Play pool for money or fun against other players

This is a paid review.

If you like to play 8-ball or 9-ball but don’t have room for the table, maybe you can go the virtual route. There are a few different virtual pool tables I’ve seen inside Second Life. I’m not aware of any that feature player versus player for Linden dollars, although some must exist. Did you know there is an online site dedicated to PvP billiards? Play89.com offers player versus player billiards in the comfort and convenience of your PC. As that old 8-ball pinball machine used to say, “stop talking, start chalking.”

You can play for fun or with real money stakes against other players. The first step is to download the Play89 software which is Windows only. Darius tried it using Parallels on his Mac and indicates it installed and ran successfully but then “freaked out on Direct3D” when he tried to play a game.

Check out all the language choices:

I was curious if they had a good matching system that would make sure I was playing against somebody who spoke my language (English). Would find that out later. The install process was smooth and error-free. Upon loading for the first time I saw:

I chose “Play for Free” and was greeted with a registration form. If you give them your email address and validate you get a $2 real money bonus. I’m guessing this also opens up your email address to further solicitation, although the form doesn’t explain if that’s the case.

Annoying that the form only accepts passwords 6-12 characters. Why not allow longer passwords, particularly since there is a real money option? Also, to make security matters worse, only alphanumeric characters can be used. They need to fix this. Usernames are confined to 6-12 characters too with the same requirements.

No matter what registration information I used, the following error message was returned:

If you can make sense out of that friendly VTOR reader, then you are one up on me. After trying a couple different combinations, I gave up, closed the play89 application and restarted. I tried using the very first registration information that was input (that had also produced the error message above) and it worked. Strange and not very smooth registration process.

A female voice greets players warmly with “Welcome to Play89.”

My first stop was clicking the “training” tab and playing a game. To aim you click on the left mouse button and guide the stick in front of the cue ball and to shoot you hold the right mouse button down and then release when the power meter reaches the desired power.

The game responded sluggishly on my test Windows XP SP 2 machine with 2GB of RAM. The ball animation was a little jerky and I felt a bit frustrated with the mouse controls. The pool table was drawn nicely graphically but nothing that blows you away graphically. There’s a chat window in the lower right hand side of the screen with the message: “no foul language please.” Since I was playing against myself there was no compelling urge to swear at myself.

Didn’t take long to realize I’m better in real life playing pool than virtually with Play89 and that’s not saying much. It looks like Play89 has a fairly active game session running with over 950 people playing on 243 tables when I logged in and their promotional page says they have the legendary Snooker Champion Jimmy White hosting. Their software also promises no spyware (none detected). During the registration they promised a $2 real money bonus for validated emails, but after several hours I never received an email.

Since there is skill involved here I don’t think what Play89 is doing would be considered online gambling but I’m no attorney. You can still play for fun if you want to play it safe. If I was more excited about billiards in general, I’d probably dig deeper into the game and maybe even take up a few PvP games. The real money option doesn’t interest me at all. It is the first MMO community for billiards I’ve ever seen which I bet billiards fans will find interesting. Let us know in the comments below if you’ve played Play89 before and your experience: good, bad or indifferent.

Play89 also has an affiliate program for interested webmasters.