Ladbrokes Poker Review

Overall 79 Ease of Competition 78 Tournaments 79 Customer Service 80 Software 85

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Please note: Ladbrokes Poker does not accept real-money players from the United States.

Overview
Ladbrokes is a well-established British bookmaker, with many land-based betting offices. They recently left their stand-alone poker room to merge with Microgaming. This merger has boosted the size of their player pool which was a crucial thing for their operations since they were previously quite small.

Bonus
Ladbrokes offers a 100% first-time deposit bonus up to $1,000. This is a good bonus, but it has some strings attached.

The bonus must be cleared within 30 days in order to be released. Ladbrokes has effectively "priced people in" to depositing on the conservative side. For example, if you make a $300 deposit but only clear $275 of the bonus in the first 30 days, you receive $0 in bonus money. For this reason, it is important to make a deposit that you are certain to clear. Players must participate in 600 raked hands for every $50 in bonus money.

Additionally, in order to receive the bonus, one must complete a form on the Ladbrokes website once they have completed the requisite number of hands. Most online poker rooms' bonuses are automated, so this is kind of a pain.

Promotions
Ladbrokes holds a really cool monthly "rake race" promotion in which $1,000,000 is given away each month. The top 3,000 players on the Rake Race Leaderboard receive cash prizes. The prizes range from $20,000 to first all the way down to $50 for 3,000th. To receive points on the leaderboard, one must simply participate in real-money cash games. The leaderboard is updated daily.

This is basically just a glorified rakeback system, but it's still pretty cool.

Tournaments
Ladbrokes' scheduled tournaments are proportioned heavily towards rebuy events. As a somewhat smaller poker room, their tournaments usually draw around 150 players for most of the standard daily tournaments. High stakes players enjoy the daily $100 rebuy $30,000 guaranteed tournament. The sit-n-gos on this site priced higher than $10 are not popular.

Software
The software is smooth and easy to use. They have made improvements to it recently to make it even more user-friendly than it already was.

Competition Level
Ladbrokes games are about average in terms of difficulty. Shorthanded no-limit hold'em is by far the most popular game played at this site.

Ring Games Offered
Texas Hold'em, Omaha, Omaha hi-lo, 7-stud, 5-stud

Fixed Limits: $.25-$.40 to $300-$600
NL & PL Blinds: $.15-$.30 to $25-$50

Tournaments Offered
Single-Table: Fixed-Limit Hold'em, NL Hold'em, and Pot-Limit Omaha
Multi-Table: Fixed-Limit and NL Hold'em

Single-Table: $5 to $10,000
Multi-Table: $1 to $2,500