Decentralized Poker – What It Is & Where To Play It (2024)

Let’s face it – whether it’s round of Jacks or Better or good-old Texas Hold’em, poker is unprecedented in the casino world as one of the all-time favorites. However, the emergence of thousands of different slots and online casino games slightly moved the attention away from this game, for online gamblers at least.

So, it’s a good thing that we can now introduce you to decentralized poker which is great news for all crypto casino players, but what does that truly mean for you and your gaming style? We’ll answer this and many other related questions in our in-depth guide on crypto poker sites and variations you can play with crypto wagers. We’ll also give you a few hints on the best decentralized poker sites, bonuses, and ways you can pick the best sites, so let’s get straight into it.

What You’ll Learn

• How to find the best crypto poker sites
• How to play decentralized poker
• Our methods of picking the best poker sites
• Advantages of decentralized poker sites and their bonus offers

Best Decentralized Poker Sites

To give you an idea of the best poker sites to play with crypto deposits and wagers, we’ve decided to give you a few hints on our ranking methodology in this guide. Still, that will have to wait a bit as we’ll first give you a list of our top-rated decentralized poker sites and casinos straight-up:

1. Wild.io Casino
2. Metaspins Casino
3. BC Game Casino
4. Empire.io
5. Winz.io Casino

Decentralized Poker Explained

Unlike regular live casino poker games you can play on most gambling sites, decentralized poker is only available on crypto casinos that operate on blockchain and aren’t related to any prominent gaming authority. This enables you as a player to enjoy the safest possible experience and keep your payment details from being exposed.

Even so, the main difference is – you won’t be playing against other players at the table, but rather enjoy a game similar to a table game version of poker. We can be referred to this as provably fair poker which isn’t available on all crypto casinos and you’ll be playing against the algorithm, but at least you can verify the fairness of the game and figure out if the cards were truly randomly drawn.

It’s not something you can count on with regular RNG-operated poker games or table games that aren’t that exciting to play. Plus, there are all sorts of decentralized poker games in the works that allow you to play against other players using crypto as well and this is the most exciting part about these games.

We’ve even heard of a specific type of crypto poker game being developed that would even involve virtual reality so you can get a sense of sitting behind a real Vegas table while wagering in crypto, but we have yet to see about that. For now, it’s enough to know that you can get more privacy and fairness by playing crypto poker instead of settling for RNG-operated games or even live casino releases.

How To Play At A Decentralized Poker Site

So now you know a bit more about the crypto poker sites and how the game works, but it takes a bit more insight into the steps you can take to play the game to become a true expert. We’ll make things easier for you by giving you a set of steps to follow for the best possible decentralized poker experience:

1. Pick a site from our list – The first thing you’ll need to do to play decentralized poker is to find a suitable casino or gambling dApp to play at. Our team always makes use of a specific set of evaluation metrics to hand-pick the best sites based on our real-play experience, so you can use our list of best poker sites for this matter or look for a site that looks legit yourself with our tips.
2. Make a deposit – The next step is to make your first deposit to the site and make use of a deposit bonus for newcomers if such an offer is provided by the site to boost your poker bankroll. Still, we have to give you a heads-up for this since most sites offer slot-related welcome bonuses that may not be suitable for poker.
3. Pick your preferred poker type – There are several types of poker games you can play on gambling dApps as recommended by our team, so you’ll need to select the one that works best for you. We can certainly recommend Texas Hold’em and Three Card Poker offered at BC Game Casino, but it doesn’t hurt to try Omaha or Caribbean Stud if these variations are available.
4. Enjoy a provably fair poker round – The only thing left at this point is to place your initial wagers and wait for randomly-generated community cards. It’s a good thing you can rely on a provably fair algorithm and check the fairness of each game round as it goes down with decentralized versions of the game.

What To Look For in A Decentralized Poker Site

We’ll shortly introduce you to our method of picking the best poker sites, but first, let’s give you a few hints on how you can see through the shady ones and go straight for the best of the best. While looking for the best decentralized poker sites, you’ll need to consider several key features, and here’s our list:

• Types of poker games offered
• Provably fair algorithms
• Poker bonuses
• Jackpot poker games

These are just some of the signs that a site is worth joining, and we realize it could be a bit difficult to find the one that checks all these boxes. Especially with poker bonuses, it could be tough to find a suitable operator, but that doesn’t mean you should settle for less. Our team will give you a complete list of our poker sites that work perfectly for crypto players to help you out.

How We Rate The Best Poker DApps

We know you’ve probably visited dozens of casino review sites in pursuit of pieces of advice on finding the best ones, and we get it if you are a bit suspicious. Before we decided to run our own site, our team of casino players struggled with the same issue of untrustworthy sources that lead you to mistakes, so we decided to be completely transparent with our readers.

Our team tests each site with real money play and we’ll give you an overview of the items that our team checks when reviewing poker dApps to get you on the right track:

1. Casino licenses and fairness – The first thing that we check when reviewing online casino sites with poker games is their gambling license and the fairness of poker software. This one could be tricky since you have to remember that some poker games are operated by RNG and it takes looking for eCOGRA or iTechLabs approval in that case. On the other hand, we mostly bring you sites that are properly regulated and feature provably fair software that guarantees utmost fairness.
2. Poker bonuses – We already mentioned how you can’t have high hopes for online poker bonuses as much as slot players do for example. Still, there are some sites that excel in this field and we aim to bring you only the sites where you can get a substantial poker bankroll boost upon joining.
3. Types of games offered – While most poker dApps offer Texas Hold’em as one of the most popular variations of the game, there are also fast-paced Three Card Poker and other similar variations. Just for the sake of having some diversity in selection, we decided to give you a list of gambling sites with the best hand-picked poker bonuses.
4. Payments and customer support – The final piece of the puzzle is checking the security of payments and customer support availability. While the first one gets easier these days due to decentralized crypto payments, we have to test the customer support in practice to decide if it suits the needs of our readers.

By sticking with this review form, we can help you avoid shady or scam sites that could possibly offer unverified or unfair poker software or payment issues that could make your experience much worse.

Decentralized Poker Bonuses

Now we finally come to the section that you’ll be interested the most besides our list of the best sites and it’s about decentralized poker bonuses. There are several types of bonus offers you can use on decentralized poker games, and they mostly include deposit offers, no-deposit bonuses, or reload offers. However, if you are a poker high-roller, you can also make use of VIP bonuses offered to loyal players.

One thing that we have to point out here is that you’ll mostly run into the bonus contribution rate for poker that’s around 10% for all deposit bonuses. Now, we are not saying it’s like this for all the sites, and you should still check the T&Cs before you get to make crypto deposits.

It’s still a pretty common thing since most bonuses are focused on slots and the bonus contribution for slots is almost always 100%. That means that you can meet the wagering requirement and use the funds to play poker games more easily while playing poker alone with the bonus funds could take 10 times more wagering before you can withdraw.

Either way, we advise you to pursue sites that offer up to 1BTC or even more in deposit offers like BC Game Casino as you have the highest chance of using the poker bonus for real money play this way.

Decentralized Poker – FAQs