poker room.
Obviously, PKR doesn’t offer anything new when it comes to betting patterns, and I realise it sounds kind of goofy to suggest that you can learn something valuable about 
a player from the way that they design and control their 3 dimensional virtual reality avatar, but the plain truth is that you just can.
I’m not saying that you can sit down to a table, study the players and think to yourself, “ok, what’ve we got here? — 1 tight aggressive, 2 loose aggressive, 1 idiot, 1 man pretending to be a woman and 1 genius.. Oh wait no, that’s me.”
But with experience, you start to pick up things about a player’s character before they’ve even done anything. A simple example is when a player’s avatar stands out for some reason. It’s pretty likely that their poker is going to stand out for some reason too — maybe because they’re really good, maybe because they’re really bad, maybe they’re crazy or volatile, who knows? It doesn’t matter, the point is you’re looking for what stands out about their play, and that’s useful.
What about multi-tabling though?
Isn’t all that 3D stuff distracting?
I guess it might feel that way to begin with, like you’re being overloaded with extra information that you don’t normally get. I first played at PKR a long time ago though so I can only tell you that once you’re used to it, you don’t even think about it, and as a good player, all that extra information is priceless.
Ironically, the slightly slower pace of PKR along with all the added information probably makes multi-tabling more effective. At least it feels that way to me, and I like to 8 table Full Tilt and Betfair as well so I know what I’m talking about.
What are the players like?
Generally speaking? I can answer that with a single word — soft-fish-donkeys.
But that’s not a word you cry!! — Yes it is. It’s been a word ever since PKR came out of beta testing in September 2006 and started attracting hoards of them to its tables with its sexiness.
It’s got good constant traffic too. Even without American players, there’s always a ton of cash games and sit n go’s running at all levels, plus tourneys throughout the day. One that I like to play is the daily $17,000 guaranteed that’s on every evening — first place pays around $6,000.
There’s obviously loads of others to choose from as well, bigger and smaller, and there’s a bunch of freerolls to play as well if that’s your thing, but the $17k is one of my favourites.
Why are PKR players weak?
Good question. I guess it’s down to a couple of things.
1. Like I mentioned before, all the machine-like hardcore grinders are elsewhere, trying to cram in as many hands as possible, which is the one thing that PKR doesn’t offer them.
2. The casino effect. All of PKR’s fancy eye candy and the stupid shit people can do at the tables if they really want to — like gesturing “up yours” at someone, or calling them a loser before calling with the nuts — distracts many players from focusing on the cards and playing the best poker they can.
It doesn’t happen anywhere near as much as you might think and when it does, as I said before, once you’re used to it, people just end up marking themselves as donors with their stupidity and it’s money-time. 
Final Thoughts
Um, go play there.. I would. No wait, I already do.
Grab a bonus with your first deposit, and make sure you have rakeback. You can do that here. I can’t emphasise enough how important rakeback is if you’re getting into online poker. All the gotdonk PKR bonus codes come with rakeback.
For PKR, they don’t have to be gotdonk bonus codes either, here’s some PKR Rakeback Bonus Codes from PKRriends too.
One more thing
If you’re like me and you like to play with a H.U.D. which shows a box next to each player with stats like VP$IP, Preflop Raise %, Aggressor frequencies etc, you’ll want Poker Officer. It’s poker tracking software that was designed exclusively for PKR and it is priceless.
It’s not actually priceless, it costs $49 but it pays for itself a zillion times over if you know how to use the numbers. I think you can get a free trial which lasts for a week so obviously I’d recommend doing that first. I’ll probably write a more detailed review of Poker Officer soon.
That’s all. What are you waiting for? Go create your avatar and slap some fish around. 
Hi, nice post. I’ll definitely be coming back to your blog. Keep up great writing.
Thankyou! I will.