In normal poker, most of the strategy lies in betting, as the cards are dealt out from a deck randomly. Abandoning the random aspect, you can now choose your own cards. The skill went from betting and is now focused on the entirely dynamic system of balancing your offense and defense to create the superior hand.

There are a couple of different ways to play the game, including Hold’Em Blitz, which deals all of the cards face up and allows you to pick from the deck to either get the best hand, or prevent your opponent from doing the same. Based off of classic hold’em poker, three cards are placed in the middle of the table, and you build the rest of your hand based off of them. The first card you pick is dealt face down, but the remaining cards are face up, so you need to guess a bit harder to outthink your opponent.

The other style of play is Six Card Battle, ThwartPoker’s “buffed up and altered stud version”. In this game you get to choose the cards you want, instead of having the randomly dealt three in the beginning. You attempt to build the best five-card hand you can out of the six cards you choose. If another player or the computer chooses the same card in the same round, the card is worthless, and you need to begin a whole new strategy.

Once you get the basic style of game play down, which isn’t that hard to master if you’ve ever played poker, then you can move onto the World Tour, and try you hand at many different levels of skill throughout the virtual game world, beginning in the wild west, and moving onto many other fun areas.

One of the most exciting features of ThwartPoker lies in the fact that the game is predominantly skill based. This means that they can legally award cash prizes for tournaments and games. When skill comes so heavily into play, the game is no longer considered to be chance gambling. Through buy-in direct multiplayer tournaments, subscription-based single player tournaments, or special pay-for-play single player tournaments, players can win cash prizes. The more players who enter the tournament, the larger the pool will grow. Prizes will also be awarded, ranging from Best Buy and Amazon gift cards, to Sony PSP’s and iPods.

One of the concerns I had, and brought up to Daniel Pfeiffer was the issue of addiction, which can be a major problem for some online sites. Since the game involves a certain amount of critical thinking, they feel safe in the knowledge that ThwartPoker isn’t as hypnotic as other games, such as video poker. In the future they also plan to track user usage, and if a player seems to be getting out of control they’ll be able to limit the amount of play.

I had a lot of fun trying out the game, and picked it up really quickly. I haven’t had a chance to try out the actual betting system they have in place, unfortunately, but it promises to be quite a bit of fun. The game has already appealed to players of all demographics, including both men and women, and poker players and non-poker players alike. With the advent of legal skill based online gambling, I’m looking forward to what these guys are going to do in the future.

Currently, at www.ThwartPoker.com they are offering a PC Downloadable version for $19.95, and the game is also available on many cell phone carriers including Verizon, Cingular, and T-Mobile for a low monthly fee. The minimum age for prize games is 18 years of age.