Doyles Room Review

Doyles Room Summary

It would be easy to write off Doyles Room as a bit of a novelty act or sideshow, attempting to capitalize on one of the most recognized names in poker, that of the legendary Doyle Brunson. Upon first visiting the site you’re greeted with a video of Doyle giving you a rather generic message about never knowing who you might play against, and giving you his personal nickname on the site, which doesn’t really help the site break from this perception. After downloading the software and playing some games though, I can safely say that the site offers a lot more than initially meets the eye, but also suffers in some key areas. Doyles is more a site for players looking to utilize multiple sites for their poker needs, as it does offer some nice guaranteed tournaments. Players looking for just one site to call home will probably want to look elsewhere to satisfy all their poker desires. Doyles went through a period where they weren’t accepting U.S players, but they are again accepting players from the U.S, so no need to let that stop you from giving the site a try.

Doyles Room Bonus

First up is the depositing bonuses for new players, and Doyles is very strong in this regard, with a 110% match bonus up to a maximum $500. Like most sites, 1 point is earned for every game you’re a part of with $1 rake. They also calculate the bonus right to the penny, so where many sites will simply give you all or nothing, a $0.99 rake at Doyles means 0.99 of a point earned. Every 16.6 points unlocks $1 of your bonus, and it’s paid out in $10 increments as it’s earned. You have 3 months to collect your bonus, which is a fair amount of time. Deposits and withdrawals can be made with credit cards, e-checks, Neteller, Instadebit or Moneybookers, but U.S players are restricted to credit cards and checks. Withdrawals take 72 hours to process, and withdrawals to credit cards can take as long as 30 days for the credit card company to process.

Doyles Room Promotions

Promotions are a mixed bag. There’s a few daily, weekly, and monthly guaranteed tournaments, which are nice for good players, but after that there really isn’t much happening besides the regular play styles and tournaments, although they currently have a satellite tournament running for entry into the 2009 Canadian Poker Championships, which are aired on Canadian television.
Their only other major promotion is their Bounty Tournaments, which reward large sums of money for knocking the noted players out of the tournament. You can win $25,000 if you knock three of the players with bounties on their heads out of the tournament, but as you may never even cross paths with these players before you or them get knocked out, it’s largely a matter of luck. The first time players participate in one of these events, they can get their buy-in amount ($27.50) refunded to them, no matter how well they did, so this a nice incentive for new players to at least give it a try once.

Doyles Room Games

Doyles has Texas Hold’em, Omaha, and Seven Card Stud. The traffic is modest, placing it in the middle of pack among poker sites, averaging about 5,000-10,000 players. Competition is very soft from what I’ve seen, even in higher money games. No limit games come with blinds ranging from $0.02/$0.04 to $500/$1,000. Finding games for Hold’em and Omaha at varying limits is fairly easy, yet despite the limited game selection, there are very few Seven Card Stud games available. The software is very functional and runs at a good speed, though I personally found it to be somewhat busy and distracting in its layout. I prefer simpler and cleaner interfaces that make it easy to spot the vital information.

Doyles Room Rewards Program

Doyles’ stumbles slightly with their rewards program, which is overly complicated, seemingly with the goal of hiding the fact that there are really are no tangible rewards in store for the regular players, just entries into more tournaments and drawings, and chances to win additional prizes. First is the gold chip meter, which can be viewed in your profile. Filling this meter gives you a gold chip, which can get you entry into gold chip tournaments. Next you have the gold cards, which are randomly awarded during games. Collecting an entire set of 52 nets you $52,000, but as one of the cards (the ace of spades) has odds of 1 in 5,000,000 of acquiring, this isn’t exactly a realistic goal. You can redeem those cards instead for entry into draws or the gold card 500, which is a weekly contest to see who redeems the most cards for a chance at modest cash prizes, but by doing so the cards are removed from your collection, and limit your chances of winning the large prize, as remote as they are. While it is a different setup than the typical rewards points system found at most sites, it ultimately fails to deliver. There is promise of a Doyles Room store opening in the future, where you’ll be able to exchange your chips for actual prizes, like electronics, which would go a long way towards redeeming their otherwise underwhelming rewards program.