Poker Websites For Real Money
A common question that arises among beginning players is what site to play on, and how to deposit there. For non-US players living in countries where online poker is legal, the answers are fairly straightforward. For virtually all sites, the deposit methods are fairly similar. Credit cards may or may not work, depending on your bank and country. For many sites, however, one can do a bank transfer which will generally be successful. If one is hesitant to provide bank details to a poker site, an alternative is to use an ewallet, such as moneybookers (now skrill) or neteller. These are regulated by the UK financial services authority, which should provide a level of comfort in using them.
Thus, for non-American players the main factors to consider when choosing a site are the traffic for the games you’re playing, the reputation of the site, and the software. For the more popular games such as 6-max NL or micro-stakes single table SNGs one can reasonably choose almost any site that has a good reputation for paying their players promptly where one is happy with the software. The largest networks for non-US players are pokerstars, party poker, ipoker, 888poker, ongame, entraction, and microgaming. Some reputable skins on the networks include fortune poker, NoIQ, interpoker, poker heaven, paradise poker, red star poker, and unibet. There are others, but too many to list so one should do their own research when considering other skins and networks.
For some of the other games, choices may be more limited. Many games only have sufficient traffic to play them as a regular on Pokerstars and possibly Party Poker. Some examples include full-ring NL, limit hold’em, large field SNG’s and MTT’s, husng’s (if one wants to put in significant monthly volume) and a lot of the non-hold’em games. Also, for hunl cash games, one needs to sit on a large number of sites in order to get a significant amount of volume.
For US players, the deposit and withdrawal options are fewer, and there is significant risk to playing in the US due to the current legal situation. If one does decide to push through with playing from the US, the most popular current options are the Merge network, Bodog, Cake Poker, and Everleaf. In general, the best way to deposit money onto a US poker site is Western Union, as other methods have high failure rates. For withdrawals, most of the merge skins use paper checks. However, there are numerous reports of these taking a long time to process, and when they are processed they sometimes bounce. Playersonly and Sportsbook currently offer wire transfer options, but this may involve some legal issues and risks to the sites that checks do not. On Cake and Bodog, withdrawals are generally done by paper check. Bodog also offers wire transfers, but there are reports of these getting lost in transit. Depending on the skin, Everleaf may offer withdrawals by Western Union, which will tend to have a higher success rate than other methods, but the fees are high and there have been reports of extreme software glitches on the Everleaf network. All reports from players on cashout methods or software glitches come from the 2p2 forums.
Finally, regarding the games, a lot of the games available to a non-US are simply not feasible (or barely so) for a US-player, such as being a large field MTT or SNG reg, a PLO reg, and possibly even a hunl reg. In sum, for non-US players there numerous options for players unless they play one of the games where only pokerstars holds enough traffic, while for US players the options are more limited and riskier.
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