Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I love Texas Hold'Em poker. I've been playing this game for about 2 years now. At the beginning, things were pretty good. Hands were random and gameplay was pretty balanced. The donkeys usually never got too far ahead, and you could tell who was actually skilled. Then roughly about a year ago, I noticed some weird, new behaviors in the game. First, I would frequently get the same hand twice in a row, with different suites. At first, I chalked it up to coincidence, but it kept happening, as if the game wasn't just picking random cards anymore, but rather had some algorithm for dealing cards. Then I noticed that there was a dramatic increase in the number of big hands. In a single game consisting of maybe 30-40 hands, I would see LOTS of trips, a few straights, several flushes, sometimes a straight flush, a decent chance of four of a kind, and even a tiny chance at a royal flush. The frequency of these really nice hands was WAY above normal (I play online and offline, and I've been playing for about 8 years now, so I know when something isn't normal). In the past year alone, I've gotten three royal flushes, and countless, countless hands of trips and above. Sounds great, right? Then I noticed that there would always be ONE player at the table who would be extremely lucky. Sometimes it was me, but when it wasn't (which is most of the time, since it's a 1-in-5 chance), it was terrible. Eighty percent (I kid you not) of the lucky person's cards would either be face cards and/or would hit perfectly on the flop. Got a 2 7 off? No problem if you're in the good seat. You'll get 2 7 Ace on the flop. One of the 4 unlucky players has an Ace, so they bid high, only to have their top pair crushed by two pair or a full house. Coincidence? Maybe, but it was good enough to bet on. Once I figure out that I'm in the good seat, I can just go all-in every hand and win 90% of the time, no matter what I have. I'll admit, this can be a little fun to experience. On the flip side, no matter how good your starting hand is, you will almost certainly lose if you're not in the right seat, and that's just frustrating as can be. Other reviewers say this is all intended to make me want to buy chips. Personally, I don't get that desire to buy chips. I've stacked up over 16 million in chips without buying any, but the gameplay is simply terrible now. It's literally become a Russian Roulette variant of poker, with only one empty chamber. If you enjoy that type of thing, then go for it. Other things to consider: 1. In the past 3 months, the amount of notifications from this app have SKYROCKETED. I get about a dozen notifications a day, and 11 of the 12 will be an advertisement to buy chips because there is a sale. Of course, there's been a "300%" to "500%" sale on chips for months now, so it's not really a fantastic sale - it's just what they charge. This recent crazy increase in activity has pushed me to finally ditch it because it was generating so many notifications that other, more important alerts were being pushed off the screen. 2. The first hand of the first round of the shoot-out is ridonkulous. Since the buy-in is only 5k, people will just buy-in and go all-in the very first hand in hopes they'll just get a lucky win and quickly pass the first round. This is sort of amusing at first, but it quickly becomes annoying when you can't even ATTEMPT to get any decent play out of anyone in that round. There are some pros about this app (the reasons it took me so long to uninstall): 1. The user interface is pretty good, except for a few bad button placements. 2. There are several different types of tournaments and tables, but it's all TH. 3. You can play on your Facebook page, and can transfer between your phone and the Facebook version seamlessly. Sometimes this doesn't work, but it usually does. Overall, the unbalanced/favoring gameplay is what screws this game because it makes it many times more frustrating than fun. I'm more than happy to lose well at a fair game, but playing a game that has been heavily balanced in someone else's favor just isn't fun. I had hoped things would go back to the way they were, but I guess I'll have to find another poker app. Avoid this one.