This is the poker wing of Casino On Net (one of the big boys of the online casino world). This is mostly a good thing, because it provides a steady flow of gamblers who just want to play that holdem thing with the money they won at blackjack.

Trust me though, there are some truly awful players on Pacific Poker. Some of them seem to think folding is forbidden. I asked one guy why he never folded and he said - "I didn't know I could" - he wasn't kidding, I counted about twenty hands in a row where this guy saw the showdown. Mind you, Pacific do have a promotion where the players who see the most showdowns in a given period win money, so there is some excuse (by the way - it's bad idea to play for that prize but a good idea to be at a table with people who are).

There's a relatively small shark population (those who can put up with the software do pretty well), but generally, ABC poker puts you ahead of 75% of the other players here.

So why do you have to put up with the software? Well, it is slower than most other sites, so you get less hands per hour. It is also difficult to do anything - like visiting the cashier, join a waiting list for anothr table, or look at the animated (ugh) hand history without leaving your table. Still, it looks OK, doesn't eat my CPU resources, and has a good layout, so they got the important things right.

Unfortunately, cashouts are slow. There's never any fear that they won't arrive (Casino on Net has enough money that they could probably turn the whole of Gibraltar into a giant Scrooge McDuck swimming pool of dollars), it's just agonising having to wait 5 days (like I did once). It was even worse back in the day when you needed a $1000 deposit - we had to walk to school in bare feet as well.

Support are nice people. It would be too harsh to call them friendly incompetants, but it can be a little difficult dealing with them. The problem is that they are the same staff that answer Casino on Net queries, so sometimes, they just don't know about poker. They are very quick, friendly, and actually want to help (you just have to explain things to them sometimes, like what a multi [table tournament] is).

They do have a nice collection of guaranteed prize pool events, which is nice (even if there are usually enough buyins to save Pacific from having to top-up the money). The $1000 prize pool $1 tournament doesn't usually fill up, if you're looking for an overlay,

Pacific poker is a pleasant poker site with a decent deposit bonus. The real attraction is the very loose players who basically just give their money to you.