Poker by Zynga offers almost tournament style poker in the form of sit and go tournaments or shootouts. When you pick a table you’re presented with the main table interface. With controls at the bottom to fold, check, call or raise, the app vibrates your phone when it’s your turn. A timer bar circles your icons to tell you how much time you have to make a choice. The app will vibrate again when you are running out of time. If you do run out of time you tend to “stand up”, meaning you are still at the table but no longer at play. This can be annoying but it keeps the play going for the other players. On the other hand, in tournament play your player folds instead.

Poker by Zynga also has an interesting feature called “Hand Strength” which gives you an idea of how strong your hand is likely to be throughout each round of play. Each player is also given an experience level based on the number of hands played. The more hands you play, the higher your experience level will be.



I try to play a game every day and what’s even better is I do it while on the treadmill. I initially bought $150K of chips from Zynga and my account is now over $2 million – too bad its not real money! After playing many modes and realizing when there are little stakes at play the usual “All-In” on the first few rounds always happens. I have pretty much narrowed it down to one mode that consistently has what I call “real” poker players. Under “Tourney Games”, I play the “Sit N Go Tournament” option and I always select the $70K buy-in. This will get you a fairly competitive game with people who actually know how to play.

If you've already reached Level 12 in ChefVille for other promotions, you still might need to access ChefVille via the links presented in either Zynga Poker or Zynga Bingo to get your progress to "sync" across games. Even then, a couple of refreshes of your games might also be necessary.