Real Money Online Poker New York
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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.
Most real money New York poker sites offer a huge range of different casino gaming options. It’s common to find ones that offer more than 10 different poker games. With that being said, it’s smart to play the ones that you know and understand. This will significantly increase your chances of winning.
Rank | Poker Site | Exclusive Bonus | Get Started | |
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#1 | 888poker | 100% Up To€400 | Visit Site | Visit Site |
Real Money Online Poker in New York 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. Three other states in the process of offering real money poker online are Kentucky, Connecticut and New York. NJ Online Poker One of the first legal poker rooms in the Garden State was 888 Poker. Meanwhile, legal, real money poker has yet to come to NY despite the efforts of lawmakers over recent years. What follows is an overview of NY poker, including the state’s history and sweepstakes online poker sites. NY players also have the option of downloading a NJ poker app in New York and crossing the border to play online. If you’re new to online poker, we’re here to help you learn. From hand rankings to basic rules and strategies, find everything you need to get started. The games you want. These games do not offer real money gambling or an opportunity to win real money. Practice or success at social games does not imply future success at.
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!
Is online poker legal in New York?
No, not at present, although NY lawmakers continue to work toward that possibility.
NY online poker is hampered by current law that includes poker among its list of prohibited games of chance. The state’s constitution only allows a few exceptions for poker, including at regulated commercial casinos. Meanwhile, Native American-owned casinos can also spread live poker if they wish, per the applicable nation or Tribal Gaming Agency.
In early 2020, a bill was introduced in the state Senate that would remove poker from the list of prohibited games while authorizing up to 11 online poker licenses to operators. A similar bill was introduced in the State Assembly as well. In both cases, the bills failed to advance beyond committees the year before.
These are the latest among several attempts to legalize online poker in New York, ranging back to 2013.
Will New York regulate online poker?
If recent history provides any indication, chances are not great that real money online poker will be legalized and regulated in New York in the near future.
Previous online poker bills that have been introduced have failed to garner adequate support to advance through the legislative process. Meanwhile, online sports betting has gotten much more attention among lawmakers lately thanks in part to gambling laws in neighboring states. New Jersey and Pennsylvania have launched online poker sites, casinos and sportsbooks.
If online poker were to become legal, the New York State Gaming Commission would be the governing body drafting regulations, issuing licenses and overseeing the integrity of online poker in New York.
What are sweepstakes poker sites?
In the absence of real money NY poker sites, there aresweepstakes poker sites that currently welcome players in New York. The most popular of these sites is Global Poker, where players from every US state except Washington can play.
Sweepstakes sites use virtual currencies rather than real money. Global Poker uses Gold Coins and Sweeps Coins.
Players can purchase Gold Coins to play “cash” games and tournaments. When they buy Gold Coins, they receive Sweeps Coins as a bonus. Sweeps Coins can be obtained in other ways as well, including via Facebook giveaways and even by writing to Global Poker directly.
Furthermore, players can use Sweeps Coins for sweepstakes-style cash games and tournaments. Players can win and accumulate more of them. Then, once they have collected a minimum required amount, players can redeem Sweeps Coins for real money and withdraw the cash.
What about offshore poker sites? Are they safe?
There are online poker sites located outside the US — hence called “offshore” sites — that do accept US players. While New Yorkers don’t necessarily face legal obstacles to play on such sites themselves, they are, nonetheless, taking a risk when they do.
The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 restricts US banks and other financial service providers from allowing transactions with non-US gambling sites. That means rogue poker sites are forced to find other means via which to allow American players the ability to deposit and withdraw funds.
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If that isn’t problematic enough, American players have to take a leap of faith when it comes to game integrity and the safety of their funds. There have been incidents of these sites suddenly closing and making off with players’ money, leaving Americans no legal recourse to recover their funds.
Also, if players suspect they have been victimized by cheating, collusion, ghosting, multi-accounting, or other types of fraud, they generally have to hope the sites respond to their complaints. Since again, they have no legal recourse to ensure they are protected.
Playing on a fully legal, licensed and regulated real money site is much more preferable. To be able to offer the games, operators must comply with rules to monitor and prohibit fraudulent activity, thus making the sites much safer for online poker players.
New York poker laws
The New York Penal Code explicitly prohibits gambling, defined as staking or risking “something of value upon the outcome of a contest of chance” or some other event not under a person’s control and doing so with “an agreement or understanding that he will receive something of value in the event of a certain outcome.”
That prohibition includes types of gambling in which skill plays a part, too.
The way the law is written, “contests of chance” involve any game that “depends in a material degree upon an element of chance, notwithstanding that skill of the contestants might also be a factor therein.”
There are exceptions, foremost among them playing in the state lottery or gambling at a facility licensed by the New York State Gaming Commission, such as at the state’s commercial casinos. Also allowed are horse racing and pari-mutuel wagering operations, authorized video lottery terminal operators, and Class 3 Indian gaming facilities.
Are home poker games legal in New York?
As is the case in many other states, home poker games are allowed in New York as long as no one is collecting rake or fees.
The relevant part of the New York Penal Code describes such a game as “a social game of chance… without fee or remuneration.”
There was a notable court case involving a home poker game in New York in 2011.
Lawrence DiCristina was hosting poker games out of a warehouse in Staten Island. DiCristina collected 5% rake in the game, which in and of itself, would run afoul of what the law says about hosting a “social game of chance.” However, DiCristina was found guilty of violating federal law, the Illegal Gambling Business Act (IGBA).
The case was appealed, and in 2012, the conviction was overturned in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Interestingly, on appeal, the US District Court Judge Jack B. Weinstein ruled that Texas Hold’em was, in fact, a game of skill and thus not prohibited by the IGBA.
That ruling was reversed by the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals. DiCristina tried to appeal again, but in February 2014, the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Nevertheless, the most recent attempts to introduce online poker legislation have included mention of the DiCristina case, in particular Judge Weinstein’s ruling that poker is considered distinct from other gambling games thanks to its skill component.
New York card rooms
New York is home to tribal casinos and commercial casinos, with live poker rooms found in each.
The first tribal casino opened in 1993, the Turning Stone Resort Casino in Verona, operated by the Oneida Indian Nation of New York. It continues to feature one of the biggest and most popular poker rooms in the state.
In 2013, commercial casinos were legalized and among them can be found some popular poker rooms as well, such as at Rivers Casino in Schenectady and Resorts World Catskills in Monticello.
No-limit hold’em is the primary game at all New York poker rooms, although the larger ones also spread pot-limit Omaha and stud games.
Meanwhile, both the Rivers Casino and the Seneca Niagara Casino & Hotel have hosted popular poker tournaments in recent years as well.
List of NY poker rooms
Here’s a list of live card rooms that players can find in New York casinos:
POKER ROOM | ADDRESS | TABLES |
---|---|---|
Akwesasne Mohawk Casino | 873 State Route 37, Hogansburg, NY 13655 | 5 |
Del Lago Resort and Casino | 1133 Route 414, Waterloo, NY 13165 | 14 |
Resorts World Catskills | 888 Resorts World Dr., Monticello, NY 12701 | 19 |
Rivers Casino & Resort at Mohawk Harbor | 1 Rush St., Schenectady, NY 12308 | 16 |
Seneca Niagara Resort & Casino | 310 Fourth St., Niagara Falls, NY 14303 | 23 |
Seneca Salamanca Casino | 768 Broad St., Salamanca, NY 14779 | 8 |
Tioga Downs Casino | 2384 W. River Rd., Nichols, NY 13812 | 6 |
Turning Stone Casino | 5218 Patrick Rd., Verona, NY 13478 | 32 |
Also, there are poker rooms in two casinos just across the Canadian border on the other side of Niagara Falls: Casino Niagara (with 26 tables) and Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort (with 16 tables).
New York poker timeline
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, stories of poker games occurring in the underground poker clubs in New York City were frequently reported on in newspapers and given literary treatments by fiction writers.
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Following World War I, one of the most famous poker clubs in the country regularly met at the Algonquin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The Thanatopsis Pleasure and Inside Straight Club comprised many of the era’s most famous writers, actors, poets, playwrights, columnists and critics who kept the games going until the early 1930s.
As far as other types of gambling were concerned, New York first legalized and then banned pari-mutuel wagering before bringing it back again in 1940. Horse racing and off-track betting have been an important industry in the state ever since.
Meanwhile, after being the first US state to ban the lottery in the 1830s, New York was the second to bring it back in 1967.
Poker continued to be played, however, with regular underground games taking place in a variety of locations, such as bars and restaurants, office suites, high-rise condos, self-storage units, social clubs, private homes, and even in churches and synagogues.
Some of the Hungarian restaurants where such games took place were commonly referred to as “goulash joints” or “ghoulies.”
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Despite their necessarily clandestine nature, a few of these poker clubs gained renown outside of New York City. This includes the Mayfair Club that began as a bridge club in the 1940s, then later became the site of high-stakes backgammon, gin rummy and poker games.
Famous poker players who passed through the Mayfair during the century’s later decades included Stu Ungar, Erik Seidel, Dan Harrington, Howard Lederer and Mickey Appleman, to name a few. Band manager and music producer Brian Koppelman played there as well, and later with David Levien would use that experience as inspiration to write the screenplay for the 1998 film Rounders.
Clubs, like the Mayfair, began to be shut down, however, in 2000, thanks to then-Mayor Rudy Guiliani’s “Quality of Life” campaign to clean up New York City.
Games persisted nonetheless, with clubs reappearing in the 2000s and afterward, in particular during the “poker boom” when the game found new popularity on television and online.
In 1993, the state signed a compact with the Oneida Indian Nation of New York, resulting in the opening of the state’s first land-based casino, the Turning Stone Casino Resort in Verona, which featured a large and popular poker room. Eventually, other Native American-owned casinos opened as well.
In 2013, voters in the stated supported the New York Casino Gambling Amendment authorizing a limited number of commercial casinos to open in areas of the state other than New York City.
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While the overall number of casinos in New York are small, many of them do provide live and legal poker to New Yorkers not wishing to brave the underground games.
As far as online poker is concerned, State Senator Joseph Addabbo Jr. and Assemblyman Gary Pretlow have each introduced multiple online poker bills over recent years, though none has gained needed support. Thus New York remains without legal, real money poker sites, unlike its neighbors, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, to the south.
What does the future hold for New York online poker?
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For online poker to become legal in NY, it will likely be necessary first for other forms of online gambling or online casinos to be legalized, in particular, NY online sports betting.
In early 2020, some momentum was starting to build around an online sports betting bill. However, the onset of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the disease’s profound impact on New York state, including economically, understandably made the pursuit of such legislation a much lower priority among lawmakers as the state grappled with budgetary matters and other more urgent concerns.
With the country’s fourth-largest population of more than 19 million, New York would be a great candidate for online poker, given what would surely be a significant player pool. It would be especially good for online poker in the US if the state were to legalize online poker and join the multi-state compact to increase liquidity.