The Ongame Network is headquartered out of Vienna, Austria, whose main poker room is bwin.com. The poker room network ranks as the fifth largest in the world despite not accepting players from the United States. The general consensus is that bwin.com has below-average competition through the micro and low stakes cash games. The software lobby is fairly straightforward and unimpressive while the table software is archaic and dated.

The Ongame Network, and more specifically bwin, offers a lot of traffic for a no-frills poker playing experience.  However, bwin consistently pulls in some of the worst players at the micro- and low-stakes, so you won’t hear any complaints from the site’s regulars.  For those of you on the go, there's now a mobile client for bwin that's pretty slick and worth checking out.  Overall, if you want a simple poker room, then bwin.com is probably for you.

Lobby Software

The lobby software is pretty straightforward, with tabs for Quick Seat, Cash Games, Tournaments, Cashier, and Support.  Both the cashier and the support buttons go to a website outside of the lobby software window.  Players can see their name, real money balance, play money balance, seated players, and the current time from the window.

Game seating definitions have a whole different meaning at bwin and its affiliates.  A full table game has 10 players (this is almost universally nine at other card rooms), while short-handed games have either three players or five.  There are no six-handed tables available.

Semantics aside, the lobby software makes it really easy to find a game.  The "Quick Seat" tab brings up a no-frills page where you answer three questions and immediately get seated into a game.  That makes it very simple to sit down at a game, pronto.  Filters from the "Cash Games" and "Tournament" tabs include the game type, level of buy-in (Micro, Low, Medium, and High), and table types.  You can also hide full, empty, private, and play money tables.  From the "Tournaments" tab, you can filter down by traditional tournaments and sit and gos.

Table Software

bwin’s tables are the definition of “no frills.” It’s just you and the cards in a rather primitive look for such a large online poker site.  Unfortunately, there is no resizing of tables, only the option to have a "regular" sized table.

The table avatars for the regular sized tables are generic and cheesy and the animations for the cards and chips are extremely simple.  Basically, what you see is what you get. For players who don’t mind a bit of an archaic online poker experience, the hands move pretty quickly and the competition is lackluster, so there's plenty of opportunity to make some serious money playing at this poker room.

Overall

For people outside of the United States who are looking for a no-frills online poker room with less-than-stellar competition, bwin is a great place to play.  There are a lot of people who don't care about AHK script support or complex rewards programs.  They just want to have fun and play cards, ideally against inferior competition.  If this fits the bill for you, then bwin will be a really fun place.