Stacked with Daniel Negreanu

Here’s a game design nightmare: Make no-stakes Texas Hold’em compelling without involving any money. Most would say this is an impossible task, but STACKED comes about as close as you can get without putting any of your hard-earned scratch on the line.

The game focuses solely on Texas Hold’em (including limit and no-limit), and although there is a quick play option, much of the gameplay revolves around creating a character and rising through the tournament ranks in career mode. You start with a small bankroll, buy in to little single-table and multi-table public tournaments, and try to do well enough to ultimately get a seat in the championships.

The presentation is superb and resembles a televised match. Players and the casino environment are modeled in 3D, the dealer sweeps his arms across the table to rake in bets each round, and opponents fidget, mumble, and whine as they try to figure out how to play their hand. There’s even a button that lifts up your hole cards so you can see them in a little picture-in-picture box, just like the TV shows do.

Few games have ever done a better job of depicting what it is like to sit at a poker table, and that’s the game’s biggest problem. All of those animated 3D player models, voice samples, and other multimedia assets must be loaded from the UMD, and it’s dog slow. It takes a full minute just to load a tournament, and once it is going, the audio and video hiccup nearly every time the disc spins up…which is often. This doesn’t make the game unplayable but each hand drags out far longer than it should. This diminishes the game’s potential as a learning tool because when you are picking up the basics of Hold’em, it helps to play as many hands as possible.

Although STACKED claims to have a learning AI that monitors your betting behavior and reacts accordingly, there’s really no way to tell if it works because you never see an opponent’s cards when they fold or win. All of the showdowns that took place during testing indicated that the AI opponents tend to play tight, and rarely make all-in bets unless they have something special in the hole. The good news is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to game the system and consistently trick the AI into making bad decisions. Going all-in on a pure bluff gets you knocked out of the tournament more often than not, and the knowledge that getting back in requires sitting through an excruciatingly long loading screen encourages sensible play. If you do not want to put up with AI opponents, the game supports multiplayer in ad hoc, infrastructure, and online Internet modes.

A set of full-motion video tutorials by poker pro Daniel Negreanu is included, but most segments are brief and very basic. There is some decent betting advice, and newcomers to the game (assuming there are any at this point) can learn the essentials, but most players will find no reason to sit through these lectures.