Best Online Poker Real Money Sites for 2022
If you’ve ever seen poker played on TV where players are trading thousands of dollars back and forth, you may have been tempted to try your hand at playing poker for money online. The problem is, there are so many options for you to choose from, so how do you decide which site to play on? To help you out, we’ve tested and ranked the best online poker for real money sites – and these are the results.
Real Money Poker Sites
REAL MONEY ONLINE POKER GAMES
The first thing you need to learn is the mechanics of how the game’s played; how many betting streets there are, what your possible actions are, how much money you need to buy in with, etc.
Once you’ve got the basics down, you can then start to learn strategies for your game that you can use when you play. However, those are not essential if you just want to play for fun – only if you want to win.
Why Play At Online Poker for Real Money Sites?
When there are free options available, it may seem a little silly to play real money online poker when you’re not very experienced. However, while the free-to-play games are good for learning the rules and the mechanics of how a poker game works, they will limit your ability to improve as a player.
This is because, without the risk of losing money, there’s no incentive for you, or anyone, to play “correctly”. There’s no penalty for calling every single hand to the river or jamming all-in every hand. When you play for money, even if it’s just for pennies, there’s a financial incentive to make the correct plays. Playing at the best online poker sites against better players is what improves our own game, so by playing against people who are actually trying to win you give yourself the best opportunity to improve.
Our Real Money Online Poker Site Ranking Criteria
There are a lot of recommendations for real money online poker sites out there, with some being more reliable than others. A lot of review sites will accept payment to promote a site, regardless of the actual quality. Here at TightPoker, we have a list of criteria that we use to rank real money online poker sites to ensure that you are getting the best recommendations possible.
These criteria include:
Licensing
All of the sites we recommend are fully licensed and regulated poker rooms. After the Black Friday debacle, a lot of off-shore, unregulated sites started popping up, offering their services to US players. While this gives Americans some much-needed access to poker, these sites come with huge risks, and it’s not uncommon for the games to be unfair or for players to have their deposits stolen.
Software
While it may seem like a secondary concern to some people, the software is what you’re going to spend your time looking at. You’d be surprised the difference quality software makes when it comes to which sites are best to play on. No one wants to look at a confusing, poorly colored interface for hours on end, so we’ve played on each site to be able to report which are hot and which are not.
Secure and Quick Payouts
There’s nothing worse than making a big tournament score and then finding out you’ve got to wait two weeks to withdraw your winnings. While pretty much all sites offer instant deposits, there’s a lot of variability in how quickly poker rooms will let you take money off their site. We’ll give you the lowdown on quick and secure each site is when it comes to withdrawing money.
Top-Notch Customer Service
If you have an issue on a site, you’ll want to know whether you’re going to be supported or left hung out to dry. A lot of real money online poker sites are increasing the quality of their customer support as they realize that if they don’t, players will play on a site where they’ll be supported in their time of need.
Mobile Capability
Not everyone has the time to sit at a desk and dedicate a couple of hours a night to playing poker. Some of us need to be able to play on the go, and knowing whether or not a site has a dedicated mobile app could be a dealbreaker when it comes to signing up.
User Experience
Most importantly, we look at what the site is actually like to play at. How much can you customize the software, what are the table settings like, what games are there, how big are the prize pools – all things you would consider important when signing up to a poker site.
How to Choose The Right Real Money Online Poker Site
So what should you be looking for when you’re picking a poker site to play on? With so many choices it can be hard to decide which one is best for you. Each player is going to have different priorities when choosing a real money online poker site, but here are some of the things you should consider:
Online Poker for Real Money Apps
A lot of providers have mobile apps for people to play real money poker on the go. Each of these apps offers different things to their players, so we’ve checked them all out to give you a quick summary of what you’ll get from each of them.
Real Money Online Poker FAQs
Any fees that you may incur when depositing to or withdrawing from a poker site are at the discretion of the site. However, you’ll find that the majority of sites do not charge any fees in order to encourage players to play on their site.
It has never been illegal to play online poker in the United States, only to run an online poker site. Some states such as New Jersey and Nevada have made this legal, so you can play on sites that are regulated in the US, but in the majority of states, your only option is to play on sites regulated outside of the US.
Whether or not you have to pay taxes on your online poker winnings will depend on the jurisdiction you’re playing in. In a country where gambling winnings aren’t taxed, like the UK, you do not, whereas, in the US, players are expected to report and pay taxes on any winnings.
Real money poker sites make their money by taking rake from the games they host. In tournaments, this is done by taking a percentage of the buy-in, and in cash games, it’s done by taking a percentage of the pot.
If you’d like to withdraw your winnings from a poker site, you can do so with the same method with which you deposited the money. These methods include debit cards, online wallets such as Neteller, bank transfers, and cryptocurrency.
There is no set amount of money you need to play online poker, each player can play with however much money they’d like. However, most poker sites will have a minimum deposit amount if you’d like to deposit money onto the site.
The safety of a poker site will vary depending on the specific site in question. The safest sites will have licenses from recognized gambling commissions clearly advertised on their page.
Any online poker site that is regulated by a gambling commission is not rigged. These sites have to go through 3rd party auditing to make sure their random number generator is fair and secure.
You can deposit your money onto a poker site via debit cards, online wallets such as Paypal, bank transfers, and cryptocurrency. Once you’ve created an account on the site, click on the “deposit” button and follow the instructions.