charming but not so great
First of all, I have the full version of this game and not this 1-map demo so I'm going to review the full version.
For a start, the game features charming pre-rendered graphics and animation and has a slew of funny character voices. That's the main point which drew me to the game in the first place.
The gameplay is quite fun but will most likely annoy more experienced poker players. The main problem is the AI. Even on hard mode, the bots play like total donks, raising to 20x the blinds with an unraised pot, chasing open-ended and gutshot straight draws with unbelievably poor pot odds (even calling all-ins with a draw), calling all-ins or even pushing all-in with middle or bottom pair in a full table, etc. If I want to play poker with retards, I can play practice money games on PokerStars for free instead.
Another huge problem is how the game works as you expand to the outmost territories with the largest cash games and tournament prizes. The fundamental problem here is the minimum bet. The cash games there have you starting with around $1600 but the minimum bet is at $600. It is moronic to play a cash game where you can only afford 2 big blinds. That's putting an emphasis on luck over skill when the late game should instead be putting more emphasis on skill.
Finally, after you waste your time conquering all the territories of Texas, nothing happens. I played through this entire game in spite of being quite bored and frustrated (took me about 12 hours on hard difficulty mostly because the late games required more luck to survive the first few rounds than anything) just to see what the ending was like, and there was none! That's really disappointing to say the least.
Problems aside, the game managed to keep me somewhat interested with an interesting conquest to purchase the territory in each available city and to challenge the best poker players for new transportation. I think this concept was the most interesting and this game probably would have worked even better if poker was just one of the mini-games you could play to earn cash along with other games like roulette.
As for people complaining about the game using modified poker rules, I've seen no evidence of this. The game is based on standard poker hand rankings (high card->pair->two pair->3ofK->straight->flush->4ofAK->s traight flush). My suspicion is that because the game doesn't read out the winning hand (something sorely lacking) and the animations are quite fast (especially on 2x which is the only speed I could stand to play), the people complaining here just misread their opponents hand. I've won with a set/straight/flush against two pair plenty of times. The one time I thought it was odd that I lost, I paused the game to see the opponent's hand clearly and it initially looked like he beat my 3ofK with a pair, but he actually had a flush. Again, reading the winning hand would have made this game a lot better as well.
The game could use a lot of improvement. That said, I do think it has potential if the AI was improved and the minimum bet/starting chips ratio wasn't so ridiculous in the late game (a player should be able to afford at least 10 BBs) to join a game.