With the advent of social media it seems like peer reviews and reader opinions should be the best advice on where to shop, what to buy and in gaming – where to play. But 99% of the time player reviews of gambling sites suck – They are totally useless for making any kind of informed decision.
Why ? Because most of them are simply the rantings of sore losers.
So this is a bit of a revisit & rehash of an old post that is still relevant especially with 2020 hindsight …
As WSOP supremo Nolan Dalla will tell you in his vintage post “For $1000 I’ll listen to your bad beat story” back in 2013 –
The number one rule of gambling and poker is
you should never ever listen to a sore loser … ever.
The problem is most player’s who post a review are posting because they have had “bad” luck not because they actually had a bad customer experience. They have little if any real in depth knowledge or most importantly comparative experience of other gaming sites.
That’s not to say that most of review sites “authoritative” reviews are any more helpful, honest or useful.
Worst But Most Visible Player Reviews
Google, social media, the plethora of review sites and the internet generally has put increasingly more weight to reader review type feedback and the opinions of joe blogs – which is all well and good until you start to read it.
Things got so bad that when PokerScout redesigned their website (around the summer of 2018)- they dropped all the reader reviews of sites because they were essentially the meaningless rants of bitter losers and conspiracy theorists.
So winding the timemachine back to the pre summer of 2018 old version of PokerScout the reader reviews are just shocking, either totally negative about every site (even good ones) or very obvious biased poker room employees posting totally gushing 10/10 reviews or rakeback affiliates clearly trying to promote one brand over another.
Don’t get me wrong this is not about bashing PokerScout, it’s just that their huge array of customer reviews happen to be a really good way to illustrate the flaw of listening to customer feedback specifically in the gaming world.
eg. Revolution 2/10, PokerStars 2/10 & Winamax.fr 1/10
So a casual observer or newbie player would go away thinking that pokerstars and revolution were similarly terrible and that Winnamax is even worse … none of which is a true reflection of those 3 sites and where they stand relatively to each other.
Apparently it gets even worse –
PokerStars (the world’s most popular poker room online) had 596 reviews scoring a weighted average of 2.10, while revolution (a slow paying nearly no paying network I wouldn’t have touched with a barge pool that is no longer in business) had 139 reviews scoring 3.3 suggesting that Revolution is better than PokerStars which it very definitely, most absolutely it is NOT.
Confused ? If you were a new player you certainly would be.
BTW I had a very quick check on the Winamax expresso promotion and it’s very clear that it was a random added prize (very similar to the old PokerStars $1 million golden SNG’s) – what did the guy think ??? That every game would have $10,000 jackpot prize ???
With all due respect moronic complaints like this bring down perfectly good rooms while rubbish rooms manage to disappear into the mush of low scores without getting the truly negative attention they deserve.
PKR Forum Members Fought Back
I wasn’t singling out PokerScout as all sites that feature unmoderated player reviews pretty much suck everywhere I’ve ever seen them. But I’m not the only one who noticed them, back in the day PKR forum members happened to search “PKR Poker Review” and found the seemingly all negative “player” reviews of pkr.
Active members of the then PKR community were shocked and disappointed that their favourite site was being represented by such negative yet unwarranted feedback. The response in the PKR forum kind of proves an often forgotten quirk of human nature where we are very quick to complain about stuff that we don’t like (rightly or wrongly) but are woefully poor at extolling the virtues of something we have found that we like.
The trouble is that those terribly unreliable and uninformative reviews used to be lost out on page 99 of google where nobody cared for or saw these idiots opinions. Post google panda the PKR and other reviews on pokerscout are now very much the first impression new players will get of good sites like PokerStars (and back in the day PKR before it’s somewhat sad demise.
Reader Opinions v Affiliate Sales Pitch
So on the one hand you can listen to angry losing novice gamblers who would give every poker site or casino they play a 1/10 “never play here again – they are cheats / rigged RNG / villains” (etc etc delete as appropriate) – This give you absolutely nothing in the way of useful information and I would hope it’s clear they are not making very informed statements.
OR
You could try to read through all the glowing sales pitch style reviews found on many affiliate sites that just want you sign-up at whatever site review page you landed on. Most are just in it for the commission and many can’t help but say every site is brilliant out of their 50 reviews of literally any site that will give them a commission.
Given that peer reviews / facebook recommendation / consumer reviews are becoming increasingly popular for making people “more informed” on virtually all purchases and decisions – Just why are they doomed to be useless in the gambling world ?
You Shouldn’t Listen To A Sore Loser
Quite simply no other product or service has a losing proposition as an intrinsic part of what your buying.
It’s that simple, when you get advice on what car to buy, people will tell you which ones are unreliable or expensive to run but when you come to purchase you will get a car and pretty much what you expected.
With gambling your paying for something that is most likely to get lost and have nothing to show for it – That’s called taking a gamble. You stand to win more or lose your stake.
Sh*t or Bust
But it is inevitable that people who lose need to rant and let off steam – If you don’t believe me, take a look at the ranting player letter to PokerStars from Bill Fillmaff in the youtube video at the bottom of this blog.
Generally Negative Reviews Mask Problem Sites
The other interesting problem with having sites with 100’s of generally negative results with the occasional very very obvious glowing “employee PR review” is that the genuinely bad ones to avoid actually get lost in the general malaise of sore losers just slating the site they happened to play and lose on – That really is no help to the novice player looking to get a clear indication of sites to avoid at the very least.
Conclusion
As Nolan Dalla said (you did read his article didn’t you) as soon as you start to hear a hint of a bad beat story just walk away – Not all player reviews are created equally.
The best information is going to come from people who have invested a lot of their time trying to established solid comparative reviews with information from a players POV but with the added insight of being knowledgeable of the industry.
The only place you are realistically going to get that is from affiliates running poker guide type sites. Look for all round sites where they are about helping you as a player with tips and strategy, not just about bonus code pages and sign-up bonuses.
Site like gamblista.com (and it’s previous incarnation 4kingpoker.com) base all ratings on a balanced player perspective regardless of the size of commissions we receive and have the long term loyalty of players to a good brand as a priority not just making a quick buck peddling unknown also rans.
