The top online poker rooms are not all that difficult to point a finger at. Pretty much everyone connected to the business can name at least 4-5 such sites which all claim to be the biggest in the world. All one has to do is check out their traffic at the cash and tournament tables and he’ll be able to tell how popular a room really is. Big popularity means that there must be something good on offer there, right? Well it usually does too, but in the same time, it doesn’t mean there aren’t better offers to be found elsewhere.
‘Top poker room’ is a very relative concept in the online poker industry. What may be a top poker room for one person, may not be the same for the other. At the end of the day it all really comes down to finding a ‘personalized’ solution, via bonus whoring and learning how to evaluate different promotions and bonuses.
Just because a poker room is small, it doesn’t mean it can’t provide value. Quite the opposite is true actually. Online poker operators are aware of the fact that in today’s industry it takes some sacrifice to get started and to reach critical player liquidity. They will come up with offers that are more profitable than anything any of the top online poker rooms offer.
Take propping for instance. In order to somehow reach critical liquidity, new poker rooms actually hire layers to provide action. Nobody is going to wait for hours for a SNG to fill up, so prop players are the obvious solution. These guys will be paid through the excellent rakeback deals offered to them: above 100%. Propping however, comes with a few obligations which might just prove too much for some to handle, therefore I cannot state it is a setup that everyone is going to find rewarding.
Other such excellent value deals are available though. The ideal poker room will feature a generous bonus, one that is easy to unlock too, with loose validity deadlines and no “one lump sum” setups. In order to provide full value, a poker room needs to give some sort of a rakeback deal too. Whether it’s called cashback, or a performance-dependant loyalty bonus, it’s still all rakeback in my book, and it still provides the same, valuable edge.
Make sure the room you do decide to join does not deduct bonuses from rakeback. That way, until you’ll have your bonus unlocked, you’ll be playing on a double rakeback deal. The bonus needs to be a good percentage match of your first deposit (you like to get all the bang for your buck you deem fit, right?). Make sure there are no short validity terms chasing the value out of your bonus. The redemption requirements count big time in this respect. Redemption will usually be done vie FPPs or APs (Frequent Player Points of Action Points) which are directly dependant on the rake you generate. Make sure you know the exact method the room uses to calculate the rake you contribute. Dealt rake will have you at a disadvantage if you’re a loose aggressive player, while contributed rake will make it extremely difficult for you to unlock your bonus if you’re a weak-tight or just a tight passive player.
If your bonus is unlocked in smaller increments, you can rest assured you won’t have to wake up empty-handed at the end of the redemption period. If the room uses the “one lump sum” deal though, you might as well kiss your bonus goodbye, especially if it is a large one and you have a very short period to unlock it.
Things like the playing atmosphere, the graphics and the actual quality of the software are much less important. As long as software issues do not make playing impossibly frustrating, you don’t really care about it, do you. Which would you rather choose? A state of the art poker room fitted with all sorts of crazy options and statistics which is impossible to beat, or a mediocre one (there aren’t any that are ‘impossibly frustrating’ to play anyway) which offers great value?
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