5 Things to Look For When Choosing an Online Poker Room

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PokerStars, partypoker, and 888 poker are the top online poker brands in the world and where many players play. However, they are not the only game in town. Some do no like the mega-poker sites while others prefer to play at smaller online poker rooms.

If you are looking for a new place to play online poker, there are a few things to consider. As with most things in life, you should shop around before choosing which online poker room to play at. Today, we will go over the five things to look for when choosing an online poker room.

Simple Deposit Options

Depending on which country you live in, making a deposit at online poker rooms can be challenging. You want an online poker room that gives you multiple options for funding your online poker account. Poker rooms should offer a wide variety of credit card deposit options, e-wallet deposit options, and deposit options using bank accounts.

A growing number of online poker rooms are using bitcoin and other forms of cryptocurrency for deposits. This is a great alternative for countries where your deposit options are limited. If you have trouble making a deposit, you can also contact customer support to see if they have alternative funding options.

Fantastic Promotional Offers

For starters, you want an online poker room that offers a solid welcome bonus. Most will offer you some form of bonus cash, but the best online poker rooms offer more. It may be tickets to freerolls or special depositor tournaments. Others will give you cash you can use in cash games exclusively.

Outside of the welcome bonus, you want an online poker room that offers ongoing promotions. These range from reload bonuses to special tournament series, and more. This gives players an incentive to keep playing and make future deposits.

More Than Hold’em and Omaha Poker

While many online poker players are happy just playing NL Hold’em or PL Omaha, they are not the only games out there. The best online casinos offer Seven Card Stud, Stud and Omaha Hi-Lo, and some mixed games.

PokerStars and other poker rooms will offer games like Badugi, Short Deck Hold’em, and other forms of poker to keep players engaged and to draw in the non-Hold’em crowd.

Solid Guarantees

One great sign of a popular online poker room is generous guarantees. Sites such as partypoker and PokerStars have the best guarantees but other rooms offer great value. Essentially, the better the guarantees at a website, the better the turnout you can expect in a tournament.

For example, if a $10 tournament has a $5,000 guarantee, you can expect that tournament to regularly hit 500 players. If the tournament doesn’t reach that number, you get an overlay. While it is nice to have an overlay, they generally result in reduced guarantees.

Sites that have low guarantees or few guarantees have low traffic for their tournaments. The better the guarantees, the better the action.

Ample Cash Game Action

If you want to gauge the health of an online poker site, check out their cash games. By this, we mean check out the low stakes NL Hold’em games. Smaller sites with low traffic will struggle to have more than a few tables running at any time. Often, you’ll find the same players at multiple tables.

The more tables you see running in low stakes cash games, the more players you’ll find at the site. Naturally, traffic during peak hours is going to be higher but it will also give you a good idea of the general health. If peak hour traffic only offers an average number of cash games, then you can expect the site to be slim pickings other times of the day.