I've now played a few real-time games of this implementation and am in the middle of one turn=based game.
Yes, I agree with the two previous posts. Obviously the Texas Holdem implementation on BGA will be significantly inferior to online play at a dedicated poker site (just like chess will never be as good at BGA as at a dedicated online chess site). I do get the feeling that the developer took a lot of care to get the rules of Texas Holdem correct, but has not actually played much poker, and in any event was never immersed in the lingo.
For example, on BGA my hand was described as "a flush (Top value: King)" which is not how any poker player would describe it; the correct terminology is "a king-high flush". The word "top" should never be used in hand descriptions. For example a straight can be referred to as "a queen-high straight" (or "a nine-to-queen straight", less commonly) and any hand ranking below one pair should be described as "high card ace" or "ace-high" (or "king-high" or whatever).
It's very weird that the community cards (i.e. flop, turn, and river) would be shown face down on the board. That's not how holdem is ever played; those cards are never face down on the table. I know it doesn't affect the play, and there's an option not to see the backs of those cards, but it just illustrates that the game has been implemented without any knowledge of the practices and culture of the game.
The animation is way too slow. The thing where chips get exchanged at the bank for different denominations, that's totally unnecessary, it just slows down the game. And when I'm at a showdown, it gives me 10 seconds to decide whether to show my cards, that's also an unnecessary delay, it should be 2.5 seconds. In general the showdown takes three times as long as it should.
A fold checkbox is desperately needed. For the player in the big blind it should be "check/fold" meaning "check if nobody raises, fold if somebody does raise". This would speed up the game because most players fold the majority of hands, and they often know they'll fold as soon as they see the cards.
But maybe the biggest criticism I would make at this point is this: if I go to raise and decide not to use one of the amounts on the buttons there already, but instead decide to key in my own choice of what to raise, it gives me a little box saying "Choose Amount" but it doesn't specifically say that this is the amount I'm going to raise
by. Usually I think about a hand in terms of what I want to raise
to. For example, if the blinds are 4/8 and I'm on the button, I might wish to raise to 24, but if I type in "24" that's interpreted as a raise
by 24, so that it actually costs me 32. You can't leave this ambiguous, that's unfair to the players. (Also, after I type in the numerical amount, I should be able to press return, but the return/enter key doesn't work there. I have to move my fingers from the keyboard back to the mouse and then move it to click that tiny "OK" button. Very frustrating!)
