UltimateBet In Review
If you’ve never played online poker before, it can be daunting to find a poker room that makes it easy to both learn both the software and the game itself equally well, but UltimateBet appears to have made great strides to help players old and new better enjoy the game.
Over the past several years, they’ve greatly improved their software and opened up the user interface to take advantage of greater monitor resolutions and computer speeds. They also are among the very few major poker rooms that offer a Mac-compatible version of their software. Overall, the software is very fast and quite nice, with a few innovative functions that should be implemented at more sites, such as the avatar feature that allows you to upload your own image.
In addition to their high-quality software, UltimateBet has two of the biggest names in poker as cardroom consultants: 11-time WSOP winner Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke, who has catapulted to fame as the greatest female poker player of all time. While Phil has focused on the player experience and cash games, Annie has had a hand in ensuring that UltimateBet’s tournaments are tightly run, even if some players will find the tournaments with the higher buy-ins intimidating.
One of the biggest pieces of news concerning UltimateBet is its merger with Absolute Poker to create the Cereus online poker network, making it one of the busiest poker rooms in the world. The Cereus network helps ensures that the traffic on the site, which could be spotty in off-peak hours and overall volume on the site is the fifth-greatest in the industry, with real-money player statistics as of October 2009 showing 2,100 ring-game players at peak hours and 14,000 tournament players at peak hours.
UltimateBet may not be the biggest poker room, but their excellent RAI$E program and tournaments that are a cut above the rest easily makes it equal to better-known names in the business. The game variety is top-notch, the signup bonus is huge, and the customer support is responsive, even if we wish they offered a live chat with their support team in addition to the current email solutions.
