Purple Lounge Overview
Purple Lounge is rapidly growing site on the popular Microgaming network, which currently is not taking US customers. This is an average site, however the promotions they are coming up with to attract players are fantastic. Traffic is ok so you can find the game you want. If you play good poker, this site will reward you.
Purple Lounge offers an attractive poker room, designed to run a smooth game. Their traffic ensures that a wide variety of table limits, and type of games, can be found. The software runs in a slick way, although graphics are not extraordinary, but actually pretty common. However, they offer all the useful features you want expect to find and this is a great site for multi-tabling. The software although leaves room for improvement, gets the main aspect covered: function ability. Purple Lounge runs interesting promotions with a very interesting bad beat jackpot (featured on a numerical counting scroll at the main lobby).
At Purple Lounge they are very committed with financial responsibility and anti-scam. At their website you can find a letter by one of their auditors: PricewaterhouseCoopers stating that cards are dealt using a random card generator.
They share the same player base and software platform with all the other skins on the Microgaming network, so if you have played at sites such as Unibet Poker or Gnuf Poker, you will feel right at home.
Purple Lounge Game Features
Purple Lounge offers great action, good traffic and game diversity. The games offered are Texas Hold'em, Omaha, Omaha Hi-Lo, Seven-Card Stud, Five-Card Draw and Five-Card Stud, as well as casino action. Almost anything is available full-table games, short-handed and heads-up tables.
Soft competition can be found at the medium limit tables, where the player’s flop averages ranges from 45 to high 60% and up to a 70% when you get into the micro limits. However, at high stakes levels there are a number of experienced players where the flop view can get to the 35%. You can find a lot of fish to exploit since there are no micro $0.01 limits, with the tables starting at $0.05/$0.10. So newbies and fish will be found where they can be exploited.
The action at Purple Lounge is strong but if you do not find the table that matches your likes, then the private table feature is fantastic because it ensures you will have exactly what you want, if it is not open yet. There is a very interesting feature to tag players as “sharks” or “fish” which can come in very hand. Traffic at Purple Lounge Poker needs to increase as they share players, as part of the Microgaming Network, with Battlefield Poker, Bet 365 Poker, Crazy Poker, Poker Time and Pokerium.
The tournament traffic is good, from 5,000 to 6,000 at peak times and the traffic during ring games is around the 10,000 real money players during peak times. Purple Lounge offers action at all times of the day, on all different games, but at lower levels. At the $2/$4 you wont’ find many players and will have a long wait before you see some action. Multi and single table tournaments’ action is pretty good, but populated in lower stakes levels. They have a strong promotions department and always seem to come up with something great to offer players. They offer free entries to their guaranteed prize tournaments. Also they are offering seats to any poker event you can imagine such as: the EPT Barcelona 2007, the Swedish Poker Tour.
Their promotion “Mad Dash”, held on July 2007, is a prize of $3,500 for the highest raking Purple Lounge player and the player with the highest number of raked hands stands to win a fantastic $10,000. If the player doesn’t win the prize, every player on the Top 50 will be rewarded at the end of the month.
Their “Purple Loyalty Program” is superb, since they joined it to their previously “Quintessentially” Program. They offer passes to the best operas, restaurants, concerts, plays and sporting events. They claim these tickets are exclusive and for the sophisticated player. This program acts as a members club and as a concierge service.
It is very weird, however that, sometimes, when a specific type of game is requested, and the demand is there to populate the table, it is not created. This can be due to the fact that the number of players you see is from the shared platform and not the actual players of Purple Lounge.
There is an interesting thing about the sign-up bonus-- it's a 100% initial deposit bonus, but the catch is that it can only be cleared if you play at $1/$2 stakes or higher, which is very inconvenient for the “bottom feeders”.
Purple Lounge Software Features
Purple Lounge is powered by Microgaming software. They share the Prima Network player platform and the graphics are clear and functionality is good.
Graphics at Purple Lounge are of a standard level (clean design), although they tend to be a little cluttered and it takes some time to get used to them. However, most users tend to think they are OK, nothing special. Avatars are not used and the felt’s color is of a deep purple (matching the theme of the site). The deep purple color is not too disturbing but definitely not easy on the eye.
The Purple Lounge lobby is very well laid out. There are plenty of customizable options, including the MTT Info Tab, which provides info (without leaving the table), such as: Players Remaining or total entrants, Chips in Play, Tables Remaining, Largest Stack, Smallest Stack, Average Stack and several others.
The latest version of Purple Lounge poker is compatible with a maximum of eight tables at the same time, and if used with the mini view option you can see a maximum of five tables at the time when multi-tabling; which is more than enough for any poker player. Multi-table is executed efficiently and fewer problems have been reported. However tables are a bit too full and chat and other windows can be cluttered.
The player, at any time, can watch an analysis of his own game through an interface on the table to see: folds, calls and re-raises. The hand history feature works pretty well with this software and can be exported to your local PC to further analyze it, but it doesn’t number the hands per session. A useful function is that when you change your bonuses, the lobby counts your raked hands, which makes it easy for the player to know how many he has played.
Purple Lounge Support
Support at Purple Lounge definitely needs improvement. The only way to get support is to click on the “support Link” at the lobby and filling a very poorly designed form. It asks the player to fill in all kind of info, which is weird because if you are logged into your account it should be enough to just provide your username and a security question. Customer Support requires that you enter a lot of info that should be automatically populated or not at all requested.
This is not the fastest method because it can be difficult to write exactly what your issue is about; however once the customer service agent deciphers what you need the responses have a good speed and quality. But c’mon! Invest in a live chat feature; after all, this is about what every other site is doing.
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