Best Online Poker Real Money Sites for 2022

One of the best things about signing up to a poker site for the first time is all the different bonuses and promotions you get to take advantage of! These sites are in an arms race against each other, offering more and more generous promotions in order to get players to choose them over their competitors.

There is a range of different offers to choose from. Some of the more popular options are:

Welcome Bonus

No-Deposit Bonus

Loyalty Bonus

Freerolls

Percentage Bonus; and many more.

If you’re a first-time player, take the time to look over the bonuses these sites have to offer and pick the one that’s right for you. If you want to learn more about the specifics of the different bonuses available, travel to our poker bonus page.

Being able to get your money on and off the site is extremely important when picking a poker room. Not only do you have to consider the different banking methods a site allows, but also the speed at which they process your deposits and withdrawals. It’s no good having your preferred banking option if it’s going to take two weeks to withdraw your winnings.

Most real money online poker sites offer a wide range of banking options these days; whether you want to use a debit card, an online wallet such as Paypal, or even cryptocurrency. Each of these withdrawal methods has different average times to get from the site to your account, so it’s worth checking to see which one best suits your needs.

Despite what some people think, poker doesn’t begin and end with Texas Hold’em. There are a large number of other games out there for people to play such as PLO, Short Deck, 5 card draw, and many others! More and more sites are offering these mixed games, so if they’re something that you enjoy playing check to see if your site offers them.

When it comes to game variation, it goes further than the poker variant you want to play. You want a site that has a good mix of tournaments, cash games, and sit and gos available to players. This not only gives you more choice in the games you want to play but you get the opportunity to learn different formats of poker.

The whole point of playing a tournament is you get the chance to win a huge score from a small buy-in. There’s not much fun in playing one and only winning 5x your buy-in (unless you’re playing in one of those super high roller tournaments).

Playing on a site that offers large guarantees in their tournaments not only gives you the opportunity to win more money, but large prize pools attract weaker players to the games. If you’re someone who’s looking to make money from tournament poker, consider looking for the sites that offer the largest tournament guarantees.

It’s important that any site you choose to play on is fully licensed and regulated. If it isn’t you’re leaving yourself exposed to any number of things happening; such as playing in an unfair game, playing against bots, or just having your money stolen by the site.

Every site that is licensed will display its license on its site so you can be sure that you’re playing on a secure site. There are a number of different regulators out there, all with different requirements that need to be met in order to gain a license so it’s worth checking what rules your chosen site must follow.

Knowing the opinion of fellow players is vital when choosing a real money online poker site. If the majority of reviews on the site are negative, then not only does it mean you’re likely to have a bad experience, but it means that most people won’t even bother to play on the site at all.

It’s also a huge red flag if a site has had formal complaints made against it by its players. Usually, these complaints are due to blocked withdrawals and if these have been done illegitimately by the poker site, it suggests you’ll also have a hard time getting your money from the site.

No one ever seems to do it, but reading the fine print should be something we do as standard. When we play on a poker site, we agree to play by their rules – which are laid out in their terms and conditions. If you don’t know the rules of the site, you could be breaking them without your knowledge and will have no defense if they try and withhold your winnings.

For example, if it’s in the terms and conditions that HUDs aren’t allowed and you’re found to be using one, you could have your account closed and your money confiscated. The worst part is, you’ll have no recourse as the rules were clearly laid out in the terms and conditions which you didn’t read!

The players are the lifeblood of any poker room. You can make your site as great as you want but if people aren’t playing on it, it’s going to fail. It’s natural that players will flock to the site with the most traffic – as more total players equals more weaker players to play against.

In some restricted markets there isn’t a great deal of choice, but if you live in an area where there are a number of poker rooms to choose from have a look at the daily number of players to get an idea of how much traffic these sites get. Where there’s traffic, there’s money!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.