Compared to the big names, the online poker sites on this page are less well-known…except among serious online poker players. These are the online poker sites that don’t get all the television coverage — but should, because they do everything just as good as (and in most cases, better than) the BoDogs and Full Tilts on the list.
- Cake Poker — I’ll say it right now, so you know: Cake Poker is my favorite online poker site. I’m not the least bit impartial. They were my favorite even way back when they offered a no deposit bonus and their software and poker network was only half as good as it is today. Something about the community kept me coming back; I always found great players who shared my passion for poker (and worked me through many beginner’s mistakes). Now, just a few years later, they can truly hold their own with any of the big boys on the poker scene when it comes to number and variety of games and players (up to and including Doyle Brunson himself, who put his own legendary site on the Cake Network recently!)
- Carbon Poker – the biggest site on the fastest growing poker network (Merge), Carbon Poker has everything that I like in a poker site: great software (user-friendly, fast, and uniquely good-looking to boot) and a great player base. You can actually learn and grow as a player rather than having to watch your back all the time (a common problem in the huge casinos!), as the community is something really special. The downside of this is that you may not be able to hop on at any time and find the exact situation that you were looking for, but you’ll never lack for a great game no matter when you get a chance to play.
There are a handful of other sites that I could have included, but we want to make sure that they live up to our standards of trustworthiness and dependability before we give them our full recommendation.
