Safe Online Poker Sites for US Players
Perhaps no consideration is more important to poker players when choosing an online poker site than safety. Given the huge amount of trust players must place in online poker sites when playing and depositing money, safety is rightfully a critical concern, but how are players meant to tell which sites place a high priority on safety and which sites are cutting corners?
Our experts only recommend the safest and legal US poker sites online for players. Longtime industry experts write our reviews to aid players in choosing the most suitable option for them. We monitor online poker forums to address and remove sites with significant complaints or issues from our recommendations.
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The Safest United States Online Poker Site
Without any doubt, the safest and best online poker sites are the ones available to players in Nevada, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. State entities regulate with strict rules, including financial separation of player funds from operating money, ensuring player protection.
The primary sites upon which all skins operate are PartyPoker, PokerStars, and 888poker. All of these have extensive histories in the online poker business and are the most trusted sites in the world. They are the poker options available only to players in the states listed above.
We recommend sites to almost all states in America with proven solid security measures in place. Ignition and Bovada have never suffered from complaints about the safety of player funds or the security of their data. Americas Cardroom has improved over the past few years to build its reputation and ensure that players feel the site is fair.
Needless to say, there are more than a handful of safe poker sites, not just one.
The following list is our most up-to-date ranking of the safest online poker options for American players.
Top Legal US Poker Sites 2023
How Do Sites Protect You Against Cheating?
Most of the security measures taken by online poker operators happen behind the scenes. They safeguard player funds, protect account information from hackers, and refrain from selling personal data to third parties.
Sites take different measures, however, with regard to cheating. But in recent years, more operators have become more transparent and detailed in the prevention of cheating.
Operators focus on fairness, attracting recreational players, and combatting cheating and bots in the playing environment. Players have also demanded it. This has prompted many sites to clarify and report their policies.
PartyPoker has been the most transparent in this regard. They have not only dedicated a section of their website to their “Fair Play” initiative, they put together a fraud detection team of former professional poker players to monitor the site for bots and other cheating tools. The team also investigates all reports of fraud or cheating, and they work together to implement technological tools that will automatically detect any unethical behavior.
Via social media and the site itself, PartyPoker is now very transparent about all cheating-related activity, including the number of bots detected and closed, and how much money is confiscated from those accounts and redistributed to players. In the first 12 months of doing this, the team closed 768 bots and refunded nearly $1.4 million to players.
Other sites have chosen to follow PartyPoker’s lead. PokerStars has become more transparent in its policies regarding cheating. Americas Cardroom attempted the same but has not been nearly as consistent as players hoped it would be.
This doesn’t mean the sites are not safe. They all work to prevent cheating so as to maintain their reputations in the poker community and keep a fair playing environment for all players. Some sites have simply taken a more public and proactive stance with regard to cheating than others.
How Can You Tell That the Games Are Fair?
One easy way to tell if a poker site ensures fair games is to look for its RNG (Random Number Generator) information. The software used for RNG must be cleared by any regulator issuing a license to an operator and is checked regularly. Sites also provide certification of the RNG.
All of the sites we recommend have provided RNG certification.
Another fairness test can be found in the privacy policy of a poker operator. All reputable poker sites use encryption methods to ensure the safety of player data. With more frequent hacking attempts and DDOS attacks on poker sites in the past several years, poker operators have upgraded their encryption methods. At one point, all sites used 128-bit SSL, but many increased that to 448-bit or 1024-bit RSA.
Employ Two-Factor Authentication for Your Accounts
No guide to the safest online poker sites would be complete without an appeal to players to take safety into their own hands. While players certainly can expect that rooms will provide them with a secure environment for online poker, a poker room can only do so much. If you’re not protecting your personal information on your end, then no amount of security in the world on the room’s end can offer you protection.
Given that money – often substantial sums – is in play, online poker accounts are especially attractive targets for hackers. As a result, anyone playing online poker should use two-factor authentication whenever possible – certainly for the email attached to your poker site accounts, and certainly for the room itself if offered. While rooms play a part, the responsibility for a safe online poker experience is ultimately in the hands of the player, so make the smart bet and do everything in your power to secure your accounts before you play another hand.
