Carbon Poker Review

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	The free gift promotion is a great option for players who already have a bankroll but would like to try other rooms, we offer free gifts for signing up through PSO.
	For die hard players, you can earn a percentage of all the rake you contribute while playing online poker

Name Carbon Poker Country Australia Network Merge Gaming Established 2007 Support email support Telephone N/A

Overall Rating 5.40 Software/Interface 7.0 Ring Games 4.3 Tournaments 4.5 Game Variety 4.3 Soft Competition 5.3 Signup Bonus 6.0 Frequent Player 5.0 Promotions 6.8 Customer Support 6.3 Deposit & Cashout 5.8

Carbon Poker is a small to medium-sized room with about 5,000-plus players at peak hours. This is actually the re-birth of the site which first launched in February 2005 under the name Poker.com.  In early 2007, the old Poker.com management created the Merge Gaming Network, of which CarbonPoker.com was the first member.  The change was made in order to improve marketing efforts at live events.  Because of online gambling advertising restrictions at many live tournaments, the “.COM” suffix on a poker website logo must be covered.  Thus, “Poker.com” became the generic “Poker,” which does not do much for a poker room trying to grow its customer base.  So, by creating CarbonPoker.com, even if the ".COM" must be obscured, anyone who sees the logo will still understand where to find the company online.  All Poker.com customers were still able to keep their accounts and now play at the same tables as CarbonPoker.com customers.

The software platform is excellent...the action is fast and the lobby has great filters which allow you to easily find what you are looking for. The overall level of skill is pretty low, with many reckless players who buy in for short stacks. It is not uncommon to see people all-in pre-flop with less than premium hands (such as AJ or KT) and sometimes not even suited! Players represent countries from all over the world, and each player is able to select or upload a custom icon to be displayed next to their name at the table.

Carbon Poker currently offers Limit and No-Limit Texas Hold'em up to $25/50 as well as Omaha and Pot-Limit Omaha with limits as high as $25/50. They also offer: Omaha Hi/Lo, 7 Card Stud, 7 Card Stud Hi/Lo, Razz, 5 Card Stud, 5 Card Draw, Triple Draw (both 2-7 Lowball and A-5 Lowball) and Badugi.

The lion’s share of the action centers on the Texas Hold’em tables, especially at the lower stakes. There are usually several table options for whatever type of game you want to play, right up to $2/$4 and higher games. At the higher stakes the action is very scarce.

The Omaha action is hard to come by at any level of stakes. Carbon Poker offers a range from $0.10/$0.20 up to $1/2 for Omaha Hi and up to $3/6 for Hi/Lo.

The 7 Card Stud traffic is about the same as Omaha’s – virtually non existent. The stakes cover from $0.10/0.20 up to $2/4 for both Hi and Hi/Lo. If you are looking for 7 Card action you really should look elsewhere. As for the rest of the games that Carbon Poker offers, the only one worth mentioning is the 5 Card Draw, with 2-3 tables at the lowest stakes going just about any time of day. Triple Draw, Badugi etc. practically do not get any traffic whatsoever.

Carbon Poker has the standard tournament line up of Sit and Go’s, Multi-Table tournaments, Guaranteed, Freezout, Re-buys, and Turbos. They get about as much action as one would expect from a site this size.

Where Carbon Poker really shines is in the abundance of features offered by their slick software. They offer many features not found at other sites, such as the ability to “rabbit hole” the remainder of the hand, the ability to show one or both cards when you are the last to fold or are mucking your hand uncalled, and a very flexible and easy to use note-taking system that allows icons to be assigned to players that remain visible on the table at all times.

This comes with a price: running two tables, I found Carbon Poker to take up 120MB of RAM and was constantly using between 10 and 20% of a 1.6 GHz laptop CPU. The features can be turned down in the 'Settings' menu from the lobby, so that the software will not be as resource intensive on an older PC. One possible bug is that the all-in button, if clicked, will put your whole stack in without asking for confirmation. This can be an expensive mis-click! However, clicking fold if you can check will pop up a window asking you to confirm.

The Carbon Poker software is configured to use as default a tabbed system that is extremely poor for multi-tabling: it opens each table you select in a tab in the main window, and when it's your turn the tab blinks and will make a sound, but will not open, so it is very easy to miss your turn and be sat out. In order to fix this you must go into the 'Settings' menu in the lobby and go to the 'Window' tab. Selecting the 'New Window' option will open every table into a new window, like pretty much every other poker software. It is confusing as to why they have chosen the tab system as the default.

The lobby displays the number of hands per hour, average pot size and players per flop, vital statistics when choosing a table to sit at. The main lobby at Carbon Poker is very nicely laid out, so players can find the games they are looking for, and the filters and tabs are extremely well organized. They do not have any pop-ups or distracting flash graphics to clutter up the main lobby board. Another nice feature is that you can choose to hide both play money games and full tables from the main lobby board. The only problem is that as the night goes on, tables gradually die until the selection of games becomes very poor.

The tables are very well laid out and display all the information you expect. The current pot size, along with the total sum of all pending bets is displayed, as well as the amount of rake taken. Players’ names, stacks, and bets are all clearly visible and easy to identify. The location of the button can be confusing sometimes in full ring games, due to the closeness of the seats.

Carbon Poker is currently offering a first time deposit bonus of 100% up to $200, which is not bad, and players are able to clear bonuses quicker than in many other sites. To clear bonuses, players earn comp points for each raked hand in which they are dealt cards. More comp points are earned at higher stakes, so obviously the higher you play, the faster the bonuses are earned. They also offer periodic re-load bonuses about every two months, usually in the 20 to 30% range (sometimes going up to 100%) with a cap of a couple hundred dollars.

Carbon Poker is also a freeroll-lover’s dream. For those new to the site, there is a $500 new depositor freeroll every day for 14 days. Everybody is eligible for the $50 freerolls, which run four times daily. Additionally, there are $1,000 freerolls every weekday, a $2,000 freeroll every Saturday, a $10,000 freeroll every Sunday except for the last Sunday of the month, and a $50,000 freeroll on the last Sunday of every month. Players can earn a seat into each by earning enough comp points over certain periods of time. For regular players, this is not hard to do at all.

Comp points can also be used to purchase items from the poker room’s store.

Carbon Poker is licensed by the Kahnawake Gaming Board, a world leading gaming regulatory body in based in Canada. They use a random number generator to ensure that the 52 card deck is impossible to predict and 128-bit data encryption to ensure you data privacy.

The email support at Carbon Poker is good with accurate, helpful and quick responses usually sent within one hour. They also offer live chat support, but no phone support is available at this time.