Pool Stars have launched their new website, network and pool software which is being hyped as the next best thing in the online pool world. Below you'll find a general Pool Stars Review.
The PoolStars online pool game is free to download and play and is also going to be available to play for real cash at some stage in the future. At the moment they are not releasing (or at least I could not find a date) which says when they will start cash pool games on the network. UPDATE: they have already launched the cash pool games it's just not immediately obvious from the home page of their website that the games include cash.
They have launched with a Pool Forum directly on their website which is a great way to be completely open an honest about what's going on. Sometimes these forums can be a mixed blessing where you'll end up with people slamming the website about things they are doing wrong or other times you'll have enough of a positive online pool community that it'll help get people more involved.
Starting the Pool Stars Download is easy although I noticed on the download page that the recommended PC requirements are a 3Ghz Intel Pentium or equivalent. That's a very high specification for a recommended Pc as not many people would have something that high unless they're really into buying PC's for high end games. The download is 8MB which is about what you would expect for quality pool software.
Their main offers on their pool stars download page are;
Genuine life like physics supervised by Steve Davis
Proprietary easy to use 3d platform and interface
100% free to use for play money
Online Pool Tournaments and Sit & Go
Community with player profiles and avatars
The setup of the pool game actually includes notes on how to play the game (e.g. the pool game controls) which is pretty useful. I haven't seen that on any of the other pool software games before.
Install was quite quick.
Login was easy and I like that they have the option of Auto-login to the Pool Stars network.
The lobby is a simple to use graphical interface for getting to the pool games. I jumped right in to watch a pool game which was in progress and found it easy to get to and easy to see what was going on in the game.
You have the option of turning on the background scenery for the pool hall although it looks like the pool hall details are not turned on by default in the software. This will be so that the loading times of the pool game are faster.
Chatting while you're plaing at Pool Stars looks like it is easy to get to and simple to use.
There is a country flag next to each of the pool stars players so that you know which county the pool player you're up against is from. That's a nice touch to add in a bit of competitiveness.
In the Lobby of Pool Stars there is also a Single Table Games tab as well as a Tournaments tab. Under the Tournaments there are options for playing games like 9 ball Sit'n'Go tournaments as well as others. There are different levels of buy-in although most seem to be for $10 and are being played as 9 ball only.
Under the Cashier option, you can see...
your real money balance for playing in cash, your 'play money' for playing practice pool games and there is also a VIP Points total.
Overall this appears to be a very good piece of pool software and it looks like a network which could really take off. Hopefully they'll end up with more pool players online at any single time as when I logged in there were only 4 players online!
If you're interested in having a go yourself you can go to PoolStars.com to have a look.
Today I found a very interesting pool comps site (poolcomps.com). They seem to have a large number of both free to play online pool games as well as pay for play pool games.
