Players
They have half a million registered players,  and it’s not unusual for them to peak out in the evening with over 10,000 simultaneous players.  That’s plenty enough players to keep games going 24/7.  Like almost all internet poker rooms, they have players from all over the world,  and like most of their competition, their player base is concentrated in the United States.

Games
AbsolutePoker.com offers the typical range of games: Texas holdem,  seven card stud,  Omaha, stud hi/lo split (8 or better),  andOmaha hi/lo split (8 or better).  But like most cardrooms both online and brick and mortar these days, it’s primarily a Holdem poker room.  They have a very large base of players,  but it appears it’s mostly a base of Holdem players.  You’ll always be able to find a Holdem game,  you might not be able to find an active table for one of the other games offered.

They offer a full range of limits,  from $.02/$.04 Texas holdem to $25/$50 holdem.  The limit ranges for other games are a little more restricted,  starting at $.10/.20 limit and going up to $15/$30 limit.  At peak times you’ll usually find a $25/$50 Texas Holdem game,  but you’ll seldom find a $15/$30 stud or Omaha game.  Holdem is taking over everywhere.

And big bet Holdem is making inroads everywhere also.  Absolute Poker is no exception.  No-limit Holdem is offered with blinds ranging from $.10/$.25 to $2/$4.  Buyins for the no-limit games are a minimum of 20 times the big blind.

Deposit Bonuses
The internet poker business has become highly competitive,  and it’s important for a room’s survival to be able to distinguish itself from the pack.

One of the things that keeps players coming back is frequent reload bonuses. AbsolutePoker offers a 35% Bonus Bucks deposit bonus for new players,  and frequent 20% reload bonuses  --  sometimes a reload offer every week,  at least a couple of times a month.

The Bonus Bucks aren’t that hard to work off.  For every 100 hands they convert $10 to real dollars and every hand that is raked at least 25 cents counts.  You can make a $500 deposit,  get the $100 reload bonus,  and immediately transfer $400 back out  (or all of it), leaving yourself $100 to play off the deposit bonus in low limit games.  All in all it’s a pretty good deal,  a way to compensate for the high rakes all the internet poker sites have  (I‘ll comment on that later). With the Bonus Bucks you’re essentially getting back 10 cents from the first 25 cents raked per hand.  They do put a 60-day time limit on redemption of the bonuses:  You lose them if you don’t redeem them in 60 days.  But if you’re just a marginally frequent player,  playing a few hours a week,  you’ll get the bonus worked off in time.

Frequent Player Points
Frequent player points are given that can be used to buy into special tournaments.  They don’t offer these tournaments often,  but it is a little extra bonus.

Tournaments and Freerolls
They have frequent $50 freerolls,  every hour or two,  20 a day.  These tournaments are capped at 2,000 players and the $50 prize money is divided among the last 9 finishers,  $10 to 1st place and $5 each to 2nd through 9th.

They are also heavy on offering satellites for the World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour.  After Poker Stars was lucky enough to have qualified the winner of the WSOP through a satellite on their site,  earning the subsequent free publicity,  most online poker rooms jumped on the bandwagon of offering satellites to major televised events,  and Absolute Poker was no exception.

As a way to reward frequent tournament play,  they maintain a tournament leader board.

Software
The look of the table gives me the impression of clunkiness.  I don’t know why that is.  Maybe the graphic just has too much symmetry and too many straight lines and right angles.  I don’t know,  it’s just the impression the visual gives me.

Bet sizes in the no-limit games are made by moving a slider.  I don’t really like operating a slider,  but it seems to have become the industry standard.  My favorite method of sizing no limit bets is an alternative offered by America’s Cardroom.  They have icons of various chip denominations.  Click on a green chip to make a $25 bet,  click twice to bet $50,  click twice on green and once on red to bet $55.  I like that method because it closely replicates how I bet in B&M games  --  I pick up an appropriate number of chips of the appropriate denomination.  But I guess my preferences aren’t shared by many because no other online cardroom that I’m aware of has adopted the chip icon method of betting in no limit games.

Overall,  the software functions somewhat smoothly,  with one major exception. It gives you a complete array of advance option check-boxes before it’s your turn. That’s all fine and good,  but when it’s your turn your options are displayed in large click-on buttons that are positioned right over the advance option check boxes.  That means that if you go to check the check/fold advance option box, but the other player bets quickly,  by the time your finger has made the click, your check/fold box has changed to a large button reading “Call.”  You might end up calling when you intended to fold.

This is a major software glitch.  And I think it’s inexcusable.  Adequate testing would have caught that,  and it’s not that difficult to correct.  I find it incredible that they aren’t aware of the problem,  but they haven’t done anything about it.  That one thing is enough that you might want to stay away from the site until they correct it.

I do play at the site in spite of the design bug with the overlap between the advance action check box and the call button.  But I do not play no-limit on the site because of this.  It can easily cause a catastrophic error in a no-limit game.

Another software drawback is that you can't connect to the game server from a cellular internet connection.  I'm not sure why they have this problem,  but it can cause a problem if you're on the road a lot and sometimes rely on cellular for mobile internet.

High rakes
Let me take a minute out to comment on online poker rakes.

The popular wisdom is that rakes online are low.  That idea comes from a comparison of online rakes to rakes in brick and mortar live games.  Of course they would also be low if we compared them to the price of a new Lexus.  We might as well;  if you’re going to compare an apple to an orange you could just as well compare it to a banana.

Online poker rakes are high when you look at the rakes relative to the site's marginal cost of operating a table.  When you look at rakes that way they are high,  very high.  And that’s really the only rational way to look at a commodity that doesn’t really have any unique characteristics.  Some of the poker sites have been successful in establishing some perception of brand value;  Poker Stars has a reputation as having the best tournaments,  Party Poker has established a reputation for having the best game selection,  but most of the sites haven’t really been successful at branding.  The differences in software features from site to site aren’t really very large,  and generally a $1/$2 limit Holdem game is just a $1/$2 limit Holdem game...  It doesn’t matter that much which site you’re on.

Generally the barriers to entry into the online poker site industry aren’t all that high relative to the potential except for one thing.  It’s unclear how long the industry will last  --  there is always the potential for the U.S. to start some kind of anti-internet gambling crusade,  putting a few people in prison and seizing some assets.  The United States has no qualms at all about putting a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any other country,  and we always have the potential of a nutcase U.S. Attorney General creating havoc among internet gamblers and internet gambling providers.  We have a history of such nutcase behavior  --  we conducted a military invasion of Panama just to arrest a suspected drug dealer.

All it took was pressure from the New York State Attorney General to get PayPal out of the business of facilitating internet financial transactions between gambling sites and their customers.  Neteller,  a Canadian company,  has taken up that slack,  but even they are worried about the Patriot Act.  It was after the Patriot Act passed that they started requiring that their U.S. customers provide a Social Security number and they cited the Patriot Act as the reason. The threat of adverse action by the U.S. government is a real threat.

Because of that,  poker site operators can’t rely on recovering their investment and fixed costs over the long haul.  They can’t be sure that there will be a long haul. So they don’t engage in marginal pricing,  they feel the need to generate as much revenue as they can now,  because it’s possible the business has no long-term viability.

But there is a little bit of hope on the horizon.