Players Perspective of Carbon
Carbon Poker, part of the Merge network is fast becoming one of the most popular online poker rooms, or so I keep reading!, so I thought I would give the room a look and see for myself what all the fuss is about.
As a web site developer I do tend to scrutinize sites and can be somewhat picky at times, but I have to say that my initial impressions were rather good!, the only irritation I found being the clock showing “Carbon Poker time” that sits on the home page under the tournament feed that seemed to be sending me back in time on each and every visit that I repaid to the home page, but that's another story!.
Downloading the site took around 2 minutes and installation onto my computer a further minute. I did get a little irritated by the registration procedure, though its fare to say that there was nothing untoward about it and the final touch of having to confirm my e-mail address before I could access the site proper did leave me feeling more secure than I have with some rooms in the past. The whole process took me around fifteen minutes before I was able to browse around with my new play money account.
My first port of call was the tournament list, but due to fact it was 7.30 am eastern time ( 12.30 pm GMT ) not a huge amount of action was to be found. The Sit and Go list was a different story altogether though and I found well over 100 tables full and playing here, as well as many more half full and waiting for the additional players they needed to start their respective games. Entry levels here ranged from $ 0.06 to basically where ever other players online wanted to let you go, I did see some waiting at higher stake Sit and Go tournaments. Buy-ins and game variants included NLH, PLH, FLH, PL Omaha, to name but a few. At this time of the morning some 2700 players were showing as being online.
When re-visiting later in the day the number of players online was, as you would expect, vastly different to the early bird numbers I had seen earlier on in the day. At 11 am I found the numbers had increased to 3700. 1 pm it was 4800 and mid afternoon still had player numbers in the region of 4600. 16.30 was still seeing 4760 online, and at 19.00 there were 5993 players online. Some sites tend to display the number of tables on the go, not the case here, at least I could not see it if it was there, but in all honesty, does that really matter, as a player you want to know there are players on the site and then, hopefully, find plenty of them at your chosen discipline and level.
Tournament's
Now what I really like here is the amount and range of guaranteed tournament's, aside of the two larger $12.5k guaranteed freezeout on Saturdays with a buy-in of $30 + $3 at 13.00 ET and the bigger prize pool of $50k in the Sunday freezeout at 15.00 ET for a buy-in of $100 + $9, you will find somewhere in the region of 30 daily guarantee events ranging from a buy-in of $ up to $ with the added bonus that you can use your vip points to buy into each and everyone of them. On the FreeRoll front, I do think Carbon are being generous with the prize pools here, although they don't quite hit the highs of 5 years or so back, but that's yet another story :].
Promotions.
On the promotions front, what really stands out is the bad beat jackpot which stood at $74,262,00 whilst coming to the end of my review. Aside of this I really like the VIP Points program, most of all the free points entry into all those great guaranteed tournaments. You will also find a great 600% first deposit bonus in the lobby area, well worth a hit!.
Customer service experience.
I e-mailed customer services so as to get an idea of what their service on this is like, now this wasn't over anything serious, just over the clock annoyance written of earlier. I received an automated reply with a ticket number within a minute, no big deal really, but what really impressed me was the opportunity I was given to to go on live what with an operator if my query was so important to me that I didn't want to wait the 4 to 8 hours I was promised I would receive an e-mail reply in. They put a nice little chat button on the e-mail. This I simply had to try and was really impressed with the almost instant reply, and though my hang up was almost as instant as the reply, due to the fact I really didn't have anything that important to talk about, I was seriously impressed by this.
Banking experience, deposit and withdrawal methods.
Once I had found my way around it was obviously time to try this out and I have to confirm that my experience here was faultless. I found the cashier panel easy to understand and super easy to deposit through and funds were in my online account in a flash. There are 14 methods of depositing funds to your account at Carbon Poker including Visa, Master card , Click2Pay, ClickandBuy, ECO, INSTADEBIT, Moneybookers, Maestro, Visa Electron, NETELLER, WebMoney, Cash Transfer, Paysafecard and uKash. Aside of Cash Transfer who have a minimum deposit limit of $100, the highest of the others was $25, with most being just $10. The withdrawal site of things was not so clear and is something you need to try for yourself as I simply would not have ended up back there.
Overall experience.
On a whole, my first experience on the Carbon Poker room was a very good one, my only real criticism, aside of my clock issue again, I can't get that out of my head!, would be the jumbling up of listed events in the tournament feed every time I scrolled too fast or it was being updated. Though this could be down to my mini lap top, as could some earlier issues!. Not once during the 16 hours that I constantly had the site online and I myself was logged in, did I have a disconnection issue. The banking was excellent and although I was impressed with the e-mail reply with regards my issue to customer services and the chat button it included, my reply had not come through in the promised 8 hour time frame by the time I was finishing off my observations.
On a final note, if you decide to give Carbon a look in the near future, I hope but more importantly know that your experience will be a happy one.
