Just played my first freeroll at Carbon. Wanted to check out graphics and all. I believe that it is doable. The software should get better with time and player input. Of course game selection will be limited, only 10k players at peak times atm. But it seems to have the highest traffic for US friendly sites atm.

I think we need to start playing and building it. I wouldn't expect to win big just yet, because the regs are most likely to join first, but we have to, and MUST keep playing. I remember playing on party poker way back when and their graphics were not spectacular either. Pokerstars were not as always as great as they are now either, they have constantly upgraded over the years.

Don't hold your breath imo.

Any sng players out there trying Bodog or Merge network? I'd be curious to know how the traffic is there, plus has there been much of a spike in traffic since black Friday?

I just opened account at Carbon, but some reports from earlier posts stated that they had peak traffic @ 5k before "Black Friday", now they are at almost 11k. Of course this does not yet bode well for us sit n go grinders, but we have to start somewhere right?

True, the more traffic the better. I got to believe that eventually the sng traffic will become decent. Way too many grinders out there to just stop completely. I'm probably screwed though as I played non-turbos.

Well, it looks like they have made some improvements, but it took them since like 2007/2008 to do it.

I used to play on Carbon, and I'd try to multi table and tile 4 tables on a 15 inch monitor, I'd shrink them and all the ****ing text and everything would get all ****ing blurry and pixelated and completely unreadable, despite their website's claim of "and with our state of the art vector graphics, everything stays crisp no matter how small you shrink the tables." Yeah, that claim was total ****ing bull****.

But now it looks like they've added a mini table mode to where it doesn't get all ****ing blurry as **** and you can read everything now. But it still sucks. The tables are all ****ing cluttered with all the ****ing preflop check boxes, and then the ****ing bet pot, half pot, quarter pot, pick your nose, scratch your ass buttons. ****ing cluttered as ****.

And their lobby is laggy. You double click to open a table and it sits there for five seconds and does nothing. Double click again and five seconds later you finally get a ****ing table to pop up.

preflop on the bottom part of the table where the action buttons are, there's 7 check boxes and two buttons for the chat and menu

post flop there's 11 ****ing buttons, plus the slider, plus the text input box.


****ING CLUTTERED

I don't think euro site means what you think it means.

oh I forgot about the 2x2 grid, gonna try that out


they have ****ing SEVEN bet pot buttons

1/2, 2/3, 3/4, POT, X2, X4, X8


can't get much more cluttered than that

boy, it sure is easy to tell who's ****ing turn it is too. I don't know how much better you can get than a ****ing shade of white ring around the players that's a different shade than the other white it normally is. Nah, we don't need any ****ing blinking or anything like that, two solid shades of white is PERFECT!

Are you ****ing doing this between ****ing hands? ****!

What are the chances that online poker becomes completely illegal in the US by the time this is resolved? I'm interested in playing on cake/carbon but I'm scared that they could be shut down in the future as well.


I know you guys are 100x smarter than I'll ever be so just asking

I think you misunderstood my intentions. I wasn't "making excuses for the poker sites", though it clearly looked that way. I actually was trying to make you less stressed and concerned over it and provided my reasons of why I wouldn't be stressed over it and others in your position.

Personally I don't think I'm being 'overprotective' of the sites. We all know the risk, yet the track record doesn't show any reason why Carbon would not process your Cashout.

I do think its wrong that you haven't heard from support on the issue, and you clearly have a right to be worried. I was just offering a reason why I didn't feel it was anything to overly worry about.

Again, I didn't mean anything by it and I'm sorry you took it the wrong way.

I will now drop it and try to make sure to post its my opinion so everyone knows I am just giving an opinion.

Not any more. I was about to take my own life playing on Carbon's software.

Jeez it's not that bad, is it?

LMAO, GL

Yeah, it sucks.


Try it for yourself.

I tried RPM, part of the same network but I'm not sure that means the SW is the same?

I've been playing for the last few days. I 4-table LHE 6-max, so I had to fire up an NL play money table to see what you meant. It didn't seem THAT bad, and I hope you tweaked the settings and got rid of the news and stuff.

Anyway for what I play it's rough but playable. A lot of things are small, like fonts and chips, so I do find I have to concentrate a lot more to follow the action than I did on Tilt or Stars. I hope this gets improved at some point, because I get tired of playing a lot sooner, making it hard to put in long sessions.

I looked for this and couldn't find so apologize if redundant and feel free to close/move.

I am a casual player - 1/2 cash and SNGs of 20 or so with the occasional bigger MTT. I have money on sports sites I've used and have opened some accounts on new (to me) sites in the last week (with no trouble). The problem is there's just no action. What little traffic there is is for turbos (often micro turbos). I see the ad up top and since they're a sponsor here I will try that next, but any other suggestions appreciated. Thanks.

I'm a US player, used to play on FT and PS, and I joined Carbon Poker this past week through Rakeback.com. The deposit method was not nearly as easy as FT or PS.

Deposit options were a bit limited --

1) Visa. Didn't try my Visa credit card, figured it wouldn't work in the US anyway, and read several post of people having their card frozen for even trying, no thanks. I chatted with customer care, they recommended getting a Visa gift card good for international purchases, but don't get one from a place like Walgreens or Target, because apparently those are only good in the US. Still I read enough post and it seemed that some people were having an issue with a pre-paid Visa gift card as well, so I did not opt for this.

2) Click-2-Pay. Tried it, but it wasn't available, not sure why.

3) UseMyWallet. Wasn't an option, apparently you need an invite from the site, you can't just sign up.

4) Cash transfer. I eventually chose this option. You click and "deposit" the minimum of $100, then you'll get instructions of who to transfer the money to, probably to somebody in the Philippines. Had to go to a Western Union and wire the money, had never done it before, but wasn't too difficult, just make sure you spell the name of the person correctly. Cost was $12 to transfer cash, and Western Union only takes cash on money transfers. You can get a half-off coupon for the fee if you want to go through the hassle of setting up an account with WU online. Once you transfer the money you'll get a transfer code for the transaction, go back home and enter that transaction code on Carbon, and in a couple minutes your cash will be there.

Like I said, I joined Carbon through rakeback.com, used the deposit code of "rakecom" which I think is a 100% match (eventually), also got an instant 10% added.

I'm up and running, software is different than FT or PS, but it works, will take some getting used to. Only played a couple small tourneys, can't really comment on the level of play, fish are always swimming around, doesn't matter where you play, you can't beat stupid.

Good luck everybody! F@#% the DOJ!!!:

Yeah, I've noticed this option mentioned in the forums a lot. I opened a Merge account, and just for the hell of it went through the motions of making a cash transfer deposit, and saw exactly this. ^^^ I would have had to wire money to some random dude in the Philippines.

Doesn't this seem really weird?!? I know people are having success with it and all, but it felt like I was about to give money to someone sending me spam ... who was pleased to inform me that I had just inherited $10 million! ... which could be all mine if I only send them some money along w/ lots of personal info.

I realize this isn't the quite the same thing, but it just feels soooo sketchy. Am I alone in that?

it doesn't sound sketchy to me. It rates as a pretty good deposit method in my opinion- fast to get money there, and you can send a lot with just the flat $10 fee. Relatively fast/ not a huge fee= decent deposit option- could be better, but could be worse.

Carbon/Merge network continues to grow. Now #11 world wide. Peak player number and average numbers are both up.

Decent selection of NL Hold em, 24/7. Omaha selection comes near to same.

+1

To somebody unfamiliar it may seem a bit sketchy but in reality its not. In the end with the US market in the situation it is this is a reliable and not too difficult method to use, from what I'm told. I wish they would provide instructions on how to do it through the Online WU store as it would be even easier and may attract even more recreational players.

What Network did you sign up for? Obviously, traffic isn't close to the 'Big 3' that just left the US market. Merge has already grown tremendously and is now #11 on Pokerscout in the World. The other Networks have also seen an increase in traffic and I'm sure they will continue to see traffic increase as the "dust settles".

If you are looking for SNG's or not finding enough Cash to play, I would recommend that you sign up at multiple Networks and multi-table from multiple Networks to get your volume in. This is what I do and it also allows me to Table Select a little bit. A couple other benefits is that you can take advantage of which site is offering the best bonus that day/week/month and it also means that you would not have your BR tied up in only 1 Poker Room. Obviously, there are some downsides for some people. If your BR is not large enough to span multiple sites then it may not be a viable option.