Intertops
I've had an account at Party Poker since April 2003, and an account at Empire since August 2003. Last week I finally tried out that other Party skin, Intertops Poker.

I'd read about people having problems creating an account on Empire after they already had one on Party. I had no problems with that, perhaps because I created my Empire account before certain security measures were in place. But I did have some problems creating an Intertops account. Both Grubby's page and Bonuswhores.com lead you to believe that creating an account at multiple Party skins is no problem at all, but this is not quite the case. (Since they are affiliates of Intertops, I assume they did not want to list detailed procedures for getting around the things that discourage accounts on multiple Party skins.)

First, I used a different e-mail address than I had for Party/Empire. Second, I uninstalled Party and Empire from my computer. Then I downloaded and installed Intertops and tried to create an account. I successfully created the accoiunt, and got a user name and password, but when I tried to log in it wouldn't let me -- the error message said I had another account at their poker room.

So I went online and read about possible solutions. One person said to delete all my cookies, and then go through my registry (run regedit) and delete anything with a reference to Party Poker. I did that. No go.

The solution turned out to be this, which I got from the forums at bonuswhores.com:

You just have to delete the cookie reg key.

Its under Current User > Local Machine > Software > Calculator > UCID key.

That's what freezes more than 1 party skin.

Presto!

Intertops gives you an annoyingly ugly username and password composed of a random string of letters and numbers. It's annoying because there's now way you'll be able to remember them if you want to, say, log on to Intertops from another computer. I didn't find a way around this. While you don't seem to be able to change the user name you log in with, you can choose a different name for your "avatar" in the poker room. I went with MilesV, in tribute to the plucky hero from the sci-fi series by Mary McMaster Bujold. OK, so I'm a nerd.

The Intertops software is just like Party/Empire, except the color scheme is red and black.

I've won just under $300, plus my signup bonus, at $2/$4 Hold'em in the past week and half. Woo-hoo! (Getting in a bit of poker at Sunday NFL halftimes has been lucky for me so far.)

As many other bloggers have noted, when you go to cash out from Intertops via Neteller, you must first move your money from the poker room to the sports book; then you can cash out to Neteller. The effect of this is to add a day to cashout times, since you must do two moves that often take an overnight. The other effect, of course, is to tempt you to bet on sports. I actually may leave $20 or so in the Intertops sports book for the NFL season -- you can bet as little as $1, so it seems like a cheaply thrilling way to dabble in football betting.

My first cashout was to take out $60 to deposit in PokerStars for the upcoming poker blogger tourney. The cashout requests from the Intertops sports books are a little annoying in that you do not receive any confirmation or transaction number. Instead it just says you will receive your money in 24 hours. After 24 hours elapsed and I didn't receieve my money, I e-mailed them. Turns out the problem was my e-mail address. To creat the Intertops account, I had used a different e-mail address than the one I used for Party/Empire. Well, this is also a different e-mail address than the one I have linked to Neteller. I was able to change my e-mail address in the Intertops Poker area, but the sports book page provides no way to change your e-mail address! Fortunately once I e-mailed them all was well, and my cashout then processed.

Final verdict: With all the minor hassles, the only reason to play at Intertops over Party or Empire is the bonuses. But that's a heck of a good reason.

Update, October 21

I know a lot of people don't read the comments when they browse blogs, so I felt I should add this correction to my post from DuggleBogey at Go be Rude:

The other reason to play Intertops over Party is the freerolls. The $1500 and $3000 freerolls that require raked hands at the end of the month have had less than 200 people in them. Extremely juicy.
posted by James at 10:35 AM