Party Poker is currently the market leader in terms of online poker. They have approximately 40% market share, which translates into several hundred thousand players. There are sometimes as many as 70,000 people on at any given time, and never fewer than 15,000. Because they have so many players, they have reached and surpassed the critical mass for a poker room. There is always a game available on Party Poker, no matter then limit you are looking for.

Game Selection - The game selection isn't terrible, but it isn't great either. The different games that are available are Holdem, Omaha, Omaha Hi / Low, 7 Stud, and 7 Stud Hi / Low. These games are all available in different Limit, No Limit, and Pot Limit variations. Missing from their line up are games like 5 card stud, razz, or crazy pineapple.

Promotions - Party Poker has pretty good monthly promotions. In addition to the sign up bonus of either $25 or 20%, they offer monthly reload bonuses of 20% up to $100. The work required to clear the bonus is 7 raked hands / bonus dollar. Which means that if you are playing 1 table you can clear it at a rate of 5 - 7 dollars / hour. Additionally they offer a variety of merchandise and free rolls that players can gain access to using their Party Points, which you accumulate everytime you play a hand.

Multi-Tabling - Party Poker has recently upgraded the number of tables you can play on at once from 4 to 10. This is very useful if you are using data mining software to get information about players before you sit down at a table.

Data-Mining - Party Poker is one of the best sites for data-mining. Since they store the hand histories as text files on your hard drive, program such as Poker Tracker can access the hand histories and provide you with information about the other players in real time. However, since there are so many players, you have to have a very large database of people before you frequently encounter the same players multiple times.... Unless of course you identify the fish and hunt them down. See my Fish List page for more information on that.

Servers - The Party Poker servers work well. On average, I get dropped from a Party game once a year, which isn't too bad considering how much I'm on.

Ease - With so many players on Party Poker, you would think that some of them would be fish. You would be right. At the lower limits, there are some solid players, but there are also enough poor players to make the cames very loose and call happy. This is the kind of table I tend to make the most money from, just playing ABC poker, betting my hands when they hit, and not bluffing too much. However, if you can't handle getting sucked out on now and again, because with all the chasers, it will happen, you might want to find a site with better players.

Overall - Party Poker is what you would expect from the industry leader. It is a quality site overall, with good, profitable games. I recommend giving it a try if you never have, and see for yourself.