UPDATE December 19th, 2017: Poker VT has ShutDown
The domain for the PokerTv.com site has expired and has been taken by GoDaddy. Their social media activity ceased on March 2014 and as some of the former users note it seems there was not a widespread email about it.
If you are looking for a working Poker Training Site we recommend you visit our main page where you can see all the wide reviews about them.
The following article is only for historical purposes.
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Poker VT Review
Those who are completely new to poker might be looking for what it is that will allow them to take their first steps around the felt. Poker VT aims to fill this void in the market by offering a very beginner-friendly style that aims to reveal key strategies, playing techniques, and approaches that complete newcomers to the game should take on board. However, is this a platform worth considering with this in mind? Let’s take a look.
Reputation
Daniel
Perhaps one of the few redeeming qualities about the platform is that it’s backed by Daniel Negreanu, who is a world-class poker player and six-time world champion at the World Series of Poker. Aware of the needs of beginners having started from minimal awareness himself, he presents a crash course for beginners that overlooks the basic ideas and philosophies behind aggressive poker playing and allows players to hone their own personal preferences within the guidelines of his “hand analysis” sub course. What’s particularly good about the hand analysis course is that Negreanu himself offers competitive analysis of hands that are presented to him and reveals the specific actions he would take at any one given moment. Parroting and mimicking can be a great way to reach a competitive level rather quickly, but isn’t truly giving players the freedom to develop their own skills.
User Interface
Poker VT uses the typical button-guided interface that Internet users will be familiar with and is common throughout the poker training world. The sleek black and grey interface sports a very modern look and is completely functional. None of the links are broken and all work as users would expect them to.
Video Quality
The quality of the videos is likely where users will find the platform falls apart for them. The video is entirely stream-based, which means players can’t download the videos to their computers for viewing through their preferred media players at a later time. Instead, they must stream them on demand and this can cause quite a few issues for users.
Firstly, the platform aims to deliver videos to users as quickly as possible. This could be perceived as a strength, but it often falls into the weakness category since it will place quite a demand on a user’s system and indeed the server itself resulting in very low quality playback issues. There were many times when my system was pushed into overdrive simply because of the demand the platform was placing on my system, which could very well be the same for other users. Sometimes, renderings and plug-ins would crash my browsers as well, which was particularly apparent in Internet Explorer.
Secondly, there is an apparent issue with the number of users on the website at any one given time trying to stream content. Much like what would happen in the 1990s, several users trying to stream video content would result in buffering, lagging behind, and general instability. At peak times, this is particularly common and brings into question the server-side hardware that the platform is using. It is obviously dated.
When the videos work as they should, they’re nothing particularly noteworthy. The recording equipment used is average at best. While everything is visible and it’s easy to gain information from the videos, they’re nothing to write home about. They’re purely functional.
Speed and Presence
Giving the Negreanu name to a poker platform is obviously going to send prospective players in droves to it since it’s difficult to name any poker player who wouldn’t like to learn under the instruction of a world champion. However, this is exactly what causes a problem for Poker VT: the website is often slow and can sometimes be unresponsive leading to time out errors.
Price
Conclusion
Players who are completely new to the game of poker won’t find what they’re looking for at PokerVT. In fact, I dare say some would leave entirely turned off by the prospect of learning to play an otherwise enjoyable game. It is best to look elsewhere.