Others say...

"sucks all the way"
Bought this for my hubby, he plays the wsop & wpt circuit events, was all excited about it , and said it is the worst game ever. Nothing seems to work right. His computer is 6 months old cost over 2300.00 , has the best of almost everything .... threw the disk in the trash after trying 3 times to play. I think retarded was his most forgiving part of his review.

"These are Pros?"
First off - this game works fine on my four-year old 2.2 MHz P4 running XP Pro. I installed it, it's fine. Gameplay's a little slow (I have it set on "Normal"), but that's more realistic than a lot of online games, frankly. The instructions are non-existent.

But the AI? I've seen reviews that say the players' playing style is just like real life. Umm...not so much. These players all play the same way (so far - I've only had the game for a week.) I've never seen Scotty Nguyen and Johnny Chan check all the way through a hand in a real tournament, and they're not the only ones. All of them are predictable as anything. I had David Williams to my right in my first tournament, and I knew each and every time that, if nobody called and he was in the small blind, he was going to go all in to try to steal my big blind - all I needed was a marginally playable hand to call and bust him. Actually, most of the players do that - go all in in the small blind in a steal attempt. And most of them succeed because the AI player to THEIR left folds every time. In my first tournament, I've been one of the chip leaders throughout and am currently at the final table with six players left. I don't think I'm really good enough to do that well against the REAL pros. If I thought I were really this good, I'd have no problem shelling out ten grand to play in next year's Main Event.

Then there are their lines. If I hear Scotty Nguyen say, "You trying to push me out just because I'm short-stacked, baby?" one more time, I think I'll scream. Other players have equally repetitive lines.

BTW, if you can't see your cards, hit the backspace button. Just like the picture shows.

For better hold'em play, I recommend "Stacked" if you can find it (it's pretty inexpensive these days). But this game includes all of the games included in the real WSOP, which was its main selling point as far as I was concerned.

"Obvious console port to PC makes a sub par PC game"
I play online poker pretty regularly, watched the World Series of Poker for the past few years and was excited to "play with the pros". Installed on a machine that plays World of Warcraft, Titan Quest and other mainstream games at average graphics settings. Pentium 4, 750MB memory, nvidia 6 series graphics card. Not the latest technologies but good enough.

Voices are out of sync with animations. Animations run extremely slow for some reason. Key shortcuts on the one page instruction pamphlet are incorrect. The user interface is not very intuitive. The game is made for joystick play and little was done to make it usable for mouse/keyboard.

Game play is reasonable once you mire through the animations. Poker tips are helpful.

Even though Activision is the first animation you see, there is no support on their web site. You instead need to go to Activision Value. There are no support solutions for the game on the Activision Value web site. After contacting them about patches and/or graphics performance improvements, they said neither were available.

Play some other poker game instead because you do not get quality time with the celebrities in the game.

"Disappointment Turned to Anger"
After waiting anxiously for my weekend to devote to playing my new game, I went to "options" first to get rid of the gawd-awful music. Not only did I not have a choice on the audio, I couldn't even exit. The usual escape of Ctrl-Alt-Delete was useless and I had to turn off my computer. By then I was pretty disgusted but I really wanted to play the game so I started it up again. But after 10 minutes of utter frustratiion in not being able to see my cards, I decided to exit. Guess what? No exit button. No way for me to exit except to turn off my computer again. This morning I went to uninstall the game and accidently right clicked on the icon and the darn game started up. Guess how I had to exit. Right. This game has been the worst disappointment in my video gaming history.

"CAUTION: NOT FULLY COMPATIBLE TO MY VISTA OPERATION SYSTEM"
I DON'T THINK THIS IS SIMPLY A MATTER OF MY HAVING RECEIVED ONE DEFECTIVE DVD OUT OF HOWEVER MANY WERE SHIPPED FROM A PRODUCTION BATCH. WHY NOT? BECAUSE FRIENDS WITH VISTA OPERATING SYSTEMS WHO PURCHASED THE SAME PRODUCT HAVE HAD THE SAME PROBLEMS I HAD.

THAT'S ABOUT AS CLOSE AS I CAN GET TO DESCRIBING THIS OFFERING FROM ACTIVISION. IN THE LONG RUN, YOU CAN RETURN IT FOR A FULL REFUND, AND THAT'S AS IT SHOULD BE, HOWEVER, BUT WHO DO WE SEE ABOUT PAYING US FOR ANY PROBLEMS, OR NEEDED REPAIRS, RESULTING FROM OUR ATTEMPTED USE OF "THEIR PRODUCT", AND FOR YOUR TIME AND MINE; ISN'T OUR TIME VALUABLE TOO?

I'M NOT SAYING THIS PRODUCT WON'T RUN ON A VISTA OPERATING SYSTEM, I'M SAYING IT'S NOT COMPLETELY COMPATIBLE WITH MINE,OR THOSE OF MY FRIENDS,AS IT WILL EITHER LOCK-UP OR SIMPLY DOESN'T FUNCTION PROPERLY. THE SYMPTOMS, IT SEEMS TO ME, POINT TO A POSSIBLE PROBLEM IN ACTIVISION'S SOFEWARE DESIGN OF THIS PRODUCT, AND, IF SO, THIS RAISES OTHER QUESTIONS TOO.

ALSO, I DON'T TRUST PRODUCTS THAT RECOMMEND YOU OPEN YOUR FIREWALL AS PART OF THE PROCESS RECOMMENDED, AND PROBABILY NECESSARY, FOR PROPER INSTALLATION AND FUNCTION, AND THIS PRODUCT DOES JUST THAT AND, AFTER YOU COMPLY, STILL DOESN'T PERFORM PROPERLY.