Playfish, the company recently purchased by Electronic Arts is getting ready to roll out a brand new Texas Holdem Poker Game for Facebook called Poker Rivals. Playfish is looking to challange long time established texas holdem games Zynga’s Texas Holdem application with a unique and flashy interface and by adding a virtual life aspect to the game, where players can build homes, buy yatchs and even vary their physical avatars’ movements at the poker tables.
Zynga’s Texas holdem game has managed to hold the #7 spot on Facebook’s top 25 applications list, with nearly 19 million users, so there are no shortage of poker players in online social networking sites. Playfish’s new Poker Rivals application seems to be aimed straight at this demographic.
Eventhough the game is till in beta, visually it looks great and the play is very smooth. Using their facebook poker chips from the game, players can buy clothes and jewelry to customize their avatars looks. Poker Rivals also allows you to tag players according to their play style, a great feature that lets  you keep track of rival’s playing styles. Poker Rivals is by the far the most detailed and customizable of the online texas holdem games.  Playfish says that more features are being added and tweaked before the official release is scheduled. You can check out the working beta version of the game at this link: Poker Rivals.