A revealed bill draft to be considered in November lame duck Congress session is seriously concerning me. US player pool is going to be segregated from the rest of the world after an 18-month total blackout. No matter the bill will pass in this edition or not, UIGEA is to be strengthened so I'm afraid US-facing networks might be banned soon and don't recommend you to store much money on poker accounts.
If you're still interested, read
Internet Poker Sticky: Where US inhabitants can play.
Basically, your choice is only between Merge and Revolution (former Cake, bought by Lock in May) as PLO(8) traffic is almost nonexistent on other US networks (
Bovada, Winning (
TP/
ACR);
Poker Pros is almost dead at all). One or both of them may be unavailable in your state.
PLO8 players mostly gang on Merge afaik, 4 running tables of .25/.50 and .50/1 (aggregate!) often run at peak hours, 1/3 games are rare. PLO traffic on Merge is better from my impression, on Revolution it seems a bit smaller. PLO8 traffic on Revo is smaller too so e.g. poor Leroy2DaBeroy (our dormant moderator
) has to mix .05/.10 with .25/.50! Probably you'll have to multisite to get enough good tables at non-peak times.
When choosing a skin within a network, you should look mainly at its cashout and support testimonials as cashouts for US players (even Western Union) are sooo slow (normally several weeks), plus fees for checks are $40 or so. There have been cases of deposits that were lost or charged twice, keep an eye on that!
Given this, I recommend to stick to skins that have 2+2 reps that usually resolve issues much faster than support teams. Official 2+2 threads/subforums:
Lock (Revolution),
RPM/
Carbon/PDC (Merge) - see the top of the Internet Poker main page. Also use the search function to find official threads of other Revolution (e.g.
Cake,
Intertops) and Merge (e.g.
Black Chip,
Hero Poker) skins.
As far as you can read in its forum, people don't like Lock's support and own soft, it probably outweighs their stellar rakeback bonuses/promos, so other Revolution skins are worth consideration too. Merge's soft is fast and up-to-date but buggy too (crashes often during MTTs).
Bottom line: read the Internet Poker forum before making any decisions! Ask people in O8 forum Merge regulars thread, they have much more experience with US-facing sites than me. Gl at the tables!
Last edited by coon74; 09-17-2012 at 01:57 PM.