Online poker sites come and go, and only the best ones remain and become fixtures. Whether you are looking for a new place to play or about to start your online poker adventure, there are a lot of sites to choose from.
We’ve constantly been evaluating online poker sites for the past few years. There are a lot of poker players in Smart Spin’s community, and we have to be sure they are playing on the best poker sites available.
In this article, we’ll look at three poker rooms that are the best places for playing poker online in 2024, whether we talk Spin & Go’s, cash games, or MTTs.
PokerStars – the king of online poker sites
PokerStars became the world’s largest poker site a few years ago, which hasn’t changed ever since. Sure, there were some hiccups along the way, but the room with the red spade as the logo is the unquestionable leader in the industry and offers almost all of the online poker variants out there.
How’s the player pool? Currently, poker players from around the world can play on a handful of different PS domains, but the most popular one, by far, is PokerStars.com
Poker tournaments on PokerStars
PokerStars offers an abundance of poker experiences. Poker tournaments run around the clock, seven days a week, with the occasional major series like the prestigious Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) and World Championship of Online Poker. The company also runs its own live circuits, and European Poker Tour (EPT) is the most popular and respected one. Each series has its own satellite tournaments, so if you are persistent and lucky enough, you can play the main event for only a tiny fraction of the solid €5300 buy-in.
Cash games on PokerStars
The cash game offer of PokerStars is also not too bad. You can choose from a variety of stakes – in the case of no-limit Texas Holdem, that would mean the limits anywhere from $0,01/0,02 to $5/10 and up. If you would like to play poker games other than Holdem, you will definitely find something to suit your needs, especially if you are a pot-limit Omaha games fan.
Spin & Go’s on PokerStars
What’s most important from our point of view, however, is that PokerStars was the room that introduced Spin & Go’s to the world. The format itself is still pretty young compared to the others, but it took the poker world by storm.
Spins are fast, offer you a chance to win big (up to thousands of buy-ins at once), and are very accessible – you can play them for as little as $0,25.
Nowadays, various online poker sites offer different takes on Spin & Go’s. Still, PokerStars will always hold the title of the format’s inventor, and it will most likely be the most popular online poker room to offer them for the foreseeable future.
Recently PokerStars vastly improved its rewards system, which was big news for almost every poker player out there. Now, playing at Stars is much more profitable as you can quite easily get over 40% of your contributed rake back.
Due to the brand’s clout, PokerStars is a to-go platform for many recreational players, especially on lower stakes. Good software and big fields also attract the best professional poker players, so you should be careful on higher stakes.
Winamax – the best of French online poker rooms
Winamax is the biggest online poker room in France. It’s the poker room of choice for many French players, but it’s also available to players from the European Union, and therefore it has quite a good traffic for a regional room.
Poker tournaments on Winamax
Winamax offers plenty of poker tournaments, which attract thousands of players even on weekdays (not as much as PokerStars, however). The operator guarantees €10,000,000 in prizes every month, which makes Winamax one of the best online poker sites, tournament-wise.
Cash games on Winamax
The action in cash game format is also there, especially in the European time zones evening. Winamax provides plenty of no-limit Texas Holdem tables, from €0,01/0,02 to €25/50. Fans of pot-limit Omaha won’t leave empty-handed, either.
Expresso poker on Winamax
Like any of the reputable poker sites, Winamax also offers its variation on the Spin & Go format, which the French decided to call Expresso. There are 10 levels of buy-in in Expresso games – from €0,25 to €500. Prizes in those games range from 2 to 1,000,000 times the buy-in.
The jackpots themselves are also quite big, you can play for €1,000,000 for as little as €1, and on the highest €500 stake, the biggest jackpot is a whooping €2,000,000. Big jackpots and soft fields equal one of the best poker sites to play Spins on.
Party Poker – poker room with 20 years of tradition
Being in the poker business since 2001, Party Poker has been through many ups and downs. Recently, partly due to a great job done by its partner, Rob Yong, Party Poker is easily one of the best poker sites out there.
Poker tournaments on Party Poker
Suppose you are interested in playing online poker on Party. In that case, you can choose from various daily MTT tournaments and occasional online series with hundreds of thousands of dollars guaranteed. For the last few years, Party Poker has quite heavily explored the live poker tournaments area. That obviously was set back a little by the pandemic, but many parts of the world are getting back to normal, so that we can expect great events from Party soon enough.
Cash games on Party Poker
One thing that’s characteristic of PP is anonymous cash game tables. While many pros despised the decision, the idea was to shrink professional poker players’ advantage over recreational players. Was it a good idea? It depends on who you ask, but that’s what all cash games on Party look like.
In recent years, Party was home to high-stakes cash games where the best of the best battled it out for millions of dollars, a real treat to watch for every cash game poker fan.
SPINS on Party Poker
Of course, we couldn’t really acknowledge party poker as one of the best online poker sites without it having a solid spin variant – this time, the name of the game is a humble SPINS.
SPINS offer a jackpot multiplier range from 2x to 240,000x. This means that you can play for a hefty $1,000,000 prize for as little as $5, so as you can imagine, there is no shortage of recreational poker players dreaming of winning life-changing money.
Historically speaking, the biggest downside to Party Poker was its subpar software compared to other poker rooms. That changed recently, and now Party’s software might not be the most beautiful on the market, but it’s way more reliable and functional than it used to be.
Which poker site should you choose?
There are a lot of places to play online poker out there, and in this article, we’ve presented you with the three that, in our opinion, are the most solid choices, especially if you’re interested in playing Spin & Go’s or its variants. Do you feel like taking your poker skills to the next level? Contact us and join the Smart Spin community, where hundreds of poker players learn how to crush Spin & Go’s.