Hello,

I was so shocked to see ign gave this game a 4ish out of ten that I almost didnt' buy it.
then i saw gamespot give it 7.7 out of ten so that wasnt' so bad.

I installed it about an hour ago..
i was excited to see the poker school, but was disappointed to see most of it is basic knowledge on how to play hold them.
then i realized it would be great for those who brought it on a lark because they saw it on tv.

I tried the online option next,, and manage to find a game where six of us all placed in the money lol.
i went all in queen jack suited and didnt catch nothing but what the hell it was just a lark in itself.

I am now messing around with the sit and goes 100 in career mode..
mostly the daniel advice is cool.

i just lost one where i had king queen, top pair and no real danger showed up to my over pair showed up by the river so daniel advice said this is it, the moment you been wiating for,, go all in.
so i did.. and i lost to pocket aces.

in this I am playing in with it , i had pocket fours, daniel advice said try to flop a monster.. so i play it .
two threes and one four showed up on the flop giving me a full house.
i was suprised on the turn daniel advice said check it..
i am guessing the deeper reason is not to scare off a person who may bet into you with trips threes.
which is what the computer had when they called my all in on the river.
daniel advice didnt' say go all in,, just "bet like you mean it "

I think I will use it for sit and goes trianings at this point.

i do find daniel advice more interesting and varied then tj cloutier advice in his poker game.
yet the tj tips helped me out a lot more then daniel tutorial.

all this is without advancing in the career mode.
and so I am looking forward to finally meeting a pro in the game.
even though it is stimulated.

i do find a lot of calling advice instead of raising.
yet on high stakes poker he would call a lot and leave it to his ability to read and his post flop play.

now if only his full contact poker had this kind of graphics ,, it would rule the online world

My stacked review.

Okay. First, as an owner of Poker Academy, I was thrilled to see the Poki AI getting used. I was "into" stacked from the very start. I suffered with each delay, and finally picked it up on the second of June at my EBGames. I have the PS2 version.

The single player experience is at best alright. Hands can take between three to five minutes each. The bots used are tuned so that they are "exaggerations" of the different types of players Daniel talks aobut in his "Stacked Poker School" segments. Rocks play UBER tight. Maniacs play UBER loose. Etc. They respond exactly as Daniel said they would if you play against them. Meaning, if you're against a rock, trap them, etc.

It kind of bothers me to see the bots playing this exaggerated, but, Stacked only is using eight of them. It can't help it that there are limitations.

Now one of the things about the Poki bots is that they are Neural Networks. They learn based on how you play. I won't go into details on Neural Networks, but suffice to say it, a series of formulas balances out parameters in the bots play based on action the bot sees. On a computer, where you can save that information off, it's easy to see the bots adjust and shift the more you play. On a console, however, it seems like these bots are "prebalanced." That means that the Neural Network Adjustment features are turned off. The bots don't really "learn" from your style of play, someone else trained them.

Hands in Stacked take forever, and they are SLOW. The ability to smile or frown is present, but it doesn't really make much of a difference. When I looked around in Career mode, I didn't see another smile or tell or anything. I just saw plays. Betting is easy enough, you just push up or down until your "betting indicator" indicates how much money you wish to bet. It's very hard to isolate specific sums, and it seems that the betting goes up incrementally as you hit higher bets. If your opponent has $2000 and you want to bully him with your $12500, it might go from $1900 to $2450. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground.

One of the features we were promised in the first DVD was "authentic chip stacks." That "you'll be able to see who the chip leader is at the table by looking at the size of their stack." That's gone. At most, players show two EXTEREMLY small two chip stacks in front of them. The only other way to get players chipcounts is to wait for their turn where it will appear, or pause the game and scroll down to the leaderboard. Now, a lot of people are defended the ticker.. but that's a lame defense. The ticker can hold about 8 to 10 characters. So, to get words up quickly, it scrolls fast. If you look down at your hole cards, you'd miss a lot. And I won't even discuss Daniel's "Stick it in" advice. 3 6 off suit with a rainbow flop holding an ace is not the time to "Stick it all in". Especially if you're in early position and are middle of the pack on chips.

Online play is where this game really falls apart. It billed itself as the "Halo With Chips" and the "Halo of the Poker World." In online play, the tables are run in two different manners. STT's are run on what seems to be a centralized server. MTT's are run on peer to peer networks based on rotating the ownership of the indivdual tables around between people at the table and sharing the tournament stats across the entirety. The problem with this is that if someone on the table who happens to be holding a key detail leaves.. or is accidentally disconnected.. the ENTIRE table falls out of sync and is disconnected from the tournament. Once out, you don't get back in. The error handling in the game is bad too.. often times, when someone falls out of a tournament , the entire tournament freezes. There are stories right now of entire tournaments crashing out. This all does not bode well for the Stacked Masters Series.. where this will be a major issue. I am a software developer.. I get the feeling that when this game was tested, it was not really tested in extreme or weird conditions. It CANNOT survive a player having a router set to strict NAT.. but you won't know that yours (or anyone elses) is not right UNTIL the tables try to switch owners. At that point, everyone gets kicked off. The testing didn't include random disconnects in play, or anything else.

Play inside the online experience is .. well.. shoddy. You take your entire bank roll to whatever table you're at. Table maxes are often ignored. Table Mins are often ignored. Tournaments take the buyins from you regardless if you crash out or not. In some cases, you lose your entire bankroll if you crash.. there are cases where people are reset to the $2000. You reload automatically when your money is dry. I've seen players go all in online with an A2 offsuit and lose.. then be back two hands later to do it again. It's not like a PAX system where you have to earn your money to play with it.. it's the exact opposite. They'll give you $2000 whenever you lose everything.

The problem I have with Stacked is that it doesn't DO anyting. It's NOT as good AI wise as the bots on Poker Academy 2.5 (same price for the standard). It's online play is NOT as good as any of the other online plays you can get out there. (In fact, Stacked's online play is HORRIBLE.. and we'll see how bad it gets when everyone gets on for the Stacked Masters.) The very big problem with the online play is that it's SO based on the success of the TV show. The TV show's supposedly going to offer real time tracking/updating of tournaments.. think "WPT" , but with Stacked's gameplay and the Masters tournaments. It'd be cool if it holds together, but I fear that it won't.

So.. without the show , the masters tournaments, and likely the server, will end up going away within six months to a year. That leaves single player. It's strong on singleplayer.. but you can get more out of Poker Academy. I mean, if you want Stacked for the AI, then understand, the AI is crippled on Stacked, and the people who made the AI have a better product out that show cases the AI.

Add to that that the console versions CANNOT be changed (even though the PC versions can be patched..) and Stacked gets 2 out of 5 from me. It's ambitious, and I don't know what they were telling Daniel to say, but I feel like he's lied to everyone. I hope he thinks seriously before putting his name on something like this in the future.

And if you don't like this review.. I encourage you to get the game, and treat it fairly. You'll see the problems very clearly. I'm not with IGN or anyone else, I'm just a guy who was waiting for this game, and now doesn't know what to do with it.

Thanks for the review Jarrod.

I played the beta, and never got to trying out the online stuff due to time difference (the tournaments just weren't on at suitable Asutralian times).

I did try and give it a go in single player however, and I concur with much of what you had to say.

Hands do take an eternity in Stacked - probably longer than playing live in fact.

This is mostly due to the interface being so utterly terrible.

They could have just ported over the Poker Academy interface and it would have been better. How they could have managed to screw up this essential part of the game given are so many examples to work from amongst all the online sites is beyond me. Makes me believe the developers are an insult to retarded monkeys.

It also takes away from the AI, as taking so much time to make your bets seem to read to them as weakness from what I saw, resulting in them trying to push you around with nothing, leading to a whole lot of all in with junk reraises.

The AI isn't the greatest but it's still better than anything else that is out there. Poker Acadamy goes for near $100 but doesn't play as real as this...of course that's not saying much. I find that even the "pros" on Poker Academy are way too easy to bluff off of the pot and they never adjust to your play the way they do on Stacked. Stacked is decent but Halo with chips it's not, and it will be quite a while before we see a poker sim that is able to play more true to life.

A few Stacked questions (PC version)

1. How do leave an online ring game w/o closing the program entirely?

2. Is there any way to type in raise/bet amounts? That slider is near impossible to use on a lap top.

3. How do you select how much you want to bring with you to an online ring game? I just always somehow show up with $150 even in like a $20/$40 game by default.

PS: By chance I noticed that a scheduled MTT was to take place Monday at 8pm EST....I got in and noticed there was 1 other person seated. Obviously the tourney never materialized though I half expected the software to let us play HU for some reason.

You hit escape and it should bring up the menu. Otherwise, it's another bug, and you can't leave the game without closing it.



No.


You don't.



Try getting to a tournament, and then getting disconnected because the network code is horribly written and some kid has got all the table info on a 56k line. He disconnects or highpings out, and then everyone else at the table is gone too. Then you lose your buyin.





You sir, are an idiot.

The AI on this _IS_ the AI on poker academy, turned DOWN. If you're appreciating the AI on this game, by rule, you should be appreciating the AI on Poker Academy MORE.

This game's AI is nothing BUT the Poker Academy AI with some severe limitations. If your PA bots are not challenging you, I encourage you to explore more of PA.

Plus, the standard edition of PA is not $100. It's only the pro edition that is, and PA offers a hell of a lot more to do than Stacked.

You've been very helpful

I'm sorry if I seem rude. I believed everything Daniel said about this game, because I looked up to him. A lot of people looked up to Daniel because he's "rebellious" and "kidpoker" and all that. I look up to him because he's normal. He seems human. Most of these other guys seem to go with a "facade" and stick with it. Phil Hellmuth with those cans on his ears.. Doyle Brunson with this "Texas Grandpa" look and feel... etc. Not that I'm ripping on these guys, no, they're good players to be admired. But, they feel fake. Daniel has a life, a wife, and does things outside of Poker. He seems to live.

So when he said that this game was the greatest in the world, I believed him. When it got into delay after delay, I shrugged and said "Hey, this is Daniel's game, I'm certain it's going to be fine."

And when it came out, I bought it. But.. even Daniel has to be a bit upset that his own character is telling people to stick it in while holding a 3-6 and facing a flop that doesn't help. That can't be the kind of thing he'd want to be known for.

In short, hell, Daniel is a great guy. I think a lot of people defending this game take negative comments about it as though it were against Daniel. The fact is, Daniel got a bad beat on this game. He was likely told something by marketing people, and it didn't pan out that way. An ironic look at it is that he got bluffed by the business world.. a world that knows how to bluff and steal people's money far better than any poker world will ever be.

Do I dislike Daniel? No. Do I think this game's crap? Yes. Will I root for Daniel at the WSOP? Mmmhmm. Do I think I'll buy the next version of stacked? Not really.

It's just a video game. It doesn't mean anyone, not Daniel, not the guys at Myelin or 50kft or MTV, not you, and not me.. it doesn't mean we're bad people. It just means they didn't do as well as they could have, and the quality was poor. Next time.