To say that there is no true competition to DD Poker would be silly and naive. There is plenty of competition for your business, gentle reader, and where you spend your free time. We at Donohoe Digital believe we have created the very best poker software you can find: one that meets or exceeds all your poker needs ... all for a very reasonable price ... Free!

Prove it to me, you say! Well, okay. Below is some food for thought on the three main alternatives you have to DD Poker.

Online poker rooms are great for playing for real money with strangers. However, if you want to play a friendly game with friends and family only, you have few options. Not many poker rooms offer private tables, and those that do charge a rake.

• The DD Poker community is one of the friendliest on the Internet. For the past three years, they have organized an annual trip to Las Vegas in November for an in-person DD Poker tournament.
• DD Poker is great for playing online with friends and family over your LAN or the internet.
• Few poker rooms we are aware of offer the learning tools that DD Poker provides.
• Use DD Poker to practice and become better so you can do better at the online poker rooms.

The main goal of the poker games with 3D graphics appears to be to replicate the feel of real poker. You get to sit at a virtual table and see all your opponents. You see the cards get dealt and watch as the opponents think about their action. Some will even talk to you, although after a few dozen hands, they become quite repetitive (after all, it is expensive to have actors do voice over work). You have to sit through the hands after you fold a poor hand. Essentially, you are playing poker at roughly the speed of a real live game.

The truth is that playing real, live poker can be quite boring. Honestly. Especially if you are playing "correct" poker. The poker you see in a one or two hour TV show has been edited down from six or eight or more hours of actual poker. And this footage is only of the final table, which was arrived at after four or five days long days at the poker table. Poker requires a lot of patience because you often have long stretches of time in between playable hands. Any professional poker player will tell you that it is real work, requires a lot of discipline and can sometimes be not so fun. Now given that, why would you want to replicate this experience in a game?

DD Poker lets you play more hands in less time. You can jump to the end of a hand after folding. You can configure how long it takes the computer players to act. The game moves at your speed.

Another aspect of these 3D fancy graphics poker games is that they typically run in full screen mode, taking up the entire screen. While this is fine and dandy for practice, it doesn't quite fit the bill for online play. You don't see online poker rooms taking up the full screen, do you? That's because you typically have some down time while in an online game and want to multi-task, checking email or surfing the web or doing the work you are supposedly getting paid for.

DD Poker lets you multi-task, control the size of the window, and most importantly, lets you play at work where a quick alt-tab brings up that spreadsheet to hide the game when your boss walks by.

If you search hard enough, you will find very expensive poker products available for sale over the internet. Some cost $30 or $59 or even a whopping $85. We do not want to out right name these competitors (to avoid embarassing them), but rest assured, you would be better off going with DD Poker. Read on for more specifics.

One competitor claims to have the "#1 Rated Software For 18 Years Straight", but they fail to backup this claim with actual article dates and citations. We acknowledge they probably had the best software out there five years ago, but they haven't kept up with the times. The interface is clumsy, outdated and hard to use. They don't offer online play or a poker clock. They don't offer in game information like pot odds or chance of improvement. There is nothing to match the broad array of information about a hand you can learn via the DD Poker Calculator Tool.

DD Poker has a modern interface and is packed with features for Free!

Another competitor, the most expensive of the bunch at $85, claims 10 years of research behind its poker AI, much of which is available on the public internet, so it's not so secret. The truth is that this research is focused on playing limit hold'em, which is a much easier game to get a grasp on versus no-limit holdem. While their research no doubt helps create a decent no-limit player, they are missing many aspects of no-limit that simple number crunching cannot account for like tilt, boredom and table position. These limitations are visible when you consider their advice consists of gems like "Fold 75% and Bet 25%". Are you supposed to roll a die and figure out what percentile you currently find yourself?

DD Poker has a sophisticated AI engine for Free!

It describes the factors that led to its recommendation. It will recommend that you might want to attempt to "steal" the blinds or simply check for "deception". It will tell you that a Fold recommendation was a combination of hand selection, table position and stack size. DD Poker speaks in terms you would learn by reading a poker book from a poker expert.

Finally the company behind this expensive program likes to claim it has numerous features that DD Poker doesn't have. Don't be fooled. They are talking about the 1st version of DD Poker and not the current awesome DD Poker 3.

Here is a list of features these expensive products don't have that you get from DD Poker for Free:

DD Poker is the best of both worlds. Not only is it far less expensive (did we mention it's Free?), but it has more features!