Choosing the Best Poker Rooms

8online-poker.com is here to help choose a poker room for you. We pick you play, using the most important criteria, we eliminate the need for you to waste time surfing around comparing poker rooms, when all you need to do is choose one from our list of the BEST poker rooms online.

1. Security and Trust - It's important to recognize and realise that you are transacting real money data exchanges, and therefore you should demand the best encryption protocols to ensure that your financial transactions are carried out securely. Verisign and Thawte are the industry standard in online security. Poker rooms using their services will display their signs (see above) on their website.
2. Licensing - Always make sure that you play in a poker room which has been properly licensed in a reputable gaming commission. These commissions provide and enforce a commitment to ethical gaming, and more importantly provide a forum for which players can register their complaints and concerns about a poker room.
3. Availability and Technical support - the technology behind operating online poker rooms is extremely advanced. However, this does not mean that there aren't dodgy operators out there. All the poker rooms we recommend have got excellent server models, brilliant recovery of disconnected games, and above all 24/7 availability.
4. Customer Service - as a new player or even an experienced online player, you'll still need the use of the poker rooms customer services at some point. The poker rooms we choose offer 24/7 support with toll free telephone lines. All good poker rooms will have at the very least a 24hr email support service, and some of the larger operators will have live chat operators. Beware of any poker room that doesn't display it's support details.
5. Graphics and Interface - we throughly test all the poker rooms on this site to ensure that the interface is easy to use. We make sure that it is easy for beginner players to understand, whilst maintaining it's ease of use for advanced players. We also assess the graphics for their smoothness, game enrichment, and suitability.
6. Variety of Games - a good poker room must have more than just Texas Hold'em! All the poker rooms we have chosen have all got an excellent variety of games from Omaha Hold'em, Stud Poker and other variations, with some even offering chinese poker.
7. Variety of Tables - not only should they have a selection of poker variations, they should also have a large selection of tables with lots of limit levels. This means that there will be players and tables for people of all abilities. It enables beginners to find the smallest limit tables to practice their poker, but also allow seasoned players to compete at the highest stakes.
8. Competition - It's important when going to play online poker that there are plenty of other people to play against. The poker rooms we choose have all got varying degrees of player abilities, but the one thing they do have lots of is players!
9. Loyalty Bonuses - we like poker rooms that reward players for playing more, thus giving additional rewards for loyalty.
10. Tournaments - even with all the game varieties, it's nice to compete in tournaments as they lead to greater prizes. Hence having major tournaments and satellite tournaments is important to make our list of recommended poker rooms. The best poker rooms will also have satellites which lead to the WSOP or WPT tournaments.