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Do you want to play live poker in New York? You can, but it might not be easy.
It’s easier to play poker online instead. Online poker alleviates many of the issues of live poker that we’ll cover below. First, here are the best New York poker sites online right now.
Rank | Poker Site | Exclusive Bonus | Get Started | |
---|---|---|---|---|
#1 | 888poker | 100% Up To€400 | Visit Site | Visit Site |
New York has a few cardrooms, and each one offers different games and promotions. But the nearest cardroom might be several hours away depending on where you live.
Of course, you can play at a seedy underground club instead. But those can be dangerous, and they’re illegal.
We strongly recommend playing real money poker online. But only if you join a safe, top-rated NY poker site.
If you’ve never played poker online before, this guide will help you get started.
We’re going to begin with showing you why it makes more sense to play poker online. We’ll discuss tournaments, then give you reasons to join that apply to any type of poker.
Next, we’ll share a few of the challenges you’ll face playing live poker. After that, we’ll wrap up this guide with an explanation of how we choose the best online poker sites for New York.
Let’s get started.
Honestly, the cash games aren’t too bad in New York. The rake is reasonable. You’ll find a variety of games, too. We see no reason not to play them.
There are still a few downsides that apply to live poker cash games. And we’ll cover those in the next section. We’re going to focus on live tournaments for now, which have more downsides.
Here are some of the downsides live tournament players experience while playing poker in New York.
You Have Few Cardrooms to Choose From
Only six to eight New York casinos offer poker. This is challenging enough. But then there’s also the fact that they’re spread out throughout the state.
Because there are so few poker rooms, it can take you an hour or two just to travel to one. Depending on where you live, it can take up to six hours to travel to your nearest poker room.
And that’s not all. You also have to consider the time it takes to play a tournament, which is easily another three to four hours. It could maybe even last longer.
So, if you want to play live poker in New York, you might have to set aside an entire day. This isn’t easy to do if you have a family, a career, and only a small window to play poker each week.
Another downside to playing live tournament poker in New York is that all the poker rooms we looked at don’t offer much more than Texas Hold’em.
You won’t find many variants other than turbos, knockouts, and shootouts, either.
Tournaments Start Only Twice a Day
Yet another downside is that a couple of New York’s poker rooms offer tournaments only a couple times a week. For example, the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino Resort only runs tourneys on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Even if a cardroom runs them daily, they’ll only have one or two scheduled. This makes sense because they only have so much space, and tournaments take at least two to three hours to complete.
Only a certain number of people can enter these tournaments, too. At some point the tournament will reach capacity (due to square footage restrictions). So, if you can’t get to a tournament in time, or you get there and it’s full, you’ve gone all that way for nothing.
New York poker tournament aren’t cheap. You’re lucky if you can find a tournament for less than $50 to $60, and that doesn’t include rebuys or add-ons. It’ll cost you more than that on the weekends.
Chances are you’ll want to rebuy and add-on if you drove several hours to play. Unfortunately, you can still bust early, which will suck if you made a long trek. You’ll have spent more time driving than playing.
It’s for all these reasons that playing tournament poker online in NY makes more sense than playing live.
- You can log onto a poker site and go from one poker room to the next in a matter of minutes, not hours.
- You’ll have a variety of poker games, variants, and stakes to choose from.
- Tournaments run all day long at online poker sites. You don’t have to worry about registering by a specific time unless there’s a specific tournament you want to play.
These aren’t the only reasons why online poker makes so much sense either.
Here are a few other reasons why you should consider playing online poker in New York instead of live.
- Claim a deposit bonus
- Most online NY poker rooms offer hundreds or thousands of dollars in bonuses to first-time depositors.
- Multi-table
- Poker sites allow you to play four or more cash game tables and several more, if not an unlimited number of tournaments at the same time.
- Use a HUD
- This is software that collects data from your opponents and turns it into stats you can use to make decisions in real time at the table.
- Poker software features
- Every New York poker site has features that help you play profitable poker. This includes four-color decks, display bet sizing, changing the table design, note-taking, and more.
- Play freeroll tournaments
- Freerolls are free to join and have real money prize pools. You won’t find freerolls offline.
- Lobby stats
- It’s hard to gauge a live cash game simply by looking at it. But you can do that online. Poker sites include stats in their lobbies that tell you how many players each table has, the number of hands they play per hour, the average pot size, and more. These statistics help you determine if that game is worth joining.
- Select tables
- Use the data the NY poker sites offer and online resources to determine which tables are too tough to join. Then, join the easier ones. You can’t do this live.
- Data
- There are poker websites that track players’ results by room and screenname. You can look up your competitors to see how good they are, then use this info to make decisions in real time.
- Smaller stakes
- The lowest cash game you can play live is usually $1/$2 or $1/$3. The smallest tournament is usually $40. But online you can play for $0.01/$0.02 per hand and MTTs for less than $1.
There are many reasons to play live poker. Maybe you enjoy socializing. Maybe you’re good at picking up tells. Maybe you want to play for higher stakes.
But if none of that applies to you, then we’d argue that it’s far more beneficial, not to mention practical, to play real money poker online in New York.
Challenges New Yorkers Face When Playing Live
The benefits we shared above aren’t the only reasons why it makes sense to play poker online. Online poker is just so much easier. You won’t face most if any of the following challenges that live players do.
You might be surprised at how bad some players’ poker faces are. They pick up a good hand or hit the flop hard, and you see their eyes open wide or notice them raising their eyebrows.
We’ve even seen players shake so bad you’d think it was freezing inside. And if they’re not physically shaking, their voice is shaking.
These are all tells (or signs) that a player has a certain hand. Or doesn’t. It depends on the tell. Anyway, here’s how this impacts you.
If you don’t play live poker often, there’s a good chance you have a tell or two as well. And your tell will make it easier for others to play against you.
You don’t have to worry about this if you play online, though.
Boredom
You can only play one table at a time live where you’re lucky to see more than 15 to 20 hands per hour. And if you’re a good player, you’re folding most of those hands.
What do you do with the rest of your time?
You can pay attention to the action, but this is hard to do, especially for prolonged periods. Many people choose to read, watch the game on TV, or play on their phone instead.
If you play online, though, you could play a couple of tables at once. That way, you’re always involved in a hand. You’ll make more money multi-tabling, too.
You should do your best to take notes whenever possible. This includes jotting down your opponents’ ranges, bet sizes, anything they do that surprises you, and more.
This information is good to have for future hands. It’ll help you make more profitable decisions.
The challenge is that some poker rooms dislike notetaking. Some players do, too. And even if you can take notes, it’s hard to do live since there’s so much to remember.
Note-taking is much easier online since you can use shorthand along with symbols and/or colors to tag an opponent. Most poker rooms have hand histories and/or hand re-players too, which you can use to recall everything that happened in a hand.
Other People
Another challenging thing about live poker is that you have to deal with other people.
This isn’t such a big deal if the people you play with shower regularly, don’t smoke excessively, and have good manners.
But a lot of guys don’t. They burp, fart, and forget to shower or wear deodorant before wedging themselves in between two other guys.
Don’t forget that some people can be annoying, too. They talk a lot or make too many jokes (that aren’t funny). Or maybe they have a bad temper that flares up whenever they lose (which is every other hand).
Sometimes, people just suck. The good news is that you can avoid them and all their annoying characteristics if you choose to play poker online instead.
This challenge is reason enough for us to play online, that much is for sure.
If you’re interested in playing online poker in New York, then the first step you’ll need to take is to create an account with a top-rated poker site.
We recommend you join one of the poker rooms above. And in the next section, we’ll explain how we chose them.
You’ll notice that we recommend several sites on this page. This list includes ONLY the best New York poker sites online.
But what makes them so great? And how the heck would we know? That’s what we want to explain to you now.
Reviewing and Testing New York Poker Sites
We thoroughly review and test every poker site we recommend. Here is what we look for and test.
- Does the poker room have traffic?
- Traffic impacts which games run and how often.
- What kinds of bonuses can you claim?
- We consider the size of the bonus and how easy it is to earn.
- What kinds of games and variants can you play?
- Some players only want to play old-fashioned Texas Hold’em. But some outgrow that and want to play other poker games like Omaha or Stud.
- Do they have high quality software?
- Software impacts everything from how the games look to how well they work. It also impacts the features you can use and whether you can play poker on your smartphone.
- Do they have guaranteed tournaments?
- How big are they and how often do they run? Can you satellite in? Are the buy-ins reasonable?
We find the answers to these questions and play a few games to test the software. This gives us an idea of whether this is a good room for poker players. And we’re only halfway done at this point.
The other half of our process is determining that the poker site is safe and secure, reliable, and that the operator has a good reputation in the poker community.
We also test their customer support, research their banking options, including how quickly they pay out winnings.
Once we’re done, we publish everything we find in our poker room reviews.
The next phase is rating and recommending poker sites to our readers.
We go through every poker site we think will work for a specific category, such as New York poker sites. We compare their strengths and weaknesses, then weed out the subpar sites.
We rank the remaining sites according to how great of a fit they are for the category we’re working on; in this case, it would be poker sites for NY gamblers.
The final product is what you see on this page. This process takes us hours to complete because of all the research, testing, and rating every site we recommend.
And that’s all there is to it. That’s why you can trust us when we say that the sites we recommend are the best New York poker sites.
We’ve done the work so that you don’t have to!
We covered a lot of ground in such a short guide. For example, you learned all about the challenges that plague New York live poker players.
- There aren’t many cardrooms in the state.
- The nearest cardroom might be hours away.
- Cardrooms only offer tournaments a handful of times per day, and sometimes, no more than a couple of times per week.
- The stakes are higher offline.
These are just a few of the many reasons why we recommend you play online poker instead. You’ll have more games, variants, and stakes to choose from. You can claim promotions. And you can play games on your schedule instead of the casino’s.
If that sounds like the path you want to take, what you need to do now is join an online poker site. We list the top New York poker sites on this page. Choose one and create your account now.
You can thank us later!
Our team of experts have found the top no deposit poker sites. Whether you want to make a €5 minimum deposit or make a €1 deposit in a mobile casino, these are the best places to play.
To rate top poker sites with minimum deposits of €1, we review each site using a range of criteria. These assessments include:
- Licensing and security: Whether you're playing for pennies or millions, the site should be reputable. This means it must be licensed with the relevant certification bodies and protected with the latest encryption technology.
- Software: Sites must be stable whether you download software or play instantly in your browser.
- Games: The reason why you visit online poker sites to begin with, there need to be plenty of varieties to choose from for low-stakes players.
- Banking methods: While an online casino might tout their low deposit minimums, they might only accept payments from banking methods with higher transfer minimums. That's why we always check between the two to help you find the best banking methods for low deposit poker online.
- Customer support: Whether you're a high-roller or a low-stakes gambler, the customer support needs to be readily available across a variety of communication channels to answer questions or resolve issues.
What are Minimum Deposits?
When you're ready to deposit real money at a top casino online, you'll notice that there are some limitations involved. Some online casinos will only give you a bonus if you deposit a minimum of €10, while others can even be as high as €20, €50 or more.
Low deposits let new players gamble with a small deposit, especially if they don't have a lot of money on their credit card/eWallet/PayPal, etc at the current moment. These poker rooms let you play $5 minimum deposit poker. There are even some poker sites with a minimum deposit of €1.
Low minimum deposit poker rooms cater primarily to beginning players that prefer to play at lower stakes than high rollers. If you plan to try out multiple poker sites before making a substantial deposit, it is very important to choose the lowest first deposit online poker sites to keep your testing investment as low as possible.
Most poker websites will enforce expiration dates on any money in your poker site account after a period of inactivity (often 180 days). If you make a deposit at a poker room and decide that you do not enjoy playing there, it is much less of a financial hit to make the small deposit at poker websites or play only long enough to clear the bonus that was awarded with your deposit.
Where to Find Minimum Deposit Amounts on Poker Sites
We've already done the research and found the best no deposit poker sites, as well as those accepting a €1 deposit. Casino fans from Australia all the way to the States can enjoy a wide range of excellent poker sites with low minimum deposits. Just click on our top lists of casinos to find the one that's right for you.
If you happen to land on a new casino online and you're not sure how much you'll be required to deposit, it's best to check their help or FAQ section. It should be clearly stated what their minimum deposits might be.
Alternatively, you could contact the customer support team. If they aren't able to give you a friendly, helpful response quickly and easily, it's probably a bad sign about the casino in general.
How to make a depositWhen you visit US poker sites with low minimum deposit thresholds, you might wonder if it's harder to deposit your real money into your casino account. Not to fear, it's still quick and easy to make a deposit.
- Check out our reviews to find the online casino that's right for you
- Register a username and confirm your email address
- Click or tap on cashier or banking
- Select your desired banking method
- Input your deposit amount and confirm
- Start playing real money poker with a low deposit minimum
No Deposit Poker Sites
When you visit no deposit poker sites, you'll be given real money with zero deposit. Poker sites will often do this to let players experience the games and casino online, giving you a taste of what you can expect.
Most no deposit poker works as a no deposit bonus, giving you bonus real money to play with. These bonuses will still require that you play through a certain amount before you can withdraw.
There are also no deposit poker sites that let you play with fake money. These are great for playing free poker for fun. Plus, if you play at these sites enough, you can get entry into freerolls and other tournaments.
Banking Methods at Top Poker Sites
Online Poker Sites Real Cash
One of the often overlooked aspects of choosing the best low minimum deposit poker sites is the payment options that they accept. For example, a poker site may list a low minimum deposit requirement of €10 cash but not accept any payment methods that allow transfers under €20.
The best low minimum deposit limit poker sites accept payment options that coincide with their minimum deposit limit to give you the most options. These are the minimum transfer amounts from some popular banking methods, although the minimums might be different to what you'll find as the online casino's minimum deposit.
Payment Method | Minimum Deposit |
Visa | €10.00 |
MasterCard | €10.00 |
Wire Transfer | €10.00 |
PayPal | €10.00 |
Skrill | €10.00 |
Neteller | €10.00 |
Bitcoin | €20.00 |
Paysafecard | €10.00 |
Deposit Real Money on Mobile Devices
You can make a €1 deposit at a mobile casino online. When you use your smartphone or tablet, you can visit no deposit poker sites or make a low minimum deposit, all with the tap and swipe of your fingertips.
Because all our recommended casinos online have excellent mobile integration using apps and instant play, you can use any modern mobile device. This includes iOS, Android, Windows, Kindle Fire and BlackBerry devices.
Conclusion
Whether you're looking to win big at no deposit poker sites, or enjoy some €5 minimum deposit poker games, we've got you covered. Our experts only recommend the best online poker sites for low-stakes players, so you can enjoy excellent poker online, no matter what your bankroll.
Online Poker Sites Real Money
Visit one of our recommended online poker sites today and start winning real money in 2021.