PokerStars or 888poker?
PokerStars and 888Poker are the two of the biggest players in online poker in 2013, and the two biggest innovators in the game. Between them, they’re leaving iPoker and Party Poker in the shade when it comes to moving online poker forward. Recently, both have released dedicated online poker apps for Android devices, but which one should you choose? We compare the two under several important headings to help your decision.
Game Softness
As we always tell people, in this day and age, playing against bad players should be your number one concern. Online poker games have gotten a lot tougher in the last three years and now it’s not a given that you’re going to be sat with fish at every table. Because PokerStars got so big, it attracted all of the sharks in the online game, and these days games there are noticeably tougher than they were back a few years ago. 888 on the other hand is tied to a casino and sportsbook and it has a steady flow of gamble happy players that don’t know a lot about poker. PokerStars suffers on this point too. When people come to Stars, they’re there 100% to play poker and likely to be better than 888’s casual players.
888 do a lot of TV marketing and it has paid off. They’re the fastest growing site, and they’re attracting a huge amount of bad players to their poker tables. 888 wins this one hands down.
Software
PokerStars Android app is pretty full on, with quite a few options and filters, while 888’s version is very slimline. All that’s there are the basics, and this makes it nice and easy to use. Though ‘Stars software is slightly slicker, we’re not a big fan of the multi-tabling facility which can be very confusing and can lead to a lot of misclicks as tables are whipped onto the screen as soon as it’s your turn to act. It will be interesting to see how 888 handle’s multi-tabling, as for now you can only play a single table there, but it seems like that’s all most people want when playing on a phone or tablet. We think it’s very close, but PokerStars shades this one.
Cash Games
Both sites offer cash games across a wide range of stakes and both offer 6 seater and 10 seater games. The game play is smooth and its easy to follow the action on both apps, and both sites have plenty of traffic 24 hours a day, but because the games are so much softer on 888poker, we have to award the cash game crown to them.
Tournaments
At the moment, PokerStars is the only company that offers tournaments on Android, but others including 888 have this feature in development. Of late, Stars has started to suffer a bit due to its on popularity. Its daily tournaments are now attracting 5,000+ players and taking 12 hours to complete; that’s longer than the battery life of most Android devices! If you’re going to be playing on your PC as well as your Android you’ll find the 888 tourneys a little more palatable . As well as having soft fields, they tend to only take a few hours to complete. One thing we’re looking forward to is the day when double-or-nothing sit and go tournaments come to their Android app.
Because PokerStars is the only site to offer tournaments on Android, I guess we have to give them this category!
Overall
Overall we think that you’ll get more fun out of playing on 888poker’s Android app, simply because you’ll find it a lot easier to make money! They have software that’s as good as Stars as well as a reliable app, but they’re games are bursting at the seams with fish and for this reason you really should make it your home for Android poker.
