Online poker rooms are generally so much larger than live poker rooms that it’s a bit difficult to even comprehend just how big they would be if you could somehow see all of the tables at once.
But you’re not here for hypotheticals – you’re here because you’re looking for the biggest Texas Hold’em poker sites with the most traffic, and we’re not going to disappoint you. In this guide to the busiest poker sites online, we’ll pick the biggest and the best, give you some insights into poker room size and address strategy adjustments players should make for bigger poker sites.
Best Poker Sites With Top Traffic Rankings
January’s Highest Traffic Online Poker Room. PokerStars.com (No USA Players) Poker Stars broke away from the pack in late 2006 when they were about even traffic-wise with Party Poker and 888Poker. PokerStars now has more than double the number of active players, especially in tournaments and the real money Hold’em poker games.
Cut right to the chase and get started at any of these top-ranking sites that are all among the biggest online poker rooms offering real-money Texas Hold’em games.
Best Poker Sites for Players in United Kingdom
Are Poker Sites That Different?
If you have yet to play online poker, you can be forgiven for assuming that most online poker sites are more or less the same size. If that was the case, it wouldn’t really matter which poker site was the biggest or busiest, because all would ultimately offer a pretty similar selection of games and stakes.
In the current online poker industry, however, that is anything but the case. In fact, the top five largest poker rooms have more traffic (for Texas Hold’em games and other formats like Pot Limit Omaha) than every other online poker room combined. The top three have more traffic than the next 20. We could go on and on, but you get the point: Big online poker rooms can be much, much bigger than small poker rooms, often by a measure that results in fundamentally different experiences. That’s the power of the largest online poker rooms.
How Big and Small Poker Sites Differ
The busy poker sites tend to offer players a number of advantages: More games, more limits, more tournament types and buy in levels, to name a few. You’ll also find more big-ticket promotions, such as massive WSOP qualifiers or multi-million dollar tournament events, at busy online poker sites than at those with only a few hundred (or fewer) average players at the tables. Finally, while not always the case, big sites tend to be more stable and less prone to financial and security threats than their smaller counterparts.
There are certainly some things small poker rooms can do better than big poker sites, such as personalized customer service. Some players may just like the feel of a smaller site when compared to a large poker room, as it more closely resembles the live poker room experience. Rooms with less traffic can also customize promotions and other features to individual players with relative ease, where the biggest online poker sites simply don’t have the ability to cater to specific players.
Playing at Large Sites: Strategy Adjustments
It’s not obvious at first, but there are actually a number of adjustments you can make to your general strategic approach when you decide to play at one of the busier or larger online poker sites. You shouldn’t be looking to make massive changes to your game plan, but a few small tweaks could lead to a more successful endeavor:
- Employ tracking programs: At a small site, you can rely on your memory and some basic notes to recall almost all of your opponents. At big poker rooms with tens of thousands of players, that approach is going to come up short. You’ll want to employ some sort of tracking program, whether it be Hold’em Manager or something similar, that will help you to get instant data on your opponents when you can’t quite remember whether or not you’ve seen a screen name before.
- Game selection matters: When you’re a player at a small online poker room, you generally have to take whatever games are available. The opposite is true at heavily-trafficked poker rooms, where you might have your choice of dozens (even hundreds) of tables depending on what limit you play. At this level, game selection becomes a very important skill, one that is overlooked by far too many players trying to profit at poker sites with the most traffic.
- Exploit promotions: Big poker sites have big promotions, both in terms of value and variety. You might have to bust out your reading glasses and peruse some fine print, but that is almost going to be worth your time. The promotions at your small poker site may have been easy enough to exploit with little effort, but once you shift to playing at a high-traffic online poker site you need to set aside more time and energy to properly evaluate the potential value of the promotions available to you.
With so many options available, it’s obvious why players would want to seek out the biggest online poker rooms. After all, when a poker site has the most traffic, that’s essentially an endorsement by some majority of the poker-playing community – and endorsements like that are exactly the sort of thing that can make a new player feel more comfortable about playing Texas Hold’em online for real money.