Ads:Online Pool in play89.com

The following is a paid review:

Play89 is a new pool site that offers free Online Pool game, a variety of tournaments and information on billiards, pool and snooker.
Play89 joins the online gambling pool of sites (no pun intended) much like all those online poker sites, you can download the game for free and play for free with "play money" or deposit your own money and win the big cash. However, unlike a lot of the card/boardgame adaptations, real Pool skill has little to do with this online game.

The gameplay is very similar to many other online and simplistic pool games and features a guideline and a simple mouse interface and over the table view. The gameplay works and the game is a fun distraction where the skill is in one's knowledge of geometry rather than one's acuity with a pool stick. Don't get me wrong, knowledge of pool certainly helps, but if you're a pool shark who can't use a computer mouse...all the skill in the world won't help you win in this video game iteration.



The software is a windows download. The download does not contain any adware junk which is a no brainer in my opinion. I have played on other sites that use java/flash applets to do the same thing and the native software operates much more seamlessly.

One of the distinguishing features of this site is that you can play for real money in addition to playing for fun. Ironically this is not considered gambling as pool is considered a game of skill rather than a game of chance.

I was pretty impressed with how realistic software is. The cue ball bounces off the rails with a softer bounce than hitting the other balls on the table. You can also add english (ie spin) when making your shot - which is something I could never get right on a real pool table.

A big draw of Play89 is daily and monthly pool tournaments. There are small sit and go tournaments with as few as four people that can take about an hour to play. The tournaments scale up to huge tournaments with hundreds of contestants that can take the entire day to play.

Play89 is available in 15 or so languages including French, German, Italian, Russian and more. This helps insure that there are a steady stream of players to play with from all over the world.