Big Fish Games Texas Hold'em is one of the many games you can play as a part of Big Fish Casino. There is only one style of play, so far as I discovered for Texas Hold’em, the “Sit&Go,” which simply means you play until you either get tired of your table or you run out of chips. You can leave at any time. I didn’t see any tournaments.

I’ve played a bit of poker. Particularly Texas Hold’em. I’ve played casually with friends for years, played in a couple local fundraiser tournaments, played a lot online. I watch the World Series of Poker every year. I have become the Governor of Poker probably 3 or 4 times. I profess to be a Michael Mizrachi fan. He’s one of the very few people I follow on Twitter, and I actually went as him for Halloween once.

Suffice to say, I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Tracy suggested I review Big Fish Casino: Texas Hold'em.

There are a variety of locations you can play that get unlocked as you level up. You start in Atlantic City with a small buy in of 400 chips, and then progress through the following locations, which have increasing larger buy-ins and higher big and small blinds: a Caribbean Cruise, the Las Vegas Strip, Paris Lights, a Monaco Mansion, and a Dubai High Rise with a huge buy-in of two million chips.

There’s a bunch of weird social crap built into the game, which didn’t make a lot of sense to me. You can do things like buy each other martinis, "like" other players, etc. but it was not at all clear to me what the point of that was. I bought a round of Martinis for everyone, and then suddenly won an award for that. My table mates seemed extremely ungrateful for their free alcohol as not a one showed any appreciation for my virtual gesture.

I felt the look and feel were appropriate for a casual game. I was surprised, however, that there was no full screen option. You are relegated to a small window in which they attempt to jam a lot of content. The musically was consistently annoying, on par with most casual games. The orchestral horns, particularly the synthesized bass trumpet, had to go. I shut the music off.

And as far as avatars go, I was only presented with one option... a pretty hairy chap of Caucasian descent. People are allowed to replace the avatar with their own images, which amounts to a bizarre amalgam of profiles, giving it a creepy dating site feel. You lose a star in my book for lack of fun avatars to choose from.

I also believe that if you were new to Texas Hold’em, you would likely be pretty confused as to what’s going on. There’s really no tutorial and the help I looked through was pretty thin. We’ll have a guide up soon, so check for that if you want to know more about how to play Texas Hold’em and some great strategies.

The game play was fine and there was your usual mix of very experienced and completely new players to the game at the table, which is common in live internet play. There were two pieces missing, however, that could have really enhanced this game and are pretty standard in most virtual poker games: 1.) A review of what happened in the previous hand and 2.) a quick chart of what-beats-what.

For a casual poker game, to me, these are requirements. New or casual players should be able to learn from past hands. In online play, things can move quickly, and, if you are new, they may move too fast for someone to understand what happened. And, unless you play a lot of poker, you may not know what-beats-what and the help interface is too clumsy to get to that information quickly. They lose another star for not having these key elements.

So overall, I think Big Fish Casino: Texas Hold'em is a fine game to play if you are looking for casual Texas Hold’em with real people online. Especially since it is free to play. Just shut the music off and have some references handy in other browser windows (since they give you plenty of room for that anyway) and you will be fine.