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UltimateBet is most notable for being fronted by famous players such as Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke. UltimateBet is an attractive site for a few reasons – wide variety in games and in stakes (offering up to 300/600 limit!) and for a 110% first time bonus up to $1100!
Software:
The main lobby is extremely functional and it’s easy to navigate to your intended destination. Along the left side are various links such as games, your account screen, customer support etc. The middle lists some merits about the site and the right side contains mostly uninteresting UltimateBet news.
Once you click any of the tabs on the left, you are prompted to log in. After logging in, to play a game, click the play poker games option to get to the tables. To view your account page, click on my account. It lists how much money is in your account and how much of your bonus has been cleared. One annoying aspect about the account page is that it does not update how much money is in your account while you are on tables. It only shows how much money you have put onto the tables.
Shown above is one of the available skins for UB tables. They are pretty goofy looking. There are tons of options available to set them to your personal preference, but the problem is none of them really improve the table that much. I’ve had a number of problems with the tables.
Firstly, the betting chips are extremely silly looking, and are often spread out in these ridiculous ways that sometimes make it hard to tell exactly how much the bet is. It sounds like an excuse, but sometimes such a goofy chip stack induces a call from me for whatever reason. Do not follow my ways: DO NOT BE DISTRACTED BY THE DUMB LOOKING CHIPS!!
Secondly, along with some other sites I’ve reviewed, UB betting is a little strange. For example, say you’re in the big blind of a 5/10 NL game. A player on the button raises to 40. You want to reraise to 120. To reraise that amount, you bet 110 instead of 120 because you already have 10 in the pot. It takes some getting used to coming from sites that don’t have this way of calculating bets.
Thirdly, the hand histories are badly organized. You have to be able to find the # hand that was played in order to view the hand history. Otherwise, you will be scrolling up and down searching for the correct hand. What I mean by this is consider Pokerstars. When you click the previous game button, a list of previous hand histories is organized with the following information: your cards, who won the pot, the size of the pot and the game number. A UB hand history page has just the previous hands in a text like file, with an option to change the hand history # in order to switch to another game. There is no neat organization of histories, it’s just a big mess and unless you click hand history IMMEDIATELY after playing a hand, you will have great difficulty finding the correct hand you are looking for. Plus the HH come out funny on our website: http://www.liquidpoker.net/mytlnet/myhand.php?view=item&id=27213
Fourthly, the site’s Multitabling capability sucks. This is not really explicitly a table problem, but I’m going to bitch about it here. When I first joined the site, I was only able to play 3 tables at once (this includes tournaments!!). Coming from stars where I usually play 6-8 and sometimes a couple extra tournaments, this was a huge turnoff. After emailing support I was able to up the limit to 5, which is a little more reasonable, but still not optimal.
There are however, a few nice features to the UB tables. One is the bet pot button. This can be looked at as either a flaw or as a positive aspect, but I like it. The reason it could be viewed as a flaw is a) sometimes you might misclick and inadvertently hit it, and b) players seem to go a little nuts with it. However, I argue that b is a good thing – higher pot sizes lead to more profits for winning players. Further, it is helpful for laziness. I always use it when raising preflop, and sometimes on later streets, but it is an easy option to use as an alternative to the difficult scrolling bar.
A second nice feature is that you are always placed in the middle of a table (and have the option to disable this feature). It’s nice to always be in the same spot on all your tables, it makes things a little bit easier.
Finally, the UB statistics are extremely detailed and almost pokertracker like. It gives detailed statistics about your preflop, flop, turn and river play. It shows you how often you call, bet, raise, reraise, check raise etc, along with the basic statistics shown by other sites.
Although I did have a lot of complaints, the software isnt too bad, and is a lot better than most other sites.
Rating for Software: 6
Support:
The good news about UB support is that the support section is broken up into different sections based on the type of support you need. The bad news is that the support team is lazier than an English bulldog and will take days or even weeks to respond to your questions.
When I found out I could only play 3 tables, I emailed support asking if this was true or whether I could actually play more because a friend had told me he could play up to 5. After 5 days, I finally received an email back from UB. I opened the message and was disappointed when I found out that it was just UB telling me that they had forwarded the email to the correct department. After another 4 days I was informed that my table limit was upped to 5 instead of 3. On the plus side, I did receive good help, although it took almost a week and a half.
Another issue I have with UB (that I’ll place in support because it pretty much is a support issue) is that unless you email them requesting otherwise, you cannot transfer funds on UB unless you have been a user for 90 days!!! So if I want to transfer funds to a friend, I either have to a) wait until I’ve been a member for 90 days or b) email UB support and wait at least a week to be able to.
Rating for Support: 3
Cash Games:
Despite it’s pro player support, UB doesn’t have as high traffic as I expected. There are usually only 10-15k players online, and at peak times there are 20k+, but nothing like some other sites. This leads to only a few tables per limit at the higher limits. However, UB offers a huge range in stakes, and is especially attractive to high stakes players because up to 300/600 limit and 50/100 NL is offered. It’s often cool to railbird these tables and watch people like neverwin and thunder keller play. UB also offers the following games: hold em, Omaha, omaha8, 7 stud, 7 stud 8, triple draw, and even pineapple!??!
Like most sites with not great traffic, UB has some decent hold em game selection, but the traffic for other games is pretty low. There are usually a few PLO games going for all limits, and some low limit o8 games going, but in pineapple, triple draw, and 7 stud there usually aren’t more than 5 tables going at any given time.
The caliber of players on the NL tables is a bit worse than stars. I can only speak for 1/2 and 2/4 NL, but the amount of regulars in those games is much lower. The pots also seem to be much larger because of the bet pot button. The game selection is much worse though, there are usually only 10 games going for each stake at any given time, most of them being 6 max. However, this is made up for (weird way to think about it) by the fact that you can’t play as many tables. One final thing to note is that UB allows for up to 10 person tables for their NL/PL games.
Rating for Cash game traffic: 6.5
Tournaments:
http://www.ultimatebet.com/promotions/tournament-schedule.html
The link above lists the daily guaranteed multi table tournaments for UB. Among these include WSOP/WPT qualifiers, satellites to other special events and bigger tournaments, along with other multitable tournaments ranging in buyin from 1 to $100 in a wide variety of games. Every Sunday, UB has it’s 200+15 $125,000 guaranteed tournament, with 2500 starting chips.
UB has a wide selection of SNGs as well. The SNGs are 10 person tables, 6 person tables, HU, or 10 or 20 table sngs similar to the 180 man sngs on stars. The setup is similar to stars, with 1500 starting chips, 10/20 starting blinds, and blind increases every 10 minutes. Along with normal SNGs, UB offers turbo and ultra turbo SNGs. From what I've seen, the competition in the SNGs are quite good. The low level sngs probably have better players than stars for example, but the higher levels do get easier comparatively.
Rating of tournament traffic: 6.5
Miscellaneous:
As stated earlier, UB offers a 100% up to $500 bonus for first time deposits. Occasionally they offer this as a reload bonus as well. It’s fairly difficult to clear though. $1 is cleared for every 10 ultimate points earned. Ultimate points are earned in the following manner:
For cash games:
Bonus UltimatePoints™ for each raked hand will be earned as follows:
Rake UltimatePoints™
$0.50 - $3.00 0.50
$0.25 - $0.45 0.25
$0.05 - $0.20 0.10
You can also earn bonus ultimate points if you are the first player to join a table and earn an extra point per hour of play per table.
For Tournaments:
Earn 6 UltimatePoints™ per $1 of entry fee. For example, in a $10+1 tournament, you will earn 6 UltimatePoints™. In a $30+3 you will earn 18 UltimatePoints™.
(In this example, $10+1: $10 is the buy-in amount that goes towards the tournament prize pool and $1 is the entry fee that the house keeps. UltimatePoints™ are based on the entry fee)
Bonus UltimatePoints™ for consolidating tournaments will be credited to your Ultimate Player's Club account immediately upon registering. Bonus UltimatePoints™ for Sit-N-Gos will be credited when you leave the table.
Information found here:
http://www.ultimatebet.com/promotions/players_club.html
I’ve had a lot of trouble clearing the bonus. I deposited money on the site about 4 weeks ago, and am only about 3/5 through the bonus. It’s mainly because it’s hard to get a lot of tables going because of lower traffic, and I don’t like the software as much as stars. Expect to spend a significant amount of time clearing this bonus if you do decide to play the site. Despite that, I would recommend this bonus highly for low limit players. The way the bonus is cleared is very helpful towards lower limit players, so it should not take as long to clear the bonus as the Eurobet bonus would for micro players.
The players at UB are above average in skill. They are not quite as good as players on stars (on average), but are better than sites like party and the OnGameNetwork. There are far less regulars on my tables than at equivalent limits on stars, which leads to much more profitable sessions. In comparing the skill to stars, I would say the lower limits on UB are probably equal or slightly stronger because of a smaller player count, but the middle and upper limits are a bit easier.
Rating of Bonus: 9
Rating of Soft Competition: 4.5
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