Welcome to Party Poker - with a cooler name, a better color scheme, but slighty worse support. Empire Poker is a 'skin' of Party, meaning they are essencially the same website, with the same player base.

Empire's cashier is very quick. Deposits are instant (no surprises there) and withdrawals are almost as fast. Typically it is less than 12 hours for neteller, and is usually about 3 or 4. This is very pleasing, especially since there have been a lot of limited term bonuses recently and I hope they'll be offering more to try and hold on to the European and Canadian players.

Unfortunately, Empire customer support isn't the quickest or the best. Among my online poker friends, "working for Empire Support" has come to mean someone is a few cards short of a full deck. The emails that are sent quickly tend to have a lot of junk information in there rather than the answer you actually need.

This can be a problem, because Empire's software is not the best in the business. There are several small annoying features about it which you'll find out if you play there - my pet hate is the way the lobby pops up when you close a table. The color scheme is just plain NASTY. You can't pick your own avatar, but the buttons are easy to find, and everything works pretty well, so I can put up with the green and yellow colour scheme (it's easily modifiable though thankfully).

Empire Poker used to be the biggest online poker room. Then Bill Frist came along and Empire decided they didn't really need American players. Yeah. Bad mistake. Overnight (a Friday, in case you're interested) they dropped like a stone and are now battling for second place with Full Tilt. Things are only getting worse for Empire, as more and more foreign players realize that the only thing that was keeping them at Empire was Joe Fish from the US of A. they could bottom out soon, but they'll need to learn the art of customer care and probably improve their software.

Empire used to have a lot of big tournaments, like the Empire Poker Millions Cruises, satellites to the World Series of Poker, and large guaranteed prize-pool weekly tournaments. They seem to be reconsidering this at the moment, but their offerings have decreased a lot, hopefully they will return towards the glory days of million dollar weeklies. Most Empire tournaments have a lot of satellites, but there's not a lot of small buyin multi table tournaments that pay out (as opposed to giving entries into larger tournaments). Their Sit and Go options are very good (although paying a whole dollar to enter a $5 tournament is just highway robbery - other places have $5+0.50, which is much better). You can also find single table satellites for their big multi-table tournaments, which are nice for those of us who keep odd hours and aren't around for the multi-table satellites. Empire also offer multi-level SNG Steps tournaments The basic idea is that the winners from each round go through to another bigger buyin SNG, until Step 5 where the winners take a big prize - it's the Chris Moneymaker dream on a smaller scale.

Empire have a lot of other promotions, which are nice little extras. Their new player's club (earn points to get merchandise or tournament entries) is pretty much the same as everywhere else, but their Bad Beat Jackpot is huge (one lucky table recently hit $739,622 - supposedly the largest Bad Beat Jackpot in poker history). Personally I missed a $600k jackpot when my royal beat a full house rather than Quads - on a double paired board, come on!) so I'm not a fan of jackpot games at the moment.