I tried out Full Tilt Academy over the weekend. It was quite impressive, but fairly shallow. I think the best thing you can say about it is that it’s highly polished and has potential.
The strategy videos are only about 12 minutes long, which on one hand is nice and short so you don’t have to take your ADD pills. However on the other hand they take the route of explaining points repeatedly and very slowly, which means they don’t cover a great deal in those 12 minutes.
Also while the presentation is ok (super sharp video!), the poker pros themselves are clearly not totally at ease presenting stuff (fair enough, why should they be) – you can see how the piece is carefully rehearsed and they’re reading off an autocue (also why have they been made to sit on such uncomfortable chairs? Some of them are a bit weight challenged, and they look really precarious). You don’t get the impression at all that it’s these guys passing along their wisdom, but instead it’s the words of a script writer somewhere who’s read Harrington on Hold’em…
And then there’s the challenges. Quite cool that the academy is linked directly to your actual game play, but it seems to lend itself to playing bad poker. That mostly my own fault though – I just wanted to complete a couple of challenges to see how it all works, and so of course took the fastest route from A to B. That meant on a challenge of ‘Bet on the flop when you have a FD with both hole cards of one suit’ I played any two suited cards! One challenge is proving a real bitch, and that’s ‘open raise, bet every street and win at showdown’ – I opened NL2 tables (had to be FR too, yuk!) and tried minbetting my way through each street with made hands – even then they fold!
The way to really do the challenges is to take your time – take in the ideas, set the challenge as active and then try to play you’re A game. Eventually if you took in the ideas properly you’ll complete the challenge – treating it like a video game where you try to complete it as fast as possible is really really wrong…
So overall quite nice and I’m interested in seeing where it’s going to go. However, with all the poker professionals at their disposal the content is fairly shocking. But like I said, it has potential – the framework and polish is great, they just need to utilise their harem of professionals a bit more…
ps (I have to do this shameless plug!) if you haven’t got a Full Tilt account, don’t forget to get rakeback if you sign up. By happy coincidence you can get that here (http://rakeback.meteoricpoker.com/rakeback/71068/Full-Tilt-Poker.html)
deucescracked! ftw