Summary (Rated 7 out of 10)
Betfair is one of the most popular European poker rooms online! Home to thousands of players, Betfair offers attractive deposit bonus, and many special promotions for new players. Top pros such as WSOPE Champion Annette Obrestad call Betfair their home! With their own stand-alone poker-client, soft competition, and friendly, multilingual customer support, Betfair is certainly a place worth visiting.
Players earn Betfair Points the fastest via Sit N' Go Tournaments - at a rate of 10 points / $1 tournament fee paid.
Game Selection (Rated 6 out of 10)
Betfair no longer allows residents from the United States to play on their site, but they still have a respectable amount of players throughout the day. Their limit games provide tables with stakes ranging from $0.10/$0.20 to $250/$500, and no-limit and pot-limit from $0.05/0.10 to $250/500. Most of the games running at Betfair are no-limit or limit Hold'em. There are a few Omaha tables open, but the action in those are somewhat limited for small and medium-stakes players. People who are looking to play Omaha H/L or 7-Card Stud might want to pass on Betfair as they do not spread these games.
For medium to high limit players, this site offers a great selection of scheduled tournaments. Betfair's most popular daily tournament is a no-limit Hold'em $100 buy-in event with a $15,000 guaranteed prize pool. On Sunday there's an even a bigger tournament, the buy-in being $250 with a $35,000 guaranteed prize pool. Unfortunately, Betfair doesn't offer as many tournaments for players with a small bankroll and their tournaments tend to have a relatively large buy-in. With that in mind, this is not such a great site for those hoping to find low buy-in tournaments with large fields.
It goes without saying that most of the tournaments are restricted to Hold'em, though there are a few Omaha tournaments in there to occasionally mix things up. Betfair hosts a good number of satellites to various live events such as the World Series of Poker and the World Series of Poker Europe, and it’s also possible to make your way into these by playing in Sit'n'Go satellites. Betfair also has plenty of normal Sit'n'Go tournaments running throughout the day and these would be well suited to low-rollers as well.
Quality of Players (Rated 7 out of 10)
Betfair's soft competition is one of best things they have to offer. Since they have a huge amount of sports bettors who want to try their hand at poker as well, there are plenty of fish playing in low-limit games and, surprisingly, at higher stakes as well. Of course, those players have attracted the sharks, so be careful or they just might end up making you look like a donkey!
Software (Rated 5 out of 10)
Unfortunately, there is one big setback for Betfair and that is the quality of their software. The basics are all in place, but there are a few things that don’t work as well as they should and this is why their client is below average compared to others in the poker business. The lobby looks a tad on the cheap side and there is only one menu available for browsing all of their games, so taking a look through the currently running games might seem a little hard at first. There is one great thing about Betfair's client, and that is the possibility to resize tables. This is very useful, especially when playing multible tables at the same time. Overall, Betfair's software is well below average but once you get to know it, you can definately use it without having too many problems.
Graphics (Rated 6 out of 10)
The graphics at Betfair are fairly standard, the blue theme they use works very nicely. Betfair's lobby looks a little bit dull and old by today’s standards, but it shouldn't bother anybody too much. As for the table graphics the software has a nice, clean view and you can see where the action is without having to strain your eyes. Betfair doesn't offer any avatars or any other extra visual goodies, but overall it looks good enough.
Profitability (Rated 8 out of 10)
Betfair has a whopping $1,000 first deposit bonus, so if you're looking for a permanent site to play at, this is the place to go. Their huge bonus, combined with the fact that the players there are well below average both at low and high limit games makes Betfair a site worth checking out.
