Review: Texas Hold 'em King Live

Score:
61%

Author: Magmic

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Okay, it's poker on your smartphone, but the interesting bit is that this is "Live" and against not an AI, i.e. there is someone else online, looking for a Poker game. As you first run the program you'll set up a profile for yourself, a username, password and email address on a single screen. You need to create this account as you'll start with a small amount of poker chips and these are tracked over multiple game sessions.

If you're a good poker player, this pile of chips is going to rise as you play. For everyone else, it puts an immediate time limit on the game. Once these hit zero, what next? Well, there are various free chip offers, such as following the developers on Twitter (click on the banner in the game, and you'll get taken to the browser to sign in and follow them). Or you can simply buy the chips, with some real money. $7 will give you 150,000 chips in the game, and their are other multiples to get you buying in bulk. Which I suspect is where the developers are going to make their money, as this java-based client is a free download.

Right then, onto the game. Because you're playing against human opponents around the world, this feels like a far more realistic AI. To be honest, you'd be hard pushed to tell the difference with the small number of options available to the players - but you do notice it in the chat window if anyone decides to talk to the other players at the table.

Once you select a table and "buy in" for a set amount of chips, you'll be taken to a table with a number of other opponents, and you can start playing poker. Controls are icon-based, with clear graphics showing the fold, check, raise, match bet and raise at the bottom of the screen. There's little hand holding, but I think it's a fair assumption that users will know what check and fold mean, how the betting works, and how the various permutations of the betting rounds and cards being dealt interact with each other. Ultimately, the goal is to clear out your opponents and you'll start winning chips that you can keep and add to your bank total, to buy into bigger games for more rewards.

You have a time limit on your moves, signified by a shrinking time bar. As you are, in essence, playing with real money, if you don't make a move then you'll automatically fold. This way little money is risked, but the pace of the game keeps up for everyone else at the table. Playing the game, the pace was more than acceptable for me, and there was little lag, with all the animations and heavy work done locally.

As a poker game, it does what it needs to do, and, while not stunning in graphics, gets the job done. Given the human nature of the challenge, this makes it a little bit more adventurous than a number of other poker games in the pack. Where I'm a bit worried is the purchasing of credits. This is a prime area where using a Nokia-branded in-app payment solution would make me feel a lot more comfortable than punching in my credit card details. I'll stay on the "free" credits thank you very much, but mostly because I'm old and paranoid. I also think it's a bit cheeky that you can't convert chips back out to real world money and cash out your winnings - you'll have to be satisified with graphical achievement trophies in the game.

Still, this is worth a look, and you get enough credits to start with to get an idea if you'll want to spend time building up your chip stack.

-- Ewan Spence, Aug 2011.

Reviewed by Ewan Spence at 23:00 UTC, August 23rd 2011