Choosing an Online Poker Site
Online poker sites are multimillion-dollar businesses offering casual and professional poker players the opportunity to make hundreds of thousands of dollars through the convenience of the Internet. The past couple of decades have witnessed an explosive increase in the worldwide popularity of online poker, and plenty of new poker sites continue to spring up with promises of offering the best services available. In truth, sifting through the dozens of poker sites to find one that fits your needs can be really quite confusing and time consuming, particularly if you’re just getting started as a novice poker player.
Traffic and Game Variety
No one likes to sit at poker table by themselves waiting for the other seats to fill up, which is why it is important to consider user traffic density when choosing a site. Usually, the industry’s premier poker sites are also the services that have the highest traffic ratings. Having a large user base population will give you plenty of opponents to play against. Most importantly, it guarantees that you have a wide spectrum of competition ranging from loose casual players in the low stakes range to highly experienced competitors at the high stakes tables.
The user traffic amount goes hand in hand with game variety. There are plenty of sites with tens of thousands of active poker players, but they only offer Texas Hold’em and Omaha poker games. This is great if you’re an absolute Texas Hold’em or Omaha fanatic, but chances are you’ll eventually want to try out other types of poker games such as Seven or Five Card Draw, low ball games such as Razz and 2-7 Triple Draw, and Badugi as well as mixed game variants. It’s important to choose a poker site that carries many poker game variants and maintains a large user base, so you’ll rarely be stuck at a Badugi or Razz table waiting for other players to join.
Banking and Customer Service
Online poker sites are always eager to receive your money and are usually not as pleased when you perform a withdrawal. The transparency and efficiency of a poker site’s banking system speaks volumes about its service.
When choosing a site, it’s imperative that you carefully consider their banking system. Take a good look at the valid deposit methods to make sure that there are at least two transactions methods that you’d prefer to use.
Looking at prospective online poker rooms also gives you a good excuse to test out their customer service. An online poker site won’t be of any benefit if you end up having problems playing poker or managing your finances as well as having to put up with unresponsive customer service support. Expect email support with turnaround service of less than 8 hours as well as immediate live chat help at the top tier online poker rooms. It’s always good to test out a site’s customer service site by asking for detailed information on their available withdrawal methods, limits, fees and processing period.
There’s no guarantee that you’ll find the best banking, customer service, traffic base and game variety all at one poker room, but in the long run, it pays to do plenty of research before choosing an online poker site.