This page will tell you everything you need to know to start playing poker at Poker West. It will cover out event system, how to win money, game play and the bots and a brief summary of Proforma Holdem.

Events And Prizes:

Poker West currently has three events going: Monthly Main, Buddy Signup And New Buddy Signup Bonus. The events run until the end of the month and the best scored players win the cash. Our games are completely free to play. The cash prizes are paid out through paypal.com to your email address. Nothing more is required of you.

Monthly Main is our poker competition. (The other two events are for signing up friends.) Monthly Main currently pays out $1475. It requires players to play 50 points to qualify and their best 30 point run is rated.

How do you qualify?

You get one qualify point per player at a tourney. So if it is a 10-player Sit n Go tournament, you'd get 10 qualify points for just playing. To qualify for the Monthly Main prize, you just have to play 5 10-player tournaments.

What's the point run? And how do you earn points?

A point run just means you're rated on how well you do in a row. Thirty point run would mean looking at your three best scored 10-player tournaments in a row.

The points work based on how well you place in each tournament. If you placed 1st in a 10-player tourney, you get 10/10. If you placed 2nd, you'd get 9/10.

Important: Having a bad score doesn't mean you're out of the competition. You can always improve it, up to perfect. Likewise, if you have a score such as 29/30, you can play more without risk of messing it up. You'd want to continue playing in hopes of moving up to 30/30 because you know other players will be. Playing more never negatively affects your score.

What if someone already has a perfect score?

No problem. If you tie his score, you'll share his prize. You always want to shoot for a perfect score since that will guarantee you the most money. More than one player can have the top score.

Where can I see the leader board and current best scores?

If you have the poker client installed, open it and you'll see the scores on the first page. If you don't have it installed, you can see the leader board in the no download version here. Those stats update hourly. To see your personal real time stats, open up the downloadable poker client and click the stats button.

Why don't I see more players in the leader board?

They probably haven't qualified yet. We are brand new and have few players so far (which is why we have the bots). Use that to your advantage.

How do I get paid?

After the month ends and winners are declared, we send you your prize via paypal.com to the email address you have on file with us.

What's the catch?

There's no catch. We have a small amount of advertising on the site but the main goal is to promote our patent pending game Proforma Holdem. To do that we'll give away money.

Game Play And Bots

What are bots?

Bots are robot players used to fill seats until the site becomes more popular. They can't win any money. Bots will be removed once enough real players join.

Bots and joining tourneys:

Join a tournament and the bots will fill up the rest of the seats so you'll have opponents. Other real players can join too, but since there are few real players so far, you'll likely be up against some bots. This is good though -- much easier to beat them than real players.

Proforma Holdem

We play Proforma Holdem here. If you know how to play regular Holdem (no limit or limit) you'll understand this fairly easily.

If you are completely new to the game, no problem. The best advice is to play some, then come back and read a little about general Holdem strategy.

Proforma extra rules:

• Instead of the best hand winning the whole pot, a portion of each wager made gets awarded based on if it was correct or not.
• It's correct or not if it was played with the odds. Any move you or your opponents make that was correct based on the odds, they'll get 20% of it back regardless of whether or not they end up winning the hand.
• There is an additional move if you are put all-in by the big blind: BAM (big blind all-in move). You just pick whether or not you think your all-in big blind bet is correct based on the pot odds. If it is, you'll get 20% back regardless of losing the hand.

The main thing to keep in mind when playing Proforma Holdem is that everything you know about Texas Holdem poker applies here. You play the same way. If you don't know much about either game yet, no problem, just play. You'll naturally get better and start having questions about strategy.

For a complete description of Proforma Holdem, click here.