Your reviewer is perfect fodder for this budget title, which claims to help you learn and understand the world of poker. For, in spite of enjoying the odd game of cards from time to time, he's been keen to learn more about poker, and indulge himself a little with next month's mortgage money. With that in mind, a tutorial product seemed like quite a good plan. Hurray.

But this one's a tutorial product with a twist: because - and this is a bit of a flaw, all things considered - you do need some poker knowledge before you step up to the virtual table. The way the product goes about its business is very much learning by doing.

You play with a computerised game of cards, and the computer chips in with some advice. In fact, if you do choose to click (hidden in the help menu) the Texas Hold ‘Em tutorial, you'd better have a Web connection active, as you're whisked straight off to a Web page.

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Surely this isn't the point? We could have Googled it ourselves if it was a Web tutorial we were looking for. You'd expect a little more when it comes packaged in a box with a ten quid price tag smacked on top.

Back to the in-game table, then. Here, the best help you're going to get is the hand evaluator, which gives you hints and statistical assistance. It doesn't tell you what to do with this information particularly well, but you can muddle through with it and start to pick the game up.

Perhaps the program's biggest contribution to the learning of poker is that it'll pop up with some advice if you're about to do something stupid. We put this to the test, by continually trying to bet when we clearly had the kind of hand that even the weakest poker player would sneer at. Sure enough, up came a standard pop-up window, which still gave us the choice to carry on should we so choose.

And yet it's all done so mechanically. Pop-up windows, fairly unimpressive presentation and a halfway decent game of poker aren't really what you expect to get for a product that's overtly called Learn To Win At Poker: Texas Hold ‘Em.

Granted, spread on the disc and over the Internet are the tools to make good on that promise, and the software does evolve slightly the more you get into it. But there's nothing here that you can't find done online easily enough, and there's a general feeling of not much effort having gone into the product itself. A pity.

An unimpressive way to get some extra poker assistance, and a product that assumes some knowledge anyway before you get going.