Summery – Full Tilt started in early 2004 and is undoubtedly the fastest growing site at this time.  By doing a lot of advertising, and sponsoring a lot of well-known pros, and by consistently having among the best, if not the best bonuses, they have grown fast. There are usually around 50,000 players so you will find activity at the games you want to play most of the time.

Competition – The ring games start as low as $.05/$.10 and go up as $200/$400 and sometimes even higher.  Because they’ve sponsored so many pros, and those pros actually play at Full Tilt, there are more high dollar games here than any other US site.  PokerStars has games with lower blinds and may therefore be a better place for the beginner on a budget to start while they are figuring out the game.  But once you have the feel of the game you want to be playing higher levels anyway, cause if you play where blinds are real low the play is pretty weak.  Full Tilt has lots of Sit-n-Go tournaments but you will have to wait a little longer for them to fill up than at PokerStars.  For example a 45 player $1 sit-n-go (a good beginners tournament) will take about a minute to fill up at PokerStars, but 4-5 minutes at Full Tilt.  On the other hand Full Tilt has some tournaments that PokerStars doesn’t. For bigger tournaments Full Tilt has a lot and there is always something starting, and at a wide range of levels so any player will find plenty of action.

Software – There software is pretty good now.  As they’ve grown it’s gotten much better.  They’ve had issues with things running slow in the past, but I haven’t noticed any of that in a couple of years.  I do like how well you can edit the windows where you select tournaments or ring games so that you don’t have to see games you are not looking for. For example I don’t play Turbo tournaments, so by unchecking a box I can weed them out of my view.   As for the tables there are several design schemes, and decent stats.

Promotions – They do have a Full Tilt Points (FTP) promotion, but honestly I’ve never tried to figure out how it works.  It never looked interesting enough to figure it out, but if I do ever figure it out I got a lot of points!  What I do like is that they have tournaments where you can qualify for live events (like WSOP). You usually have to finish first in a large tournament to qualify for the live events.  I’ve never finished first in one of those, but it’s worth a try.  For Full Tilt's current promotions see the banner below, it is a live update.