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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.

If you are a poker player in the US and you would like to play in a safe and secure USA online poker room, then this is the right place for you. A lot of misinformation about online poker legality issues raised concern for many online poker players. They are spreading the word that online poker is illegal but in truth, it is very legal. 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.

Poker Rooms The linked sites offer opportunities to learn and enjoy poker by providing articles, odds, and play money games. Card Player recommends these poker sites for those purposes.

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?

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• 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.

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?

Are you looking for the best US legal online poker sites or a real money poker app? If the answer is yes, then you came to the right place. This is one of our many online poker reviews where you can find more about the best online poker options.

Without further ado, keep reading to discover how to play the best online poker for money and how to form an online poker strategy. So, let’s get started!

Best Legal Online Poker Sites

1. WSOP
2. PartyPoker
3. PokerStars
4. Pala Poker
5. 888poker
6. Global Poker

Is online poker legal? It's not always the same as legal online casinos and legal online sportsbooks. All new players who decide to explore the vast universe of real money poker sites should know that federally, online poker sites are illegal. However, on the individual level, online poker is legal in some of the states.

Some websites such as Global Poker (which is a sweepstakes poker site) are allowed in 49 out of 50 US states. Only Washington does not allow it. At the moment of writing our online poker reviews, only four states offer legal online poker websites in the United States. These are the following: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware.

For more information about some of the available sites, make sure to consult our Global Poker review.

US Legal Online Poker: State by State

Is online poker legal in your state? If the answer is no, keep in mind that the situation can change pretty quickly. Unsurprisingly, Nevada was the leader of regulated online poker. Once the ice was broken, the domino-effect followed.

One by one, many states tried or are still trying to pass the legislation. As you can see, some of them even succeeded. The last one to recently pass online poker is West Virginia, and we expect more legal US poker sites to be launched in the future.

When it comes to future predictions, we believe that chances are pretty good for some of the states to overcome all the legal obstacles and finally launch real money poker sites so their residents become able to play legal online poker.

Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, New York are some of the states that’ll probably make some innovations when it comes to the possibilities of playing poker online. These are the states that have active supporters of online poker in the state senate.

What’s more, regulated real money poker sites in neighboring states can only have a positive effect on public opinion. Additionally, within the borders of the aforementioned states, you can find a considerable number of land-based casinos.

Many of them come with the best online poker rooms where you can play various variants of poker, including the most popular one - Texas Hold’em. In other words, these poker offline options make it easier to launch legal poker sites and eventually start to offer legal online poker.

States Where Legal Online Poker Seems Like a Distant Dream

From this point of view, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah are just some of the states where we can see a certain legislative hostility towards online gambling. Therefore, we don’t believe that we won’t be able to play Texas Hold’em online there for quite some time.

Sweepstakes Legal Online Poker - Play Poker Free No Matter Which State You’re In

As said before, Global Poker, a sweepstakes legal online poker site, can be accessed in all US states except for the state of Washington. This legal online poker platform was launched in 2106, and since then, many players use its services. The virtual currency gaming business model is what makes it unique.

Instead of playing for real money, players play poker free, using gold coins or sweeps cash. That’s why Global Poker often appears when players search for “play poker free” or “play poker online, free”.

To understand how sweepstakes poker works, let’s start with some poker basics and make sure to understand sweeps poker terminology clearly. There’s a difference between gold coins and sweeps cash, and there’s a reason for which “play poker online, free” is actually a bit of a misnomer here.

Gold Coins are the name for the virtual currency in Global Poker, and they are equivalent to what regular legal online poker sites usually call “play money”. In other words, you can’t cash them out, but you can use them to play Texas Hold’em online or participate in some of the available tournaments with other players. On the other hand, “$weeps cash” is a promotional, virtual currency that can be cashed out through PayPal.

To sum up, you can buy gold coins that don’t have any monetary value and can’t be cashed out. “$weeps cash” is obtained as free of charge once you buy Gold Coins. Because of this virtual currency online poker model, Global Poker is not quite considered an online gambling activity. Therefore, it’s allowed in almost all of the US.

Where Can I Play Legal Online Poker in the US?

Pennsylvania is the last state where online poker had become legal when PokerStars was launched there at the end of 2019. Right now that’s also the only available option to play online poker for money in Pennsylvania.

If we don’t count Global Poker, which can be accessed in 49 states, all the other legal online poker sites come with pretty restricted access. For example, Pala Poker and PartyPoker are only available in the state of New Jersey.

However, they are not the only NJ poker sites one can access. WSOP, America's top legal online poker site, is available in the Garden State, and it’s also accessible to all Nevada online poker fans as well. Likewise, PokerStars NJ, available both independently and within the FOX Bet app

Do Online Poker Sites Use Bots

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Where Can I Play Poker Live?

Most of the land-based casinos across different states include special poker rooms where you can play live poker. Playing Texas Hold’em online is definitely the most popular option. After all, poker is an American thing, so it’s no wonder to see it available in the vast majority of mortar and bricks casinos.

In fact, instead of listing all the states where you can sit back, relax and try out your luck with live poker, it’s better to list all those where you can’t play poker online. It’ll be easier to remember this list:

• Alaska
• Georgia
• Hawaii
• New Hampshire
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Utah

We must add that in Texas, private poker clubs aren’t forbidden. As long as no house makes a profit from the game, poker can be played in private places for fun.

US Online Poker Basics

When talking about the current status of legal US poker sites, there are two especially important laws that you should be aware of. Let’s take a look at these two federal laws that govern online poker in the country.

The Wire Act

The first one is the Interstate Wire Act of 1961, often called the Federal Wire Act. As you can see, it passed long before online poker or even the internet existed. However, it prohibits certain types of betting businesses to operate via wired communications.

In 2011, the US Department of Justice concluded that the scope of the act was limited to sporting events. Therefore, states, where online poker is now regulated, found that the bill didn’t apply to online poker nor other forms of gambling.

However, in 2019, the US Department of Justice reversed its opinion. The new opinion concludes that the Wire Act applies to all types of online gambling.

The UIGEA

The other relevant law is the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) from 2006. This law made it illegal for US banks to proceed with transactions for offshore gambling companies. That’s how they were pushed out of the market.

History of US Legal Online Poker

Online casinos started to appear back in 1994. They were usually situated in Antigua or the Isle of Man. However, the vast majority of their users were US-based customers. Two years later, in 1996, online gambling was also brought to the North American market soil.

The Kahnawake Gaming Commission was established just outside Montreal. They started issuing licenses, and pretty soon, it was possible to find hundreds of new online gambling websites.

Once again, two years later and again in Canada, the first-ever poker online website saw the light of day. Planet Poker was the favorite source of fun to thousands of Americans who were spending endless hours playing the first real-money online Texas Hold’em.

Over the next few years, thanks to technological advances, better online poker software was developed, while the number of websites kept increasing. These online poker operators also started to offer various tournaments and cash games and got a solid fan base all over the world.

The Industry Kept Growing & Then It Collapsed

Even though there were different interpretations of the law, especially of the famous Wire Act, the newly developed industry kept growing.

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The year 2003 is especially important in the evolution of online poker. Using an account from Tennessee, Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker after participating in the event through an online satellite. In Chris Moneymaker's case, we guess, it's okay to say that name determines destiny.

This online poker strategy was live-streamed on ESPN. Suddenly, the whole nation knew about Chris's story. A good number of Americans were hoping to be the next. All of a sudden, poker was everywhere on TV. Live games were followed carefully, and commercial breaks had one purpose: promoting online poker for money and playing Texas Hold 'em online.

The great number of promoted sites were, in fact, offshore online poker sites. A lot of them disappeared from American browsers after Congress passed the above-mentioned UIGEA in 2006.

However, even though a lot of sites weren't accessible anymore, online poker couldn't be erased that easily. Some of the offshore gambling companies had found a way around the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, but not for long.

In 2011, some of the largest online poker operators, including PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker/Ultimate Bet, were accused of violating UIGEA and money laundering. These websites were definitely excluded from the significant US online poker market, which seemed to come to an end at the time.

Legal Online Poker Sites Rise Again

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Also in 2011, the DOJ released a legal opinion that the Federal Wire act exclusively applied only to one form of gambling: sports betting. A few states saw this as a possibility, paving the way to regulated online casinos and legal US poker sites.

In 2012, Delaware was the first state that managed to do just that. Then, in December 2013, Nevada followed the example of passing online poker legislation. A week later, the Garden State became the third to legalize online gambling, and plans for NJ poker sites were made.

The first-ever regulated US online poker site was launched in Nevada in April 2013. Delaware and NJ poker sites went live that same year, a few months later. In 2017, Pennsylvania became the fourth state to join this group. West Virginia is the fifth state where online poker was regulated in 2019. Probably, more states will try to do the same thing in the near future.

Which State is Next?

Is online poker legal in California or New York? This is one of the frequently asked questions that people search for in the USA. They also search for different terms of poker terminology that sound unfamiliar to them. However, that’s another question that we could discuss on some other occasion.

Let’s get back to our question of legal online poker sites and the possible new markets in the USA. Michigan has made significant efforts to legalize online gambling, particularly online poker, while California, New York, and Massachusetts also seem to be moving in the right direction.

Real Money Poker App: How to Find the Best Poker App

It doesn’t matter if you are a Pennsylvania online poker fan or a regular visitor of NJ poker sites, the good news is that you can play poker whenever you want, anywhere within the borders of one or the other state.

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Many of the best online poker websites have launched a dedicated real money poker app that you can easily download and install on your device. The best poker apps are available for both iOS and Android operating systems.

In order to find the best poker app, make sure you visit one of the websites we listed at the beginning of our review.

Also, before you replace your poker offline adventure with the one that can be found on the internet, make sure to read some of the online poker reviews and get to know the poker terminology used by the players worldwide. After a brief introduction to the poker basics, it’s time to create your own online poker strategy and join one of the legal online poker communities!