How we rate Poker Rooms
Chosing an online poker site to play at is a key step in your online poker journey. There are so many different options open to you at the moment and each one has it's own plus and minus points.
Each one also offers all of their new players a bonus to encourage you to chose them, but how do you know which one is going to be the most valuable to you? Well, that's where we come in ... and is presumably why you've visited this web site in the first place.
The word "best" is a very subjective word - what one person may take as a huge advantage to a particular poker site may not be nearly as important to someone else. For that reason, we try to offer as many details as we can about the various bonuses offered by today's poker rooms.
There isn't an overall factor that should make you decide whether a bonus is good enough to convince you to sign up at a particular poker room. So with that in mind, we wanted to put together this page to let you know why we've ranked the various poker rooms on this site in the way we have.
I'd like to asssure you that there are no "Paid Placements" on this site - instead, our rankings are based purely on our experiences with a particular poker room. Here are the various factors that we evaluate whenever we play on a particular site.
How do we rate our rooms?
Once you've had a look through some of the poker rooms listed above, you'll notice that our reviews all follow a similar template. We believe that the seven factors we've used in our reviews give our players the most complete overview of a particular poker room.
Below, we list those seven factors and explain why we believe each of them is important:
Overall reputation
Any online gambling site lives and dies by its reputation. With so much competition out there, there's no need for players to accept second best any more. Therefore, for a poker room to be even considered for this site, it needs to be 100% secure and provide a fair and safe enviornment for all members to play in.
We don't list any sites that are brand new to the industry - instead, we require all sites to have been around for at least 18 months so that we can evaluate their product accurately and also ensure that they have the necessary financial backing to pay all of their winners. We don't want players getting ripped off by cowboys who are only around for a few months.
In short, if you register with any of the poker rooms listed on this site, you can be sure that you'll have a pleasant and fair experience.
Software:
The software that a particular poker room uses is hugely important to a user's experience. No one wants to play poker in a room that continually crashes and freezes. Therefore, each of our reviews analyses how user-friendly a particular piece of software is as well as whether any downloads are required and whether software is available for both Windows and Mac users.
We also provide screenshots and a YouTube video of a typical poker table so that you can get an accurate feel for the room before you register.
Bonus Information
Obviously, the bonus information forms a large part of our reviews. However, it's important to point out that it's not just the size of the bonus which we're rating. We're also looking at the clerance requirements that all poker rooms have in order to prevent fraud. It's no good offering a $5,000 bonus if players are only going to be given two or three days to wager enough to receive it.
Those poker rooms with easy clearance requirements were deemed to be more favourable as were those rooms that offered additional incentives for new players to register such as instant deposit bonuses and/or freerolls.
Tournaments and Promotions:
We don't like promoting poker rooms that will entice you in with a juicy bonus and then forget all about you once you've signed up. For that reason, we only promote those sites that offer players value over the long term.
Poker rooms with a strong tournament schedule, a wide range of promotions and regular re-load bonuses were looked upon favourably. Those rooms who forgot about players once they registered were instantly ignored themselves.
Deposit/Withdrawal Options
There are all sorts of different methods of sending money over the internet these days. It was important for us to ensure that any poker rooms we recommended were able to accept deposits from a wide range of sources. Perhaps more importantly, it should be mentioned that all poker rooms you find on this site will also pay out winnings to a wide variety of places in a quick and timely manner.
We instantly ignored any poker room that didn't pay out our winnings quickly and accurately.
Support
The final factor we looked at when reviewing sites was the online support that was available to all players. We favoured poker rooms that answered any questions quickly and accurately via a wide range of methods such as toll-free phone numbers and Live Chat.