Online Poker Rooms (2024)

Each online poker site has their own pros and cons, so finding a definite answer to this question is quite hard. The best choice might be different if you’re a professional player or someone who plays mostly for fun. We recommend you to read our reviews of the top sites before making your final decision.

The best place for beginners are sites with a relatively small player base and generous welcome bonuses. Sites like Betfair or Betsson fill this criteria. Once you gain experience and improve your game, you can move on to larger poker sites like GGPoker.

Top poker sites make sure to protect players and their personal data with various measures. Poker sites simply cannot risk getting sensitive information stolen, as they would lose their customers if this happens.

Based on the amount of players online, PokerStars and GGPoker have the most players with up to 50,000 to 70,000 players logged in during peak times.

Absolutely! Pretty much all the best poker platforms support Mac operating system. When you choose your poker home, make sure to check bonuses and player traffic first as those are even more important factors.

Well, that’s sort of the point of poker – winning money and having fun! However, winning consistently in online poker is not easy. It takes a lot of hard work like studying poker and utilizing poker training programs. If you’re hungry to beat your opponents, make sure to read our guide on how to make money playing poker.

Poker becomes quite a different game when the stakes are real, even if they are just micro stakes. While both play and real money poker games are played with exactly the same rules, their playing experience can be very different when you jump from play money games into real money games. Players become usually more cautious with their chips, making less loose calls and all-ins with trashy hands. With the chance to either win or lose real money will make some players play more aggressively and some players more conservatively.

Buy-ins for every bankroll can be found on real money poker sites, ranging from micros stakes cash games with $2 buy-in to high stakes with buy-ins up to $40k. Same goes for tournaments, where you can enter tourneys with buy-ins worth anything between $1 and $25k, sometimes even $100k! The average buy-in that people make into both tournaments and cash games is around $10-20.

Yes, it’s possible to make even regular profits in online poker. However, winning in online poker does not come easy, as you need to commit to study the game and play consistently in good games. In the short term poker is mostly about luck, but in the long term skill is what distinguishes winners from the break-even players and losing players.

Yes, online poker is still profitable even after many players have started using advanced poker solvers to fine-tune their strategies. But, the requirements to make a profit playing online have gone up: You need to work hard to find good poker games, study different strategies, improve your mental game and put in a good volume of hands.

According to data from Pokerscout.com, the three biggest online poker sites are PokerStars, IDNPoker and GGPoker. Each of these sites have tens of thousands of players online at any time, multiple poker tournaments starting any time of the day and thousands of players at the cash game tables.

Multiple factors go into ranking real money poker rooms. A site that is great for a tournament player might not be that good for a cash game player or vice versa. In general, you should take into account the quality of play on the site, the traffic and game formats, how smooth the software is, banking options, rakeback and bonuses, license and any possible complaints other players have posted online regarding the site.

On most online poker sites, the security level of the games is extremely high. Best online poker sites spend a lot of money in making their software secure and their data protection processes flawless. Licensed poker sites are also monitored constantly by financial authorities, and they don’t want to risk losing their license by not following the regulations.

There are multiple mobile apps for real money poker. All the apps are free to download, so you can check out the games before making a deposit and jumping into the action. For further information on the best poker apps to play on, read our post on the Best Mobile Poker Apps in 2020.

Yes, there are tons of those. Poker sites like Bovada and BetOnline work on all the modern android & iOS devices, and poker apps like Poker Bros and Upoker are designed & optimized specifically for mobile play.

Getting started in online poker is easy. First, you download the poker software and register an account. Second, you choose your preferred deposit option to make your first deposit. Third, you just find a suitable poker game from the lobby and start playing. From every online poker site you can find a lobby where their selection of games is visible for players, including stakes, the game format and the number of maximum players at the table. The most usual table types are heads-up, 6-max and 9-max also known as full-ring. You can also find a quick start option on most sites, which is useful when you want to grab a seat fast in a game.

Play money poker doesn’t have any risk, as you can always reload your stack without paying anything. Players treat real money poker much more cautiously as they are risking money to play and win. Play money poker is great to learn the basics of gameplay in poker, but to learn the strategic aspects of the game it’s necessary to play real money games.

After registering an account on the site, simply click the cashier option and choose your preferred deposit option. Then you type in the amount you want to deposit, complete the transaction and you’re ready to play.

The most common payment options available on poker sites are:

• eWallet deposits
• Credit card deposits
• Debit card deposits
• Bank transfers
• BTC deposits

While some of the deposit options are faster than others, best poker sites online have multiple options to offer their players so it’s easy to find one that suits your needs. Remember to check out the deposits limits before making your first deposit! 

They are definitely more skilled than the players you face on most play money sites. That doesn’t mean you can’t beat these players with the right strategies! No one forces you to sit down with 5 professional players in a 6-max game. Instead, you can game-select tables where you’re among the best 2 players. Only the top 10% of players who play real money online poker are winning players. The vast majority of players break even or lose in the long run, and most of them play for recreational purposes.

To structure their operations in a legal way in the US, poker sites offering real money games to American players are operating outside of the US. Therefore most sites that can offer games to Americans are called offshore sites. Due to UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act), financial transactions to any online poker sites, casinos or bookmakers have been prohibited inside the US since 2006. This means the US bank and other institutions for transferring money can be enforced, but poker players are not covered by the UIGEA. In addition to offshore poker sites, a few online poker sites have managed to acquire licenses lately in some specific states. We’re expecting more states to grant licenses to online poker sites in the near future.

First you should contact their support in a friendly manner a few times with an email or a phone call. If the withdrawal is still not being processed after you’ve made requests through support, you can create a thread on the popular poker forums such as 2+2 Forums to describe your case and to notify fellow players of the issue. Depending on the site you’ve played at has a gaming license, you can also make an official complaint to their licensing body. The potential loss of their license due to complaints is something that almost all licensed and regulated poker sites take seriously.

However, if you’ve been playing on an unlicensed site, the chances of getting your money back are far worse. That’s why we recommend having an agent like Beasts Of Poker as we guarantee your deposits 100% on all the clubs that we work with on PPPoker, Upoker and Poker Bros. If you deposit through an agent to these apps who doesn’t guarantee your deposited funds, it’s on your own responsibility if something happens with the club.

We try to cover all the essential details that affect whether you should play at some site. Sometimes there might be factors that we haven’t noticed during testing and playing on the top poker sites listed by us, but they’re mostly minor ones. We do recommend checking other reviews from several poker media sites to gain a more holistic perspective.