Feb 05, 2021 The online poker sites our list provides you includes the very best promotions that will boost your bankroll and give you with the opportunity to play poker online for real of play money. From high paying tournaments to a fantastic social vibe, the best online poker sites bring you that extra something to make it worth your while to sign up.

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You’ll find no shortage of live poker cash games and tournaments in California. But these games are expensive between their multi-hundred dollar buy-ins and their flat-fee rake structure.

1. Cost: FREE; At one time, Party Poker was the largest online poker playing site in the world. Started in 2001 by an investment group which included a former adult film star, it quickly grew taking advantage of the surge in internet capabilities, faster web browser platforms and communication and the spike in the gambling industry.
2. 888 Poker is one of the best sites for recreational players with plenty of promotions aimed at casual users and a more relaxed atmosphere than at the largest sites catering to professional players.

Why not make the switch to online poker? The buy-ins and rake are reasonable. There are more games and variants to choose from. And you can claim a deposit bonus, which no live cardroom offers.

All you need is an account with one of the best California poker sites online.

We strongly recommend you join one of the real money poker sites we endorse. We explain why, what we look for, and more in the next section.

Then, we’ll show you why you should consider switching to playing online poker in CA, including how it can save and make you more money compared to playing live.

If that sounds good to you, then let’s get started.

If you want to play real money poker online in California, your first step is to find a safe and reputable poker site to join. This isn’t a step you want to take alone. Here is why.

Poker is unique from most other gambling games in that you’re not playing against the house but other players like yourself. The site you join needs to have adequate traffic, otherwise, you won’t find a game to play.

This information is available online if you know where to look. And when it’s not, there are usually a few tells you can pick up in the online poker room’s lobby.

If you don’t know how to find this information, or how to interpret the clues, you might as well choose a poker site blindfolded. There’s really no difference if you insist on finding your own CA poker site to join.

On top of that, there’s other criteria you should consider, such as the poker room’s games, variants, stakes, rake, promotions, and more. It’s a lot to uncover.

That’s why we suggest you rely on us. We have decades of online poker experience. And we’ve researched and tested almost every online poker site in existence, so we know exactly which ones Californians should join.

Here’s what we look for in the best online poker sites for California.

• The poker site’s license and the commission that issued it
• The banking options you can use
• The withdrawal limits i.e. how much of your winnings can you withdraw each month?
• Can you claim a deposit bonus or participate in a VIP program, guaranteed tournaments, etc.?
• Are they trustworthy? What do other poker players think of them?

This covers the basics and tells us whether the poker room is safe, secure, trustworthy, and reliable enough to join.

But we’re not done yet.

We also need to make sure they’re a GREAT poker site, especially for poker players in California. Here’s what else we look at.

• What features does the room have? Do they have hand history players, four-color decks, odds calculators, quick play, etc.?
• Can you use a HUD?
• What kinds of tournaments can you play? Can you play guaranteed tournament? Satellites? Knockouts? Turbos? 6-max?
• What real money poker games and variants can you play?
• Do they allow multi-tabling? How many tables can you play at once?
• Is their rake reasonable?

We compare every site we review, take the top choices, and order them from best to worst. The result is a list of the top poker sites or, in this case, the best California poker sites.

We’re thorough in our research and testing, as you can see for yourself if you read our poker room reviews.

The goal is to save you all that time, money, and energy, then help you find a California-friendly online poker room as quickly as possible.

We think we achieved that. But you’ll only know for sure once you choose a CA poker site to join, create your account, and get some real money hands and tourneys under your belt.

Rake at California Poker Sites

One unique thing about playing live poker in California is how you pay rake. The rake is the money the poker room collects as their fee for hosting the game.

Most poker rooms charge you a percentage of the pot and cap how much they can rake. For example, a poker room might take 10% of every pot up to $10.

Many cardrooms do not rake the pot if no one sees a flop. This is known as a “no flop, no drop” policy.

California flips all this on its head. Here’s how.

By law, California cardrooms cannot rake a percentage of the pot, so they charge a flat rate and/or charge an hourly fee instead.

For example, you might pay $10 every hour to play. Or you might as much as $7 (at $5/$10) plus whatever the room takes for their promotions, such as a bad beat jackpot. They also rake the pot even if no one sees a flop.

Now, let’s compare this to online poker.

One of the California online poker sites we like charges 5.5% rake for their highest limit games and even less for their micro stakes.

If you play $5/$10, like our live example above, you’ll pay $0.01 for every $0.18 in the pot (5.5%). You’ll pay $1 to $5 max per hand depending on the number of players in the pot. That’s 70% less on the high side, just for playing online.

That’s not all the money you’ll save either. Here are the other ways you’ll save by choosing to play real money poker online instead of live.

• Not having to travel
• Not wasting time waiting for a game or seat to open
• Not playing at rooms without a no flop, no drop policy
• Choosing whether to play bad beat jackpot games

You’ll save money, but you can also make more money playing poker online because you can play more than one table at a time and you can participate in promotions like deposit bonuses and VIP programs.

The bottom line, you’ll increase your hourly rate and take-home pay. And all you have to do is choose to play games at the top CA poker websites instead of live.

This doesn’t just apply to cash games either. It applies to tournaments, too.

California is also known for their poker tournaments. They host some of the largest and most popular poker tournaments in the world.

• WSOP circuit events
• WTP tournaments such as the WPT Deep Stacks Championship
• Battle of the Bay
• California State Poker Championship
• Memorial Day Tournament Series
• Bay 101 Summer Open
• Commerce Hold’em Series
• A. Poker Open
• Gold Rush Poker Series

These are great live tournaments to play in. They can add a nice boost to your total live earnings column, especially since they routinely pay six and seven-figure prizes to the winner.

There’s also a little prestige and notoriety in doing well in these tournaments, which some poker players care about.

But do they offset the downsides?

• Buy-ins range from several hundred to several thousand dollars.
• The rake is expensive. You should expect the cardroom to collect $15 to $20 for every $100 you pay to play.
• The bigger tournaments can take days to complete.

Now, these will apply to live tournaments. But you also have the fact that you can spend hours playing, bust the tournament, and walk away with nothing.

This will apply to online tournaments too, but they have advantages that California poker tournament players do not have.

If you want to play real money poker tournaments in California, we recommend you play online. Here are a few reasons why, relative to the points made in the last section.

• The largest tournament buy-ins online are between $215 to $600 (with a few rare exceptions).
• The prize pools still reach six and seven figures because online poker sites aren’t confined to California or a specific square footage. They can allow a larger number of players to play, which increases the prize pool without increasing the buy-in.
• You pay less rake. You’ll usually pay $9 to $10 for every $100 you pay to play.
• Most tournaments are done in a (long) day.

Now, we mentioned that you can play a tournament for hours only to bust and walk away with nothing. That’s possible in any tournament, online or live. But here’s why online poker tournaments are better.

Online poker rooms can run more tournaments since they’re not limited on space. This means you can play more tournaments. And most CA poker sites let you play more than one tournament at a time.

Since you can put in more volume (play more tournaments), you can get through your variance (losses) faster. This enables you to cash out and win more often. You don’t have to go weeks, months, or years without a score. You’ll cash out far more often than that.

There are many other benefits to playing poker tournaments online instead of live, too.

• You can earn VIP perks.
• You’ll have a larger variety of tournament games, variations, and stakes to choose from.
• You can satellite into larger poker tournaments for much less than you can online.
• You can buy into many tournaments for less than $20. Many of these have three- or four-figure prize pools/payouts.

While there’s more money, prestige, and notoriety to gain playing in California’s live poker tournaments, it also costs a lot of time and money to play these tourneys.

Online poker tournaments are a middle ground. You can still play in tournaments with large prize pools. But you won’t spend as much to play them. And you have the added benefit of multi-tabling, which will enable you to play, cash in, and win more tournaments than you ever could offline.

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Yes. We highly recommend it. The traffic at each poker site fluctuates, both in terms of overall traffic and traffic to the specific game you want to play.

You’ll have better odds of finding a profitable game or tournament the more poker site accounts you have.

The most common is the deposit bonus. Make a deposit and the poker room will match a percentage of it up to so many dollars.

For example, if the poker room you join is offering a 100% match bonus up to $500, then they’ll give you $1 for every $1 you deposit. You can get as much as $500 free.

Poker rooms also offer VIP programs, rebates, tournament tickets, guaranteed tournaments, VIP exclusive freerolls, and more.

It depends on the poker room.

A typical guaranteed tourney during a Sunday schedule is $100,000. That said, we’ve seen guarantees as high as $1 million.

You should take a two-pronged approach.

One, figure out what you want in a poker site — the games, variants, stakes, promotions, etc. Then, read the reviews for every site we recommend and choose the site that offers the closest to what you’re looking for.

Yes. Most poker sites offer mobile poker.

Some poker sites offer a native app. Others have a browser-based setup where you’ll play poker in your mobile web browser.

There are tons of variables to consider, too many to cover here. If we had to give a sweeping statement, it’d be the one below.

If you play medium stakes or higher, chances are you’re better off playing live. You can find games like $5/$10 or $10/$20 online, but you’ll probably find more consistent action offline. And depending on where you live in California, it might even make more sense to drive to Reno or Las Vegas.

For micro and small stakes players, as well as tournament players, we think there’s a lot of value in playing at online poker sites for all the reasons mentioned above.

Poker is popular in CA. You’ll find loads of live cash game action and poker tournaments. Many of these poker tournaments pay life-altering sums to the players who win them.

But live poker in California is far more expensive, less profitable, and less convenient compared to playing online.

There’s no reason you can’t play both formats, both live and online. But if we had to choose, we’d choose to play real money poker online.

If you see where we’re coming from and want to make the leap to playing poker online, then join one of the best California poker sites and create your account now.

Cash games and tournaments are running all day every day. Are you going to be part of the action?

You could theoretically take at least 4 different approaches to writing a page about “video poker websites”. You could write a page that features a list of the best online casinos where you can play video poker for real money. Or you could write a page that features a list of the best informational sites on the subject. The third option is to do both—that’s the route we’ve decided to go with this page.

Our directory of the best video poker sites starts with a list of casinos which offer what we think are good VP games with good payback tables. More importantly, the casinos listed have excellent reputations related to timely customer service, fast payouts, and integrity in their dealings.

The informational sites on this list focus on websites which offer detailed, unique information with a minimum of advertising. We have no problem with advertising in general. Our site, like most sites on the Internet, relies on advertising revenues to stay in operation, too. We do object to sites which have no other reason for existing than to serve ads. There must be significant value to the reader for a site to earn a listing on this page.

You can read full reviews of all these real money online casinos here. On this page, we’ve restricted our comments to a few of the top USA video poker sites and how well each property serves the needs of online VP players. We’re confident that these really are the best video poker casino websites on the Internet.

If you’re from the United States, El Royale is your best bet for playing online video poker games. Many online casinos don’t accept real money players from the USA, and a lot of those that do have problems processing deposit and withdrawal requests. That’s not an issue at El Royale.

This online casino has 14 different video poker games available, including the following.

• Aces and Eights
• All American Poker
• Bonus Deuces Wild
• Double Bonus Poker
• Double Double Bonus Poker

As well has single hand versions of these games, they also have multi hand versions. Many of the payout tables are full pay.

One of only real downsides for VP players at El Royale casino is when it comes bonuses. Video poker bonuses at online casinos are actually quite rare, as the game has such a low edge. So, although El Royale offers a number of generous bonuses, none of them can be used for playing video poker games. However, that at doesn’t stop this being the top US online casino for real money video poker players.

BetOnline is also friendly to players from the United States. This real money gambling sites offers multiple services besides casino games, including sports betting and poker. They offer 17 different VP variations to choose from in their casino section.

As far as signup bonuses go for VP players, though, BetOnline.ag isn’t quite as attractive. First of all, they have a rollover requirement of 50X your deposit plus bonus, which is significantly more restrictive than most other casinos. Also, they do not include video poker wagers toward your rollover requirement.

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That being said, we still like BetOnline as a video poker casino. They have a great variety of games with reasonably good pay tables. We don’t think most players should worry too much with casino bonuses as a deciding factor for where to play video poker online.

Wild Casino is an excellent site to play real money video poker games online. They have 18 different VP variations, with single hand, multi-hand, and pyramid poker versions. Unlike BetOnline, they don’t offer sports betting.

They do have the opportunity to use one of their signup bonuses to play video poker games, but the rollover requirements are 60x. That’s a lot of VP wagers you’ll need to place. Still, the fact that they even offer a video poker bonus is very much a good thing.

Wild Casino offers a ton of other casino games, too, so this isn’t “just” one of the top video poker sites. It’s one of the all-round best online casinos.

There are 17 real money video poker games to play Vegas Casino Online. It’s a similar selection to most of the other VP sites discussed above, with nothing unique of note on offer. They do offer higher stakes than most, though, so high rollers looking to play video poker online should definitely consider this casino.

We should mention that there is a VP bonus here, but the rollover requirements are high at 90x. The good news is that you can play other games with the bonus, too, and the rollover requirements are reduced at many of them.

We’ve tried to include a comprehensive amount of video poker information on our site, but we can’t be all things to all people. When we need to do research, we do so by consulting with other high quality video poker websites. We provide a reasonably detailed description of what you can expect to find at each of these sites below.

Note that these sites are listed in alphabetical order. We don’t rank them in any other way.

Bob Dancer is the leading expert in the video poker field today. He’s written several books, many of which are available to buy on his site. He also offers a huge archive of articles as well as training software. It’s not the best-designed site on the Internet, but it’s impossible to list VP sites without including his website.

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Jean Scott might argue that she’s just as much of an expert on video poker as Bob Dancer, but she actually writes a broader range of materials that include getting the most out of casino coupons and promotional offers.

This makes her more of a general gambling expert than Dancer, but she does focus more on video poker than on other games like slots or blackjack.

Dan Paymar is one of our favorite video poker writers, too. Optimum Playis the name for both his website and his excellent book on the subject of the math behind the game. He’s one of the pioneers of the industry.

His site features several pay tables, payback percentage analysis, and strategy advice. He’s known also for making the distinction between playing perfectly and balancing excellent play with good payback percentages.

This almost isn’t really an information site, at all. But it’s important because the land-based casinos in this group in Las Vegas offer the widest selection of full pay games in the industry. You’ll see writers on the Internet lament the impossibility of finding full pay Deuces Wild games all the time, but the fact is that you need look no further than the casinos in this group.

The content on videopokeradvisor.comis more or less introductory, but the design is straightforward and blessedly low on advertising. We’re not sure who owns this one, as it seems to be more or less anonymously written. It’s worth visiting, especially if you’re a beginner.

This is less of an informational site than a product site where you can buy training software. That being said, the content on this site is straightforward enough, and the software is not only affordable but well worth your money. Everyone we know who’s serious about getting an edge at this game uses some kind of training software—many use this specific package.

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VideoPokerInfo.com is another great guide for beginners. It includes excellent info about progressive jackpots, comp and VIP points, and single hand versus multi hand games. It also includes the most basic information for the complete newbies, like hand rankings and a glossary of terms. If you don’t know as much about video poker as some of our other readers, and you want to get up to speed fast, then this is the place to start.

No other site on the Internet offers as many free games as this one. Not only that, but these games are more similar to the games you’ll find in Las Vegas casinos than just about any other online versions. It’s a membership driven site. Most of the games are free, but some of the games require you to have a membership to play.

It is not a casino, though. You cannot play for real money. They do offer ongoing tournaments where you can win points. They also have an online strategy trainer that requires no download, but to access that, you need to have a paid membership.

If you’re interested in playing the machines with the best pay tables, this is the site to visit. They feature listings for casinos throughout the United States along with user-submitted reports on which pay tables are available where. This might be the most useful video poker resource on the Web, period.

That’s our list of the best video poker websites on the Internet. We’ve tried to list top-tier casinos with good games and good VP game selection. We’ve also stuck with recommending real money gambling sites that have good reputations for dealing fairly and with integrity with players. For similar recommendations in all kinds of categories, please visit this page.

The informational sites here were chosen on merit, too. Sites which offer excessive advertising or insufficient content weren’t listed.

Please note that we are NOT accepting submissions to this page. Please do NOT contact us to request a listing on this page. We will not respond to such requests, nor will we list sites which ignore our request to not reach out to us for this reason. There are just too many sites eager to get listed here for us to field all the requests we would receive, so we’ve decided in advance to not even read or accept such emails.