Hehe, I’m not sure about their official spelling, but I guess it’s 9poker, not that it mattered as both domains (.com) are connected. So, why am I even talking about that? Because I selected nine to be my next bonus hunt “victim”. After finishing bodog within such a short time (points still pending, I hope I’ll get them soonish) I was on the lookout for another good promotion. The nine promotion at PokerSavvy sounded good: the usual 50 deposit and you’ll need to get 250 Points with nine to get 700 points. Fair enough, so I got to it yesterday.

Quick review of my experience so far:

1. Signup was mostly painless, there were numerous inconsistencies and inconveniences though:

– the sign up is done via the secure part of their website, so far so good, the only thing they should explain to me is why I can use all letters, numbers and symbols on their website, but not in the poker client. I had the feeling that this was the reason I couldn’t login in the poker client. So I fired up Live Chat support and got the answer and the password changed right away. Fine, I still told the support guy to bitchslap the designers and that they should get this fixed…this is ridiculous..a simple character check in the sign up form shouldn’t be hard to implement *cough* 😉

– I deposited via the signup and once I was able to login I was facing the next problem: where’s my money? So I fire up the cashier, nothing, I fire up the FAQ, nothing, I fire up the account info, money there, but how to transfer it? Cashier, nothing. I fire up support yet again…aaaaah there’s another cashier, which is a symbol in the poker client. Error #1: I clicked on “deposit to poker” during signup, money still went to “normal” (sports betting) wallet. Error #2: Why would the “transfer funds from (other) wallet” be only a symbol, but the same functionality isn’t available via the cashier menu???

– The points you grind out are only updated once a day as far as I’ve seen so far…this sucks!

So after that little headshaking and laughing at the messy system I fired up some poker games and played for a while. As it was approaching early morning, yet again, I decided to quit though and so I pause my play until this afternoon. Impressions so far: the games are good, the sidegames (Chinese Poker, Guts, etc) are addictive, the traffic seems to be 98% from Canada (at least 90-99% of the players I’ve met so far were from Canada), the UI is not the best I’ve seen…I mean it’s pretty looking…

…but some features are just a big PITA, e.g. the raise function – the standard raise function is a min raise, so far so good, if you want to raise more though you don’t have a bar to pull right away, but you have to click on “raise other” first and then adjust the bar (or type in the amount) and then click the raise button…not really good.

So…so far I would rate the room with a two thumbs up for their quick and easy support (via live chat), two thumbs down for their inconsistent stuff all over the place, one thumb down for their poker client. Let’s see how long it’ll take for me to grind out the 250 Points…

On another note: Did you know that Matt from PokerSavvy added a nice little item to the shop? For every 450 points you can order a money transfer of 45$ to either paypal or Neteller. This really rocks! Now I don’t say that Gift Certificates are bad, but they’re limited in use (e.g. only for Amazon.com) and the other stuff is basically out of reach for international customers like me (shipping&handling is not worth it)…so instead of going a route like PP gift certificate -> PP acount -> withdrawal to Neteller, you can now go the direct way PokerSavvy -> Neteller/Paypal, this clearly puts PokerSavvy ahead of the competition, so I’ll probably focus my search on their partners once I’m done with nine.