Can you flip through all 200 cable channels these days without seeing some sort of televised Texas Hold ‘Em tournament? Probably not. The game is quite the fad of the moment and it was only a question of time before we’ve seen a game on the Xbox 360.

Interestingly enough, however, we didn’t see it as a full priced retail game, but instead an Xbox Live game. If you downloaded it within the first 2 days after release you picked it up for free, but now it’s still only a $10 cost, which isn’t a bad deal.

In the game you are given an initial bankroll which is your ticket into the tournaments. Keep in mind you have to buy-in to tournaments, so you’ll have to start off at small tables before advancing to the high stakes ones. In the single player games, you’ll play against seven other people and try to keep as much money as possible.

In order to keep as much money as possible, you’ll have to know how to play poker. The game shows you all the winning hands and how to play your cards. Basically you have two cards that belong to you and five community cards. Using those seven cards, you make up your best five card hands. Even if you overlook a straight or a flush, the computer will determine what your best hand is (thankfully).

Every hand isn’t going to be a winning hand for you – and that’s where the strategy comes in. You see, just because you have a loser hand doesn’t mean the other seven people at the table know that. So by bluffing accordingly you can scare the other players into running away from your hand and then winning the pot.

In the single player mode, most computer players are scaredy cats unless they really have something good, and then they’ll go all in (risk all their chips).You can usually get at least half of them to fold right off. While some may claim stupid AI, after playing a few hands online, you’ll see that the computer AI is very similar to actual players online.

In addition to the regular casual games, there are also tournaments and scenario modes, which are pretty fun. Finishing all the scenarios does get you an unlocked achievement, so it’s definitely worth your while to finish them out.

There’s no doubt that this game is made to be played online, and that’s where most of the fun is. You can play an online ranked game (sorry you can’t invite friends to that table), or a casual tournament. The biggest problem I’ve seen when you jump into a game (rather than create your own) is that you can’t play until you’re up for the big blind, which can mean waiting of up to 7 hands. Yikes.

The graphics are acceptable. Cards look like cards and the table looks like a table. However, there are no players at the seats – they are all empty and instead you just see a player’s GamerTag. The right stick does let you change the angle of the table but whoopee.

The game is supposed to be Xbox Live Vision compatible; however at the time of this writing, the camera has not been released. If online gamers use the camera as it’s supposed to be used, it will add to the game quite a bit – however based on my online play, I doubt this will happen.