If you are going to play Poker online for the first time – first you have choose a poker room that you can trust. It must be financially reliable, technologically stable, and generally honest. Our Poker room reviews take all of this into account, and there are actually a number of equally solid companies that offer an excellent product for poker players. Your deposits are safe, your details secure, and when you want to get your money out that will also present no problem.
You should Play for free at a poker room before you make an initial deposit, simply to become familiar with the various software features, the time they give you to make a decision in each hand, feeling comfortable with the pre-select buttons that are available, and getting used to the way information is presented to you. Each poker room is different in most of these regards, and you need to feel comfortable with the interface before you play for real money.
Next, take advantage of the fact that online poker rooms will pay you to play there, as opposed to your local card room where the idea would be ridiculous. This is one big advantage of Internet poker, and you need to exploit it as a new player. Nearly all poker rooms offer a first-time bonus when you make an initial deposit, and many poker websites offer incentives that are linked to the number of raked hands you play there. Many new poker players lose out by making a first-time deposit that is too small. Make sure that you qualify for the largest possible match bonus offered by the poker room. If the bonus is 50% of your deposit up to a maximum bonus of $100 then make sure you deposit $200 first time out. They are giving you free money, which will help to offset the cost of the rake over time, so you must take it all.
Newer poker rooms obviously feel a more urgent need to increase their volume of players so they tend to offer better bonuses than the more established poker rooms that already have thousands of players. As a new player the volume of players at a poker room is not a primary concern. You are more likely to play low-limit games initially, and the newer poker rooms always have more users at lower-limits than they do at big-limits. If you are already a serious high-stakes player you will probably not choose a new online poker room precisely because they do not have enough consistent games at high levels. Make sure that there are games offered at your stakes level throughout the day. But a less-established poker room also has one other big advantage for shrewd online poker players, namely that they tend to attract very weak players. There is a clever way to ascertain if an online poker table is full of weak players, and every poker room has this functionality: go to the “lobby” of an online poker room and look at the percentage of players that see the flop at a table. This pre-flop % should be around 30% at the most for limit-stakes games and the higher the % the softer the game. When you see that the average number of players staying to see the flop is over 50% at a table you should jump in immediately and take advantage!
Now that you have found a reliable online poker room with an excellent initial deposit bonus, a rewards scheme in place to pay you back the more you play there, software that you are comfortable using, and weak competition that you can hopefully beat on a regular basis, you are ready to start playing online poker at a high level.
By Gil A,