Poker Sites Not on GamStop: What a Seat Costs an Hour Once the Rake Is Counted

Poker beyond the register: the short version

• The rake buys the seat, and it never misses a hand. A cash table at a British-licensed room takes somewhere between 3.5% and 5% of each pot, up to a cap set by the stake level. On the assumptions used throughout this page the answer in big blinds does not move with the level at all: 3.33 big blinds an hour out of your seat at 5% and 2.33 at 3.5%.
• Read the second figure in a buy-in line, then ignore it. An entry written £5 plus 50p puts £5 into the prize pool and hands 50p to the room, so the fee is 9.1% of the £5.50 leaving your account. Because that split barely varies, the fee is not what separates one tournament from another. Field depth is.
• Most poker offshore is dealt by the house, not by other players. Casino Hold’em, Three Card Poker and Caribbean Stud charge an edge on your ante instead of a rake on a pot, and the spread between them is wide: roughly 2.04% at Texas Hold’em Bonus Poker against roughly 5.22% at Caribbean Stud, both with perfect play.
• Every offshore welcome is built for reels. The terms name slots as the games the wagering counts, so a card player who takes one has agreed to spend the evening somewhere other than a table. A £60 bonus at 40x asks for £2,400 of slot stakes, which is 4,800 spins at 50p and better than three hours at the British minimum pace.
• If you are on Gamstop, none of this is addressed to you. Keep the registration where it is, put a device blocker on everything you own, switch on your bank’s gambling block and talk to somebody. The routes are free, they are confidential and they are set out at the end of this page.

The rule worth carrying: price the seat before you price the welcome, because the seat is the thing you will genuinely be paying for.

What to check before you take a seat

Seven checks, each answerable in a minute or two from the lobby and the terms. The third column is the figure each one moves, worked out further down the page, and the last says what it does to an evening.

One recommendation from that list, and it is narrow. If a room will not publish its rake schedule where you can read it before buying in, treat the silence as the answer and stay out, because a charge you cannot see is a charge you cannot plan around. The same goes for a video poker machine whose pay table is hidden behind a menu that does not open until after the first hand.

What the rake lifts out of an hour, stake by stake

At a table where you play other players, the house does not want you to lose. It wants the pot to be big and the hands to keep coming, because it takes a slice of each one. Published rake at British-licensed rooms runs between 3.5% and 5% of the pot, with a ceiling that rises as the stakes do, and the arithmetic of what that costs one seat is short enough to do on the back of a bus ticket.

The assumptions below are held constant across every line: nine seats, 75 hands an hour, an average raked pot worth 8 big blinds, and the charge shared evenly between the players at the table. Real tables are lumpier than that, and a seat that folds more than its share pays less, but as a planning figure it holds up.

One seat an hour = rake rate × average pot × hands an hour ÷ seats    at 25p/50p and 5%: 0.05 × £4.00 × 75 ÷ 9 = £1.67

Two readings come out of that table. The first is the one everybody notices: the cost climbs exactly in step with the stake, so a move up two levels multiplies the charge rather than the challenge. The second is the one worth remembering: in big blinds the figure never moves. Nine seats, 75 hands and pots of 8 big blinds give 3.33 big blinds an hour at 5% and 2.33 at 3.5%, whether you are sitting at 1p/2p or at £1/£2. A rake rate is therefore a tax on volume, and the players who feel it hardest are the ones playing the most hands.

The difference between the two rates is small per hand and awkward over an evening. At 25p/50p it is 50p an hour, which is £1.50 across a three-hour session and roughly a buy-in a month for somebody who plays twice a week. That is the whole of what shopping around on rake can win you, and it is why a room with a thin lobby and a keen rate is still the worse deal: a seat you cannot fill costs 100% of the hands you did not play.

No offshore welcome of that sort runs a cash-game lobby of its own, and the offshore rooms that do exist are small by comparison. Where independent offshore networks run player-against-player tables at all, their concurrent counts sit in the low hundreds or below, against tens of thousands at the large licensed networks. For a tournament player that is the difference between a schedule and a rumour.

When a cap on the pot starts working in your favour

Every rake schedule carries a ceiling, and the ceiling is the only part of the arrangement that is ever on your side. At micro stakes it is typically somewhere between 50p and £1.00 a hand, at small and mid stakes between £2.00 and £3.00, and above that £5.00 or more. The ceiling matters only when a pot grows large enough to reach it, which is why it almost never helps the smallest games.

Take 25p/50p with a ceiling of £2.00. The average pot of £4.00 owes 20p, nowhere near the limit. A pot of £60, the sort that comes along when two big hands collide, would owe £3.00 at 5%, but the table hands over £2.00 instead, so the effective rate on that pot is 3.33%.

£2.00 ÷ £60 = 3.33%    against 5% uncapped, a saving of £1.00 on that single pot

At 1p/2p the ceiling is decoration. A 50p limit needs a £10 pot before it binds, and at an average of 16p you will wait a very long time for one. The practical reading is that a published cap is worth checking if you play mid stakes and a deep stack, and worth ignoring if you grind the smallest tables, where the headline percentage is the whole story.

Entry fees, field size and the pot a room has to top up

Tournament poker charges differently. Instead of a slice of each pot, the room takes a fee at the door, and the convention at British-licensed rooms is to send 90% of the money into the prize pool and keep 10%. An entry written as £5 plus 50p is that split spelled out: £5 goes to the players, 50p goes to the house, and the fee is 9.1% of the £5.50 that left your account.

Because the ratio is fixed, the fee is the least interesting number in the lobby. What changes the value of an entry is how many people turn up, since the prize pool is nothing more than the entries added together.

The same arithmetic produces the one situation where a field is paid more than it put in. A room that advertises a minimum prize pool has promised to make the difference up if too few people enter, and the top-up is called an overlay. On a £500 guarantee in the same £5 plus 50p event, 100 entries fill the pool exactly; anything less and the room is writing a cheque.

An overlay is good value and a bad sign at the same time. The 60-entry line hands the field £200 of the room’s money, which is worth having, and it also says that the room could not find 100 people willing to pay £5.50. Offshore, where a guarantee is a marketing line rather than a licence condition, that second reading is the one to weigh: a schedule full of overlays is a schedule nobody is playing, and a guarantee is only as good as the company behind it, with no British route to chase it if the money never appears.

Hands against the dealer, priced at a £4 ante

Open a poker tab at almost any offshore casino and what you find is not a room full of players. It is a set of games where the house deals against you and keeps a fixed share of your ante. These are genuinely poker in their mechanics, they reward reading a board and knowing your equity, and they are priced quite unlike a cash table: there is no rake, no cap and no waiting for a seat, just an edge that applies to every hand you play.

The figures below assume a £4 ante and 45 hands an hour, which puts £180 of antes on the table in sixty minutes. Each cost is that turnover multiplied by the published edge for perfect play.

Cost of an hour = ante × hands an hour × house edge    Casino Hold’em: £4 × 45 × 2.16% = £3.89

The order of that table is the recommendation. Texas Hold’em Bonus Poker and Casino Hold’em are the two cheapest hands to play against a dealer, and the difference between the top line and the bottom one is £5.73 an hour on identical stakes, which over a four-evening month is £22.92 for what looks like the same activity. Caribbean Stud earns its place in lobbies because it usually hangs a progressive side bet on a royal flush, and a progressive is a different argument from an edge.

Three Card Poker rewards a rule simple enough to memorise in a sentence: play any hand of Queen-6-4 or better and fold everything below it. Deviating from that is what turns a 3.37% game into a considerably more expensive one, and it is the single commonest way players hand back the difference between the games in that table.

One British rule worth noting here, because it is often misread. The stake caps of £5 and £2 that came in during 2025 apply to online slots, a reel-based game, and not to other casino games, so a licensed site does not cap your Casino Hold’em ante either. The difference offshore is not the size of the ante. It is everything built around the table, from the self-exclusion lookup to the complaints clock. The dealer-side tables offshore are covered in more depth in the live dealer guide.

Video poker: the two numbers that decide the hour

Video poker is the cheapest poker in any casino and the most expensive, and the difference between those two statements is two numbers on a pay table. A 9/6 Jacks or Better machine is one whose pay table returns nine on a full house and six on a flush for each coin staked, and with perfect strategy it gives back 99.54%. Reduce those two rungs to eight and five and the return drops to 97.30%; reduce them again to seven and five and it is 96.15%.

Nothing else about the game changes. The deal looks identical, the strategy charts are nearly identical, and the machine does not announce which version it is running. The figures below use £2 a hand at 300 hands an hour, a steady rather than a frantic pace, which puts £600 through the machine in sixty minutes.

Cost of an hour = £2 × 300 × (1 − return)    on the 7/5 table: £600 × 3.85% = £23.10

That is a gap of £20.34 an hour, £23.10 against £2.76, for a game that presents itself as one product. It is the largest single price difference a poker player can accidentally pay in an online casino, and the only defence is to open the pay table before the first hand and read the full house and flush lines. Two rarer machines run the other way: a full-pay Deuces Wild returns 100.76% with perfect play and a full-pay Joker Poker in its Kings or Better form about 100.65%, both above break-even on paper, and both very hard to find in an offshore lobby where reduced pay tables are the norm.

At a British-licensed site the configuration of a game has to match what is advertised and operators are audited on it. Offshore the choice of version belongs to the operator, there is no British testing requirement behind it and no adjudicator to ask about it afterwards, which is exactly the argument made at greater length about reel versions in the offshore slots guide.

What an offshore welcome is worth to someone who came for cards

Here is the honest answer to the commercial question, and it is not the one the headline implies. An offshore welcome lists slots as the games that count towards its wagering, so a package of that sort is not a poker offer at all, whatever the lobby holds. Take one and you have accepted a reel-playing job in return for the matched funds.

Say you deposit £60, a sensible first payment for somebody planning a few sessions, and a first-deposit match doubles it to a £60 bonus. At 40x on the bonus that is £2,400 of slot stakes before anything converts, and at 50p a spin it is 4,800 spins, better than three hours of reels at the two and a half seconds a British licensee must leave between them. Offshore there is no minimum pace, so it can be done faster, which is not the same as it being cheaper.

40 × £60 = £2,400 of stakes    £60 × (1 − 40 × 0.036) = −£26.40

That last line is the formula value of the bonus on a slot returning 96.4%: every multiple of one costs 3.6% of the bonus, so forty of them cost more than the bonus is worth. At 35x, the gentlest line out here, the same £60 comes out at minus £15.60, and at the British ceiling of ten times it would be worth plus £38.40. A formula value assumes the wagering is finished, though, which most attempts are not, so we simulated the whole thing on our Easy model slot, a low-volatility model returning 96.4% with a win on 39.2% of spins and a maximum of 250 times the stake. A £60 deposit and a £60 bonus went into one balance at 50p a spin, and each session carried on until the wagering was complete or the next 50p spin was out of reach.

Two lines in that table carry the argument. The middle session at 35x and at 40x closes on nothing, while the average closes on £64.61 and £60.20, because a minority of runs survive the requirement and a handful of those survive it holding a lot. An average that reads well and a median of zero are describing the same set of sessions. And the ceiling column shows what a cap is actually worth to a player: nine attempts in ten finish the job at 10x, and the typical one walks away with £91.74.

The spin half behaves better, because spins cannot lose more than they are given. Where a package hands over 50 cash spins with each of three deposits, the batch is the unit, so we ran 250,000 batches of 50 spins at 10p on the same model. Face value is £5.00, the average batch returned £4.81 and the middle batch £4.15. No batch at all came back empty, 99.8% paid at least £1, but only 34.9% reached £5 or better, which is the usual shape: a short run of a 96.4% game hands back a little less than its face value most of the time. One batch in ten paid under £2.25, one in ten over £8.10, and one in a hundred more than £14.29.

For a card player the practical reading is simple. If a card pays spin winnings out without a requirement, the small cash figure is genuinely yours and the matched funds are not worth the three hours of reels. If it applies the same 40x to the spin winnings too, then neither half is a poker offer and the whole package is better left where it is. The bonus value guide runs that comparison across every shape of welcome on the site.

Where your buy-ins sit between sessions

This is the part of offshore poker that a slot player can afford to shrug at and a card player cannot. Somebody who deposits £20 and plays it out in an evening has almost nothing riding on the cashier. Somebody who keeps a working roll of twenty to thirty buy-ins so they can sit down whenever a table fills has a great deal riding on it, and the money is sitting there between sessions whether they are logged in or not.

Put a number on it. Twenty-five buy-ins at 25p/50p, with a full buy-in of 100 big blinds, is £50 a time and £1,250 parked in an account. At a British-licensed room the Commission requires an operator to protect customer funds, publish how they are held and run a complaints process that must finish inside eight weeks before handing you an independent adjudicator. Offshore that £1,250 is a debt owed by a company registered somewhere you have never been, and if the company stops paying, your claim stands in whatever queue the local framework provides.

Three practical consequences follow, and none of them is theoretical:

1. No chargeback on coins. A card payment can sometimes be disputed through your bank. A coin payment cannot be reversed by anyone once it has been broadcast, which is why crypto-first cashiers are so popular with sites that do not want payments coming back. The crypto guide prices the networks and the waiting properly.
2. A roll held in a coin is a roll that moves. A balance kept in Bitcoin or another coin is worth whatever the market says on the morning you want it, so a buy-in of a fixed coin amount is a different amount of money week to week. A good month at the tables can be undone by a bad week in the price, and the Financial Conduct Authority’s position on cryptoassets is that buyers should be prepared to lose all their money.
3. The identity check arrives at the worst moment. An offshore cashier asks for papers before it will send a first payout, which means the verification lands when there is money waiting rather than when there is not. Uploading documents on the day you open the account is simply faster than doing it on the day you win. What light verification does and does not mean is worked through in the verification guide.

The recommendation here is the only genuinely useful one on the page for somebody determined to try an offshore room: do not park a roll. Move in what you intend to play with this week, take winnings out when they appear, and accept that the convenience of a standing balance is exactly the convenience you cannot afford where nobody is obliged to give it back.

Ten offshore names, grouped by who would hold your roll

Ten brands dominate the advertising behind this search. Alphabetical order tells a card player nothing, so they are grouped below by the question that matters when money is left on account: who is the counterparty, and how long have they been one. Not one of the ten is licensed in Great Britain, so none of them queries Gamstop, none has any ceiling on the wagering it sets, and a complaint about any of them lands outside what the Commission is able to act on.

Two that arrived from somewhere else entirely. Gamdom and Roobet began life in the business of trading cosmetic items out of video games and only later turned into crypto casinos, and both now run on Curaçao licences that cover nothing here. For a bankroll that is a particular shape of risk: the counterparty is young in gambling terms, coins once sent cannot be recalled by anyone, and a deposit made that way from Britain leaves nothing to appeal to, with no regulator here, nobody filling an ombudsman’s role and no bank able to claw the payment back.

One licensed in the Comoros. Rainbet is run by RBGAMING N.V. under an Anjouan licence and is built around coin deposits of a kind no British cashier offers. Its licence sits outside the Curaçao system, and a roll held there carries both the custody question and the price question at once, since the balance moves with the coin as well as with the hands.

Two too new to have a record. Behind Kinghills and NineWin stand companies registered in Curaçao, each with a set of sister sites of its own, and both arrived recently enough that no public history exists of how they pay out or how they settle an argument. Newness is not a fault in itself, but for a player weighing where to leave twenty buy-ins it removes the only evidence there was.

Five shopfronts over one balance sheet. Velobet, Donbet, Rolletto, Goldenbet and Mystake all belong to Santeda International B.V. and trade on a Curaçao licence, which puts half of this list under one roof. Spreading a roll across two of those logos feels like spreading risk and is not: both balances are owed by the same company, so a payment problem at one is a payment problem at the other. All five take cryptocurrency, none is on the British register or connected to Gamstop, nothing caps the wagering they choose to set, and no complaint about any of them is something the Commission can take up.

What the ten have in common is shorter than what separates them, and it is the list at the top of this section. What separates them is ownership and age, which is the one pair of facts no advertisement will hand you. The jurisdictions themselves are read properly in the Curaçao guide and the guide to casinos licensed outside Britain, and the question of higher ceilings on a buy-in belongs to the high-roller guide.

The licensed rooms, and what the rulebook does for a card player

The comparison nobody advertising offshore poker wants you to run is the one against the licensed market, because for cards specifically it is not close. Party Poker belongs to Entain, the group that also carries Coral, Ladbrokes, PartyCasino, Gala Casino, Sportingbet and bwin, whose brands sit behind a single account arrangement, so a welcome offer is generally one to a customer across the whole set, and whose largest Commission penalty to date was £17m in 2022. That is a penalty you can read about before you deposit, which is the point of it being published.

Around it sit the other groups a card player will meet. William Hill and 888 Casino belong to evoke, where 888 Casino dates back online to 1997 and William Hill arrived in 2022; against that group the Commission’s two biggest published outcomes are £19.2m in 2023 and £9.4m in 2022. Unibet is the sportsbook-first brand in Kindred alongside the casino-first 32Red, a group whose largest was £7.1m in 2023. Betway runs betting and casino as a single brand whose welcomes hang on a deposit, and was fined £11.6m in 2020. bet365, privately owned and run out of Stoke-on-Trent, puts betting at the front and keeps the casino behind it, with welcome offers that hang on a deposit as a rule; its largest settlement was £582,120 in 2024.

Every one of those is wired into Gamstop, verifies age and identity before any play, refuses credit cards, offers no cryptocurrency payments and has been held to the ten-times ceiling on bonus wagering since 19 January 2026. The last of those is why their headline numbers look so much smaller than an offshore banner: a cap of ten makes a 300% match unprofitable to write. If what you actually want is to keep what you win rather than to be given a big number, PlayOJO and MrQ attach no wagering to any bonus at all, so winnings arrive as cash, with smaller spin counts as the trade.

For verification there is a step offshore cannot match. Casumo, NetBet, Mr Vegas, All British Casino and Videoslots each put the name of the licence holder and its Commission account number into the footer, which the public register confirms in about a minute. The high-street names, Betfred, Grosvenor Casinos, Genting Casino and Admiral Casino, add a building you can walk into, which makes them the easiest brands of all to confirm and the slowest to vanish. Betfred’s largest penalty was £3.25m in 2023.

So the trade for a card player is stark. The offshore market offers a coin cashier, no ceiling on a bonus and no questions before you sit down. The licensed market offers deeper lobbies, a published rake schedule, protected funds, an eight-week complaints clock with an independent adjudicator at the end of it, and a regulator with a record of fining the companies it licenses. For poker in particular, the first list is short and the second one is the one that pays.

Price your own session before you buy in

The first calculator prices an hour of play from the return on the game. It opens on video poker at the figures used above: £2 a hand, 300 hands in an hour and the 99.54% of a 9/6 Jacks or Better machine, which comes to an expected £2.76. Change the return to 96.15% for a 7/5 machine and watch the hour jump to £23.10. Set it to 97.84%, with 45 rounds of £4, to price Casino Hold’em instead, since 100% minus a 2.16% edge is the same kind of number.

The second takes a deposit match apart on the figures from the simulation: £60 in, matched at 100% for a £60 bonus, 40x on the bonus, a slot returning 96.4%. That is £2,400 of required stakes and a formula value of minus £26.40. Drop the wagering to 35 and it improves to minus £15.60; drop it to 10, the most a British licensee may ask, and it turns positive at £38.40. If a card applies its multiple to deposit and bonus together rather than to the bonus alone, double the required stakes before you judge it.

Run both before any money moves. The calculators give you what an offer is worth on paper if the whole requirement is completed; the simulation above is what happens in practice, and the two are not the same claim.

If you are already on the register, this part is for you

Some people who sign up to Gamstop feel that poker is a different case, because skill is involved and the money moves between players rather than into a machine. The scheme makes no such distinction, and nor does the reason you joined it. A registration closes every operator holding a British licence for the term you chose, poker rooms included, and an offshore table is not an exception the scheme forgot about. It is simply the edge of where a British regulator can reach.

Keep what you have and build around it. Gamstop explains how long your exclusion runs and what happens at the end of it, and it has been compulsory for licensed operators since 31 March 2020. A device blocker such as GamBan refuses gambling sites on the phones and laptops you actually use, which is the layer that reaches offshore pages at all; the guide to device blocking sets out what it catches and how to close the gaps it leaves. Your bank’s gambling block turns away card payments coded as gambling, and choosing a long cooldown on it puts real time between an impulse and a payment.

Then talk to someone, because the tools work better alongside a conversation than instead of one. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline, free and confidential on 0808 8020 133 at any hour, with live chat for anyone who finds a phone call hard, and GambleAware carries self-assessment tools and a directory of local support. Both are there for people worried about somebody else, which matters if you are reading this for a partner rather than for yourself. There is more on all of it in the safer play page.

Where these figures come from

The rake figures are arithmetic on one set of assumptions, held constant so the stakes can be compared: nine seats at the table, 75 hands an hour, an average raked pot worth 8 big blinds, the charge split evenly between the players, and rates of 5% and 3.5%, which is the published range at British-licensed rooms. One seat an hour is rate multiplied by the average pot, multiplied by hands an hour, divided by seats. Rake ceilings of 50p to £1.00 at micro stakes, £2.00 to £3.00 at small and mid stakes and £5.00 upwards above that are the published ranges, and the 90% to 10% split on a tournament entry is the usual convention.

Dealer-side costs assume a £4 ante and 45 hands an hour, so £180 of antes, multiplied by the published house edge for perfect play in each game. Video poker assumes £2 a hand and 300 hands an hour, so £600 of stakes, multiplied by one minus the return on each pay table. The Jacks or Better returns of 99.54%, 97.30% and 96.15%, and the full-pay Deuces Wild and Joker Poker figures of 100.76% and 100.65%, are the published returns for perfect strategy on those pay tables.

The simulated figures are our own and run on a model slot rather than on any real game. The Easy model is low volatility with a 96.4% return, a win on 39.2% of spins and a maximum of 250 times the stake. For the bonus runs, £60 of deposit and £60 of bonus sat together in one balance and were staked at 50p a spin, each run closing at the end of the requirement or at the first spin the balance would not stretch to: 100,000 runs at 10x and 50,000 at each of 35x and 40x. The spin batch is 250,000 runs of 50 spins at 10p on the same model. Every formula value uses E = B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP)) with the player’s own deposit left out of B, so it gives the value if the entire requirement is finished and not what a typical session ends with.

Rules and dates come from the Gambling Commission’s own publications: the wagering ceiling of 19 January 2026, the slot stake caps of April and May 2025 and the guidance that they apply to reel-based games rather than to table games, the compulsory Gamstop participation of 31 March 2020, the credit-card decision of 14 April 2020, the identity rule of 7 May 2019, the two and a half second minimum between slot spins, the eight-week complaints timetable and the requirement to protect customer funds. The penalty figures are published enforcement outcomes against the licence holders named. The crypto warning is the Financial Conduct Authority’s. Every brand statement here sticks to ownership, licence, trading history and published enforcement, and nothing beyond it. The offshore packages are described from their published terms as they stood in October 2026, which means every count is dated rather than permanent.

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