World Class Poker With TJ Cloutier

World Class Poker With TJ Cloutier is a full-featured poker game available for PC and Mac, produced by Masque Publishing.

World Class Poker With TJ Cloutier costs $19.99

World Class Poker With TJ Cloutier Summary

This is a game with many of the standard poker varieties, lots of videos, and a lot of good information to help a beginner improve their game. It is a good starter game for someone who has never played poker before and wants to learn all of the variants along with a fair amount of strategy before playing against real people.

Our Thoughts on World Class Poker With TJ Cloutier

The big selling point for this program is that TJ Cloutier includes loads and loads of instructional videos. This makes the program take up almost an entire gigabyte of hard disk space, which was a real problem at the time it came out, but these days, most people don’t even notice the lost space on their hard disk. If you have an old computer or limited space, this could be an issue. One suggestion is to not load the videos onto your computer and to simply keep the CD in the drive. You’ll notice we said CD. Yes, really. It’s that old, but don’t worry – the games haven’t changed anyway.

A lot of players find the announcer really annoying, with lines like “I’m going to make like a lawn-chair and fold” but these annoyances can be turned off. The graphics are 3D and there are thousands of avatars, which seems like overkill and seems more annoying than fun to most players. What makes the game stand out is the over 100 quizzes, tips, and strategies. There are context-sensitive tips. The first time a tip shows up, it shows up with TJ Cloutier’s video, but if it shows up again, you’ll get it as a text tip, so that you won’t get annoyed by watching the same videos over and over again.

The big downside to World Class Poker is that the AI is too easy for players to “learn.” Most players who understand basic strategy find that within several hours of play, they can consistently beat the AI overall, and then the challenge of playing is entirely lost. Moreover, this is entirely unlike real tournament play where each player has a unique style and each player can vary that style even within a single hand. This is the biggest weakness and makes it only effective for beginners. However, with such a low price tag, it’s not a bad way for a beginner to avoid making a lot of rookie mistakes at the real money tables.