PokerUp Reviews

Hello fellow developers,
I was really enjoying PokerUp since it is the only app that offers poker via iMessages. However, there is a pretty annoying bug that totally ruins my experience with PokerUp. Whenever a player folds, the board is shown for the next hand. This creates an unfair advantage to who ever sees the next board. My review on PokerUp will stand at 1 ⭐️ because this bug has been present for well over a year and others have also written reviews about it. Please fix this bug and I will gladly change this review to a 5 star 😌

Cheers 🍻

I was a big fan of this game all year until recently when it seems like the game has been really buggy.

But today was THE WORST behavior I have ever seen. I played two games in a row that were bots. Yes, BOTS. The bot player literally folded on EVERY small blind. When they got down to chip amount that was below the small blind, then they would win every time! The game went on for a long time (like 15+ min) and it was basically playing itself — folding on small blinds until their total cash was below the blind and then they’d win, repeatedly. I counting (yes, I started keeping track) — 36 wins in a row when they were below the small blind (and when it wouldn’t cause me to to completely lose). When I was at zero, then I would win. In total it won 51 hands — or 100% of the hands that wouldn’t cause me to lose. Both times, I won but again it was essentially playing itself.

Super disappointed knowing that these are sometimes bots and not live. Misleading!

In order to be able to play with friends you are required to share all of your contacts with PokerUp . This shouldn’t be legal as they’re just using this information to make money, only without you knowing.

Edit after dev response: Why do you need the whole contact book instead of just my phone number and someone I’d like to play with? It should be possible to just use a link sharing system to link 2 phone numbers as opposed to opening the entire address book to the developer.

I’ve read other reviews that say the same thing and the response from the developers is always “this game is fair, it uses RNG” but from a player that’s played their fair share of live poker this simply can’t be true. Never in real poker does one see so many flushes over straights, bad hands getting bailed out on the river, boards that are entirely of one suit, etc. PokerUp gives you good luck in the beginning and slowly takes it away to entice you to spend money on the game. It really takes away from what would be a good app to play poker with friends.

So many losses on weak hands. I have same pair and high card, opponent always seems to have 1 card higher. I go all in with Aces on the deal, lose to 2 pair, 4s and 9s, who goes all in with 4/9 thinking they have a chance.
They should also limit who can play in what room, losing all of my money so i have to play the lower rooms, i have 17k playing in the 4,000 room to a guy with 35mil, do you think they care if they lose, just bully me around with high bets that i can’t afford to lose.

I’m so convinced it’s a rigged game.
Update 2
So so so so many bail outs on the river card.
Such a terrible game.
Try to play aggressive, lose to a pair of 4s, try to play conservative, get bullied around.
So many straights, flushes, opponent always having 1 card higher than you in the deciding card.
Pair of 9s on the board, no one raises, i have a king, raise, they have an ace, i called it be fire it happened. Always seem to be 1 card higher.

Update 3
Done with this cheating game. Aces on the deal, go all in with my last $720, have 132k in the bank, playing in the 110k city
Get my 3rd Ace, lose your a heart flush, guy had a 7 spade and 5 heart and had 33 million in the bank
Stuff like that happens too much to be a coincidence
Fun concept, too frustrating to keep playing, tired of losing to bullsh*t hands

This is a great poker app! I love the different cities and the streamlined design while playing. My only issue is after a few games of doing no buy in games with a friend, I am no longer presented with the option to have no buy in while playing with friends. The minimum it will let us buy in for is 4.4k. I don’t know if this is a bug or a design choice but please change this! It’s fun to play with almost no steaks with friends who are more casual players.

PokerUp layout is nice and with it being the only poker game available through iMessage, it's great having it. But you have to fix the bugs or it's unplayable. When someone folds and you are big blind next hand, it shows you the cards coming up next hand. It also doesn't always save if you exit out mid hand, leaving chance to change your call to a fold or repeatedly redo it until your next hand you are dealt with good cards. If these were fixed it would be 5 stars.

One of the better poker apps on the store atm, though it has a few blaring issues. The most prevalent issue is the connection to the server. This game seems to require that I’m on WiFi to even get connected to the server and even then games can be glitchy and lag, contacted customer support and never got a reply. Several updates since then also have not solver the issue.

Also, the current duel format that available can make for some very bland poker, I’ve found many opponents to do nothing but go all in or just blindly bet away hoping luck will slide in their favor. Very rarely do you get a good tense game of back and forth. Bring out the lounge already!

Will anything be done about the cheated accounts on the apps richness leaderboard? Sure there are creator accounts, and they can do what they want. However, I counted from 55th and up to 1st and only found 15 real players within reason that belong there deduced by level and best hand. This means 55th place should really be 15th place and 31st place 8th. Wondering if this will be fixed? I think having a clean and real leaderboard will make PokerUp look much cleaner and more competitive! Everything else about app very good so far though.

This game is amazing to play, was supper happy to have found it after the standard iMessage games removed poker from their library. However it does have 1 annoying bug, when playing the game w/ friends, if some accidentally hits the x on the game before hitting send, the game will glitch out for both players saying “waiting for opponent” and there is no way to reset or to start a new game.

I’ve been playing since December 2019 and there are a lot of good features in PokerUp . It is generally smooth running and I have had limited issues.

The new update brings more of a focus on “live” video and audio. It basically turns on your camera and mic during the game. For me and my friends this is not a desirable feature. You can turn it off, but the layout is more focused on the profile picture and less on the cards which is not ideal.

Also, I generally play private games with friends. Until this new update, you could play for a minimum fee (50 coins) which was negligible and preferred. Now the minimums are much higher (4400 coins for us) which will require some of my friends to play through more of the regular matches which they don’t want to do.

I play this game every day and have never had any big issues... but today, all of a sudden my daily spin is locked! What gives? I updated PokerUp - it’s still locked. Can I get a response from the developer please? I’m unable to access the daily spin and the poker charge. I’m a level 15 and I don’t pay for premium. This is irritating.

Can’t possibly speak too highly of this game, it’s scratched all the poker itches for me and I’m super excited for it to catch on and gain more players.

Improvement suggestions would be:

• First up is definitely more than 1v1 games - but that’s evidently coming soon, so this one’s already being addressed

• More customization - I like the card styles but I wish there were more options, like maybe being able to change the card backs as well as the card faces. And having more variation within a certain design. Like I love the four colored faces, but the actual design for that deck is fairly boring. So I’m kind of stuck with settling for SOMEthing I don’t love

• More emojis! And more game-appropriate ones, like clapping or thumbs down or face-palm. There’s only so many ways the cry-laugh emoji can be used in a poker game lol

If I think of more, I’ll add to this. Thanks for making such a great game!

Game itself is nice and intuitive. However, buy ins to play with friends are too large! I like to play this game with family but I can’t play more the a few times since someone is running out of coins too fast.

Please lower or remove buy ins in games with friends.

I’ve been looking for an app just like this one for the past year and I’m glad I finally have. Most other apps don’t allow you to play exclusively with friends or only allow you to play heads up (for instance, WSOP, Plato, GamePigeon) which really got boring after a while.

I like that I can track my stats, but I’m hoping you guys can update it to where there are more stats: (preflop fold %, raise %, and maybe more hand stats per player).

Also, since you’re just starting out, I think you guys should resort to ads rather than the premium membership monthly price. I say this because a lot of consumers won’t want to be involved in an app where paid players have some advantages over non paid players. I think you should consider this until you have a larger community of players. Right now, it’s hard for me to find a game during some parts of the day. Please keep advertising!!!

Overall, great game if you love poker with your friends and hate getting shoved on preflop by 7-2o in WSOP and getting sucked out of your AA.

The feature of betting your coins prior to the match and being assigned a fixed amount to bet is pretty innovative. I think this is a great solution to the core issue most mobile poker games have, and that’s the feeling of being cheated on large pots. You guys are onto something and I wish you guys success with PokerUp!

Great app, but please change the new in-game UI — the design is terrible! I can barely see my cards or the dealer button. Why would I want to see the pictures at 4x the size of the cards, considering that the pictures convey no information? Please fix ASAP.

As the title says, this is an excellent poker app. Really, there’s nothing else that even comes close to this in terms of quality and user experience. I love that there are no advertisements and the user interface is incredibly slick. As a software engineer, you can really tell that a lot of time and effort was put into making this the best software possible. That being said, the networking can be a little spotty, especially on ranked. I would also love to see this expanded from just heads up to full table so that I can have one poker app when multiple of my friends want to play online (there is no app of this quality on PC).

Overall, wonderful app. Glad that this exists.

The user interface is the best in any poker game! Sometimes server connection delays and all that might crash the game but the game studio just makes the whole experience so fun. I recommend PokerUp to all my friends lol.

PokerUp is great, easy to use, smooth interface. Not clunky at all. Only thing I don’t understand is why you can only play against one player in a heads up challenge. Is there any other modes? I have looked and can’t find any. The only thing I have found is if I invite friends I can play with 2 others at once? Is that it? I don’t like syncing my contact list on these apps so it really does me no good anyway. Hopefully they add some more game modes with more players at tables, I can only do so many heads up challenge games with some of em going 20-25 minutes with the blinds maxed and I’m just going back and forth with the other guy going all in lol. Still though great game, does everything it advertises to do and works well.