Confessions of a Facebook Poker fanatic

by Teresa Adam

If you are like me and 130 million other members, you are active on Facebook. Perhaps you use it to stay connected to family and friends or maybe for work. I am using it to establish my prowess as a poker player. Granted, I am not winning real money, but as I have discovered, playing poker on Facebook is not entirely about the game or the winnings. It's about connecting and sharing with friends and acquaintances.

I stumbled across Texas Hold'em Poker quite by accident. During my usual routine of checking my friends' updated profiles and perusing pictures, I noticed that one of my friends mentioned playing poker. Poker! On Facebook! I downloaded the application, and as they say, the rest is history.

My first Facebook Poker experience is an interesting story. Playing with my friend, it was pointed out that there was someone from the Boston area also at the table. I sent a message asking how the player liked Boston. The player responded that he was actually originally from Sweden and only recently a Boston resident. He was recruited to play hockey for the Boston Bruins' minor league team, and offered to let me go to games for free! It was the least he could do since he routinely cleans me out of chips.

One of the developments in Facebook Poker is the secondary market for Facebook poker chips. People are selling their poker chips on eBay or other sites, and once payment is made, meeting the buyer in Facebook poker room and dumping chips to them. This is a pretty intriguing secondary market, considering the game is free, and you get chips just for signing in if you have a certain number of poker buddies.

But before I settled on Facebook as my exclusive free poker provider, I decided to try a few other applications. First, I signed up for Yahoo! Games and tried the Texas Hold'em game there. The graphics are terrible. The avatars are tiny. I like the fact that you can actually put your picture on Facebook. It makes the game feel more real in that sense.

As my $1,000 in chips turned into $2,000, I enjoyed the fact that the sounds on Yahoo! are a little less annoying than on Facebook. And it is very easy to invite members to join you in other rooms. But I don't have any friends that play on Yahoo!, so I was all alone in the room. And I longed for the familiarity of Facebook. And the silly things like buying dancing chickens for the entire table.

I wasn't impressed with Yahoo!, but I still wanted to make sure I wasn't limiting my free poker-playing experience. So I thought I'd try a "real" online poker room that offered free play. With that in mind, I clicked on a Full Tilt link I saw in Facebook and gave it a shot.

The first thing I saw after clicking on the link was a Full Tilt page with a "Welcome Facebook Poker Players" message. Apparently, Full Tilt is ready for us. The graphics are nice and the automatic blind option quickly become a favorite feature. But the conversation is lacking, the cards are shabby, the play is bad and I run out of chips rather quickly. As I ran out of money, I noticed there was a button on the top of the screen that would send the player off to play for real money. And it got me thinking about the difference between playing for money and playing for free.

So I asked my friend from thepokerfloor.com in South Africa, a fellow self-proclaimed Facebook Poker addict, why he plays for free. "Play money is a waste of time," he proclaimed, even though he plays poker on Facebook every day. "If I wanted to play poker, I'd play for money as there is no point in gambling for no money!" When I asked him why he wasted his time on Facebook Poker, he responded, "I get to challenge friends and show who is the better player!" Indeed. (I should point out, however, that he did not have enough money for the minimum buy-in at the table I was seated at.)

For my friend in Barcelona, Facebook happens to be where he catches up on the social side of things in his life. He views peoples' attraction to Facebook Poker as a way to interact with people. And he thinks the play on the site is good. Considering that there are thousands of players online at a time, even if only .5% are good, that's still a decent percentage. The higher stakes tables, I have found, do have better play. Since reaching "Big Dog" level and gaining VIP status, I have been playing at better and better tables.

But I don't like to play on my own. I prefer to play with friends. I liken it to why people invite friends to their home to play cards versus going into a casino and sitting down. You are playing for the company, for the enjoyment of being with friends.

And this seems to be the magic of poker on Facebook. Social networking and interaction is the main reason people play. And it is kind of nice to let people know I went all-in on a hand and walked away with 15k. As Facebook says, "Getting the hand is luck. What you do with it is skill." Please feel free to join me on Facebook Poker. I am always online, ready for a challenge, and maybe I'll even buy you a Pina Colada.

In addition to being a Facebook Poker whiz, Teresa Adam is the Program Coordinator for the Gambling Portal Webmasters Association (GPWA.org), which is part of the Casino City family. You can become one of Teresa's many poker friends by visiting her Facebook profile.