[Patchmaster]

Poker Room has these little icons you can assign to other players. The icons show up at the table and also in the lobby. It makes it SO much easier to find a good table. They have six icons. More would be better, but even three would be better than nothing. Notes also show up in the lobby when you hover over the note icon. Another nice feature.

Table windows should ideally be resizeable, but at a minimum should be sized so you can get at least four of them on a 1600x1200 screen with ZERO overlap (including the Windows title bar!). It should be recognized that many players will be playing multiple tables in high resolution (and some of them are getting old and their eyes are failing), so any text on the screen should be easily readable at 1600x1200 from three feet away from the screen by someone with vision no better than 20/40. (IOW, don't use small print for the important stuff.)

Others have suggested this, but I'll toss in my vote as well. The tables in the lobby should be filterable so I can easily see only the games I'm interested in and they should sort in a reasonable fashion. The tables should not jump around the list in an incoherent manner or resort themselves spontaneously.

Time to act and disconnects need to be handled in a way that accomodates the person who rarely suffers disconnects yet does not annoy the other people at the table. Poker Room has a horrible system for this, allowing full action time plus 30 seconds to re-connect plus another full action period before timing out a disconnect.

I would like to see a system that provides maybe 15 seconds to act, but also allows the player to actively call "time" and draw from a time bank. Each time a player acts before the 15 seconds is up, a portion of the excess time (maybe 10%) is added to his time bank up to a maximum (60 seconds?). This should keep the action moving but also allow for those times when a player really does need to think about what they want to do.

For no-limit games, come up with some rational system for easily specifying bet amounts. For an example of how NOT to do it, see Pacific Poker. Their slider is next to useless and they even make it difficult to type in an amount. I haven't given this a great deal of thought, but I think a few buttons for multiples of the BB along with a slider calibrated for the size of the pot (1/4, 1/2, 3/4, etc.) would be a good start.

An active and ongoing beta test program. Some sites seem to roll out new software after little more than some light unit testing by the programmers. I've seen major features badly broken and customer support apparently oblivious to the fact software is even involved. There some be an avenue separate from customer support for users to communicate with the programming team.

As others have said, PT-compatible hand histories maintained on the user's computer are very important. Frankly, I've stopped playing at sites that aren't well supported by PT.

The software needs to be efficient. For the life of me, I can't figure out how poker software can be using more CPU time than a first person shooter game, but some of it does. There is no valid reason for this.

And, finally, thanks for asking.