Summary

Paddy Power is Ireland’s largest bookmaker and is rapidly become one of Europe’s leading poker rooms.

Paddypowerpoker.com was launched in February 2005 and runs on the world famous iPoker network, meaning it has the foundations to succeed and compete with the best rooms in the business.  The firm has an absolutely fantastic PR team and are the sponsors of the Irish Open, Europe’s oldest and most prestigious live poker tournament.

The software is free to download and with a number of different variations of poker available to their customers  Paddy Power Poker is one of the best around.

Key Tournaments

Paddy Power Poker is the home of Europe’s oldest and most prestigious live poker tournaments, the Irish Open.  The firm offer their customers a number of different Multi Table Tournament and Sit’N’Go satellites for the event and also offer routes to the World Series of Poker, World Poker Tour, European Poker Tour and Aussie Millions.

Aside from these qualifiers, Paddy Power Poker also has huge ‘Guaranteed’ tournaments and plenty of freerolls for players of varying abilities.

Game Variety

The standard array of poker variants – Hold’em (No Limit, Pot Limit and Limit) and Omaha (PLO and Hi-Lo) are well represented. For a low stakes Omaha player looking to hone his skills, the lack of a 0.10/20c heads-up table is a slight grievance. Although 7 Card and 5 Card Stud are available, they attract virtually no players. Tournament play is where Betfred really excels in terms of diversity.

For the low and mid stakes player, there are regular $5, $10 and $20 freeze outs and re-buys, with fields rarely topping 750 players, meaning a more realistic chance of a cash. There are numerous satellites running to live APT, EPT and WSOP events, as well as independent events such as the Irish Winter Festival, with steps starting from as little as $2.

The biggest carrot of PaddyPower poker game selection is the availability of 'Asian games', including Chinese Poker, Beat the Landlord and Big Two. Due to the sick swings and originality, Chinese Poker is becoming very popular. It's one of the set games at Bobby's Room at the Bellagio, with the likes of Phil Ivey, Eli Elezra and Phil Hellmuth all great fans of the game.

Traffic

The traffic at this site was somewhat surprising and really growing.  Of course the low level games have the most traffic but even at mid-stakes there's enough traffic that a player could expect action.  During peak hours the total real money traffic can be 9000 players and sometimes upwards of 10,000 players.

Rake

Expect 5% rake in ring games as a kind of starting point, which is pretty standard, although rake percentages are never perfect because of rounding and cutoff points with pots.  At the high limits do not expect rake percentages to be very high AT ALL, at least if there is any action at the table. Our site staff monitored a $10/$20 table that had very aggressive betting.  While 5% rake was collected, Paddy Power capped that at $3.  In one pot, nearly $1000 was up for grabs but rake was only at $3 still.  That's a rake percentage of 0.3%!

Sit 'n' go rake (or the site's fee) percentages depend on the level you play.  They actually have $5000 + $200 Sit 'n' go rake tournaments at this site which is only 4% rake.  At the microlimits you can pay 20% rake on $0.10 + $.02 tournaments if you bother but everything at the $1 Sit 'n' go level is 10%.

Competition

Paddy Power Poker is attracting more and more players and with that comes tougher competition.  However, flop percentages do suggest a fair amount of loose playing donkeys with some tables showing that 80% of all players are making it to fourth street.  There are sites with weaker competition than Paddy Power Poker as these guys appear to be starting to attract a good base of patrons but if you look at table stats, which are displayed in the lobby, you should be able to find some noobs to shark.

Support

The support for this site was live and very fast in answering questions.  The link to live help can be found at the home page and then toward the bottom of the page where the contact information is.

Deposit & Withdrawal Options

Deposit options: (1) Credit card, (2) debit cards, (3) checks, (4) bank transfer,
(5) Netteller, (6) moneybookers

Withdrawal options: (1) Credit card (2) checks (3) NETeller

• Ireland's largest card room gives you $600 free at 150%

Bonus Summary

Sign up and get a whopping 150% bonus on any deposits up to $600.

Signup Bonus

For every 450 Paddy Points you earn, part of your sign up bonus will be released in increments of $5

Assuming that you are going for the full $600 bonus, in order to receive that full bonus you must accumulate a total of 54,000 Paddy Points within a 90 time period from when you set up a real money account

Ninety days is fairly generous time frame to earn a deposit bonus and 150% is pretty generous for a deposit bonus percentage.  It is true that there are better time periods out there, but there are certainly ones that are a lot worse as well.  The relevant question is, how much poker playing does it take to earn the Paddy Points?

Paddy Points are earned automatically every time that you play in a cash game or in a real money tournament.  When you start playing at Paddy Power Poker you will be enrolled in their Army and you will be designated as a Private.  Privates earn Paddy Points the slowest but if you are loyal you will get a promotion and that means you will earn more points, quicker.

Let us say that you are a private and you play $5 + $.50 tournaments.  Only the fee part of the tournament counts towards your Paddy Points (which is standard for all sites) and in the case of Paddy Power you would get 10 Paddy Points.  To get promoted to Lieutenant you would need to get 1200 Paddy Points, so basically you would need to play in 120 tournaments at that same buy in level.  After becoming Lieutenant not only would you have already gotten a portion of your bonus but then you would get 11.5 points at the $5 + $.50 level and things start to accelerate for you, with more promotions aheady.

A lot of online poker players might play in 120 tournaments in about 10 or 12 days but even if it takes you longer this deposit bonus is really achievable so long as you are committed to the site.

Whereas a lot of other poker rooms only give you 30 or 60 days to get your bonus, Paddy Power really deserves a paddy on the back for realizing that for even some of their most dedicated customers, about 3 months is needed.

Bonus Payout Release

150% to a maximum of $600

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