Softest Online Poker Sites

4/6/20224/6/2022

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You play against people who are worse than you are. You find the softest games.

That’s not a sexy answer, I know. It’s the truth, though. Think about it.

Phil Ivey. Daniel Negreanu. Doyle Brunson. They’re all great poker players. They play against each other often.

But while they might sharpen their skills playing against each other, they’re probably not making (much) money. They’re just trading it back and forth, and dealing with lots of variance.

They’d make far more money if they found a table of fish. I’d bet they’d tell you that, too.

Soft games aren’t just for the pros, either. Recreational players should find soft games too, so they actually stand a chance of not losing all their money. And maybe – just maybe – they’ll actually win some.

USA’s Softest Poker Sites (2020) Top US-friendly poker sites that are regarded as softest are Bet Online (ranks #1 in this category), Bovada, Americas Cardroom, Interops, Ignition Casino, and Juicy Stakes. How exactly are these platforms the softest online poker sites. The big money that is made in online poker is playing cash games, its important to play at the sites that will give you the highest profits and that's the sites with the softest cash games online. Poker sites with soft. It’s consistently rated as one of the best online poker sites for US players. The reason why it’s rated as one of the best online poker sites US players is due to its various features. Some of the features it has.

You can find a soft game anywhere. Even on pro-infested sites. But that would be doing things the hard way.

It’s much easier to find consistently soft games by joining a soft poker site. It’s even easier to find one if you pick one from our list of softest poker sites below.

What do you look for when you want to join a soft poker site? What do the poker sites in our list above have in common?

While every poker room is different, they will usually have one or more of the following traits. We’ll explain each one so you can see why we recommend the sites we do.

Overlays

An overlay is a term used for a guaranteed tournament where the guarantee wasn’t met from the people who’ve bought in. The poker room then makes up the difference.

For example, say there’s a tournament with a $1,000 guarantee. The buy-in is $100+$10 – only $100 goes to the prize pool.

If 8 people sign up, then there’s only $800 of the $1,000 guarantee. The poker room then has to add the $200 difference.

There’s a couple reasons why this signals a soft poker site (and soft tournament).

It’s a soft tournament because instead of 10 people to fight through (with the top 3 paid), you now only have to fight through 8 people for the same amount of money (with the top 2-3 paid). There’s more money to win for less work.
Another reason why this means the site’s soft is because if you look at any major poker room (one that has lots of pros), you’ll notice their tournaments NEVER have overlays. They have too many people. When you have that much traffic you know the site is full of pros, thus it’s not the softest site.

A room with overlays is a room with smaller amounts of traffic. While some pros hunt on these grounds, most don’t because it’s simply not worth their time.

Another thing to look for are rooms with rules against poker pros.

The rules vary, but usually they prohibit players from using software like poker heads up displays or hand calculators. The rules might also prevent them from collecting hands or data mining.

It’s not a rule per se, but another thing you might look for are rooms that don’t let players multi-table more than 4-6 tables, don’t let them take notes or tag players for future reference. Or, they don’t use screen names – players are anonymous.

Soft poker sites do this to discourage pros from targeting and taking advantage of weaker players. They want to create a warm, friendly and welcoming environment instead.

Sportsbooks and/or Casino

This isn’t a hard or fast rule, as more and more companies are expanding from single product businesses (poker, casino or sports) to multi-product business that mirror brick and mortar casinos. But there’s still some truth here.

The reason why a poker room with a casino and/or sportsbook is ‘soft’ is because there’s often a lot of people who crossover. Someone will win a lot of money in the casino or sportsbook and then feel like gambling on poker. But these guys are usually amateurs. Get enough of them together and you’ll have yourself an easy poker game.

This, too, isn’t a hard and fast rule. It’s just one indicator I’d use. For example, 888 Poker has a beginner’s only section, but I wouldn’t consider them a soft site. At least not the softest.

But the reason why I think this is a good indicator is because if the site caters to a lot to beginners or recreational players, then there’s a good chance they have rules against pros (like the ones I explained above). It also means there’s lots of beginners congregating in one section, even if only for a little while.

Access to these sections is usually temporary. Which means that after 30 or 60 days these beginners will be populating tables and games everyone has access to.

Smaller Sites and Networks

Another indicator of a soft poker site is how much traffic they have. Poker pros tend to play lots of games. Playing 5, 10, 20 or even 50+ tables at once and 50, 100 or even 200+ games per day is normal for a full time professional.

But to do that the poker site needs to have lots of traffic. Where there’s a lot of traffic you’re sure to find lots of pros. Which means it isn’t a soft site.

Less traffic means less pros.

Less pros means easier games.

These sites tend to be on networks, too, which pool their player base together. One example is BetOnline on the Chico Network. As I write this they have 1700 players online (and not all of them are at real money tables). This is a much softer site/network compared to PokerStars and their 160,000+ players.

No Sponsored Pros

A site that’s not big enough to sponsor pro players is a site that’s usually not big enough for any pro to play on regularly aka an easy poker site.

Poker sites that only offer holdem are rare, but they DO exist. Recreational players usually stick to holdem. It’s the most popular game.

You can also apply this thought process to sites that offer a full suite of games, but the majority of their players are seated at holdem tables.

A couple good examples I remember from a few years ago is Carbon and Cake Poker – not surprisingly two sites that were both apart of a network. Both sites offered more than just holdem, but the majority of their player base played holdem. Both were soft sites, relatively speaking.

What If You Can’t Find a Soft Poker Site? Find an Easy Game Instead!

There shouldn’t be any reason why you can’t find a soft poker site. There are lots of them out there.

But maybe you’d rather play at a site with lots of traffic. Or, maybe a site that has a good reputation, like PokerStars. What do you do then? How do you find an easy game on a not-so-easy site?

Here are a couple suggestions.

There are a few tricks you can use to find an easy tournament.

The best thing to do is tag players. I suggest you tag pros since there are less of them.

If you don’t know who they are – and you have the time and resources – you can run their screen names through Shark Scope.

What you want to look for are indicators that suggest a player knows what they’re doing. That means, above all, lots of profit (and not just from one tournament win, either). But also lots of games played, lots of the same games played and high average buy-in.

If that doesn’t work you can also search for each player on the site. Many rooms let you do this. Just search their name before the game starts to see how many tables they’re on. If they’re playing lots of (high buy-in and/or pro-infested) games, then chances are they’re good.

The more pros you come across, the harder the game is. The harder the game is, the more you should think about avoiding it. Simple stuff.

Now let’s talk about cash games

You can also tag cash game players. You can also look them up on the site. How many tables are they seated at? Look at their stacks – are they topped off or above the max buy-in?

Lots of weak/soft players buy-in for the minimum. They don’t keep their stacks topped off, either. Usually.

You can also look at the stats for each table in the lobby. Most room lobbies will tell you how many players are seated at each table, how many hands are played per hour, how many players are seeing the flop, and so on.

The more hands played, the more flops seen, and more players involved in each hand, the looser the game is. Loose games are usually soft.

A long waiting list is also a sign a game is soft.

Recreational players love action. So it makes sense to find games that encourage players to play lots of hands or make lots of moves.

Fast fold poker’s an easy example. Fold and immediately receive a new hand. With this format you can play 2-3x the number of hands per hour compared to a non-fast fold game.

Another good example – one I know from experience – are knockout / bounty tournaments. In these tournaments every person has a bounty on their head. When you knock a player out of the tournament, you collect their bounty.

Pros know better than to get involved in a hand just for someone’s bounty. Winning is more important. There’s more money in it.

But bounties are to recreational players as shiny bait is to fish. It catches their attention. It’s all they want, even if it means making a dumb play. This sort of thinking makes for a soft game. Especially when you consider that these tournaments often have more than 90 players, most of whom think this way.

You can also play low stakes games. It’s not the greatest indicator, though, because even the 10nl cash games and $3 sit and goes can be tough. But it’s a start.

My last thought is to find a game like omaha. Omaha encourages a lot of action because inexperienced players see all the hands they can make with the 4 cards they’re dealt. They want to see a flop to see what kinds of hands they might make. A table full of these players is an easy game for sure.

You should find a soft poker site – or, at the very least a soft game – if you’re interested in making money from poker. If you don’t want to lose all the time.

You can certainly make money from tougher games. Worst case scenario is you’ll improve your skills.

But skills alone don’t pay the bills. Especially if those skills are trumped by the skills of the other players at the table.

Trust us. It’s far easier to make money from a table full of fish. The easiest way to do that is to find and join the softest poker sites.

Best Online Poker Site Reviews 2021

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It’s important to know where you’re putting your money, that’s why we take time to give you the best detailed online poker reviews.

Online poker is one of the most entertaining ways to spend time on the internet with the potential to make some real-world dollars. Different online poker rooms have different strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to research the best online poker sites by reading as many online poker reviews as possible.

We’ve done our best to create a curated list of the best online poker sites in the world with a detailed look at features such as software, promotions and even average skill level.

Here’s a look at the best online poker sites for US residents. Keep in mind, PokerStars isn’t on this list because it doesn’t accept players in all states. But if you want to play online poker, here’s what you should keep an eye out for.

Top Things to Look for in an Online Poker Site

There are somewhere between 50-60 different online poker sites currently in operation so it can be somewhat overwhelming to try and decide where to play.

Prospective poker players should think about what they want from their playing experience before they throw down their deposit.

Some of the most important factors to consider are as follows:

We’ll go into more detail on all seven of the aforementioned items below.

Safety and Security

The #1 most important factor for most poker players is trust. That’s why it’s first whenever we review a poker site.

If they can’t trust an online poker site to hold their funds safely or offer a platform that operates reliably then they’re probably not going to bother putting money on the site.

Fortunately, online poker sites have come a long ways on this front. Nearly every online poker site uses a third-party audited random number generated. This segregates player funds so there’s never a situation where a player can’t withdraw their money.

Software

It’s going to be difficult to have a good time playing poker on a site where the software is sub-optimal. Bad poker software can mean slow games, unintuitive design, glitches and uninspired aesthetics. Most poker players would rank software as one of the most important attributes for a poker site.

Software is another element that has been drastically improved since the early days of online poker. Just as phone apps and web apps are significantly better these days so goes online poker software.

One thing to be aware of is that online poker sites tend to have stand-alone software or software that is built into web browsers. Standalone is generally better but there are merits to both.

Quality of Opponent

Poker is a unique game in the regard that most players want to be playing against the worst players available.

That’s because, quite simply: “Worse players = more money”

This isn’t like a video game where you might enjoy competing against the best players possible. In online poker you can earn significantly more money if you’re playing against worse players. Who doesn’t like earning more money?

There are some exceptions and some poker players just want to learn the game and get better. In those cases it can actually be helpful to compete against elite players.

The vast majority of players prefer playing against weak opponents (sometimes called fish). Some online poker sites are inherently “fishier” than others. It’s an important consideration when picking an online poker site.

Volume of Players

If you’re going to play online poker you’re going to need people to play against.

This is especially important for Sit & Go’s and multi-table tournaments where the number of players correlate to the size of the eventual prize pool.

It’s not quite as important for cash game players so long as there are a few games running at their stakes of choice.

So you don’t need to play on the biggest poker site in the world but player traffic is still an important factor to consider.

Game variety

The vast majority of poker players are all about Texas No-Limit Hold’em, but we always check out all the games in our poker reviews.

It’s the world’s most popular poker game and is what’s played in the WSOP Main Event and every WPT Main Event.

It’s not the only game in town, however. You might remember the old-school 5-Card Draw or Seven-Card Stud. It’s possible to find those games online.

Even more popular than Stud or Draw is Pot-Limit Omaha, which is essentially four-card Hold’em and a fantastic game in its own right.

Some of the other lesser-known games include Razz, 2-7, Omaha Hi-Lo and Badugi. Some sites even have their own proprietary games. It’s something to consider when signing up for a new site.

Promotions

Player acquisition and retention are the two most important metrics for online poker sites.

That’s why online poker sites try to incentivize players with sign-up bonuses (for new players) and rewards programs (for loyal players).

Some sites are willing to give out huge cash bonuses as they attempt to aggressively acquire new players. It’s always worth considering the size of the sign-up bonus and the value of a rewards program when picking an online poker site.

Safest online poker sites for us players

Support

Because there’s actual money on the line you definitely want your online poker site to have a good support team that can help you with any problems that might arise.

Most online poker sites offer a number of support options including live chat, email and phone. There are many players that definitely prefer getting to talk to a real person of an issue pops up.

Some of the support teams are significantly better so it’s another factor that’s worth considering when picking an online poker site.

Which Online Poker Site Is The Best

Because you play more hands you’ll tend to learn the poker hand rankings faster and understand the game a bit better.

If you’re looking to improve your game, online is probably the best way to play because you can play a huge number of hands against skilled players.

Plus the huge perk of online poker is that it’s available 24/7 every single day of the year!

How do I get money on online poker sites?

There’s a little bit of nuance to getting money onto online poker sites but it’s not that difficult.

Here are some of the popular methods for depositing:

Bitcoin
Credit card
Wire transfer
Online wallet

Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies are becoming one of the most popular ways to make a deposit thanks to their anonymous nature and the speed that Bitcoin can be processed. If you’ve already got some Bitcoin sitting around then it’s a remarkably simple way to get money onto an online poker site.

Credit cards are another popular method but sometimes it takes several tries to actually get the transaction to go through.

Wire transfer is the old reliable but it also takes the longest amount of time for deposits and withdrawals.

Finally some sites allow online wallets like Neteller and PayPal, which can be a great way to get money online.

How much should I deposit?

This is up to the individual player but you don’t have to deposit that much if you exercise proper bankroll management.

Most players like to deposit anywhere from $50 up to $300 but there are some players who simply get bored by small money poker and will choose to make a big deposit.

Anyone who’s ever played live poker will realize that online poker is quite a bargain compared to brick & mortar casinos.

The smallest game in most real-world casinos is generally $1/$2 No-Limit Hold’em ($100 buy-in), which is a sharp contrast to online poker where the stakes scale all the way down to $.01/$.02 ($1 buy-in).

Can I play PokerStars for real money in the USA?