My eyes are a little bleary this morning and I’m on my 3rd cup of coffee. I was up late last night playing Magmic’s Texas Hold’Em King 2. Magmic is holding a free poker tournament from March 26th to May 1st. To enter you just need to point your BlackBerry browser to mobile.blackberry.com and download Texas Hold’Em King! Grand prize is an all expense paid trip to Orlando, Florida with guaranteed placement at the final table in Bplay’s LIVE poker tournament on the evening of May 9th during WES (www.wirelessenterprisesymposium.com)

I had trouble downloading the application at first. I was using the Cingular web browser on my device, and the website just kept telling me to visit the site on a BlackBerry browser. I guess the Cingular web browser doesn’t count. So I switched to the native BlackBerry browser and I was able to see the site on my device. Hold’Em is located in the “What’s New” section of the page. Get the link, accept the terms and conditions, and you’ll see a list of games available for download. Texas Hold’Em King 2 Multiplayer Tournament is the one you want to download.

It looks like the free trial expires when the tournament ends on May 1st. That’s a nice long time for a free trial!

The first thing you do when the game starts is create a username/password. You will use this for logging in to submit your scores.

You start out with a little cash to play at the tables on the casino floor. Once you earn enough money, you can move to tables with higher blinds, or enter tournaments. In addition, you can go into multiplayer mode and play against real people. In this mode, you play against a mixture of robots and real people to fill up the table.

The game play is very smooth and easy. You can control all of your actions using the trackwheel or keyboards shortcuts. When you fold a hand, the game kindly accelerates the pace so you can quickly get to the next hand. After each hand, the game pauses briefly to let you see the winning hand. If you don’t want to wait, just hit the space bar to skip ahead. One thing I’d like to see here is the ability to pause the action; sometimes I didn’t get enough time to study all the hands before they cleared away.

There are several different ways to play this game: casino floor tables where you just play to earn money, tournaments where you buy in for a fee and compete to win first prize, and of course, the special tournament mode where you can submit your scores to win real prizes and a free trip to Orlando! Add a multiplayer mode to this, and it gets confusing to figure out what you are playing. I kept getting confused about whether I was playing in a tournament or just a practice game.

You can go online to see your ranking after you’ve submitted your score. Check out number 13 below! After a late night of playing, I found myself up on the boards. Woo hoo! Orlando here I come!

On its own, this is a very fun game to play. The AI plays reasonably well and the controls are easy to use, making the game move along quickly. But adding a tournament with real prizes and a seat at the big game at WES adds a whole new level of excitement to playing Hold’Em on your BlackBerry. It’s fun and it’s free…go get it at http://mobile.blackberry.com.

## This Article Was Originally Published by AllBlackBerry.com