Ok, so 3 sites have emerged as the top competitors for bitcoin poker. In this post I will try to go through them and weigh pros and cons, as well as a general idea for playing bitcoin poker.

betcoin
URL:betco.in
Pros:One full year older than any other site.
Consistent games at a variety of stakes.
Completely open source.
Number one google result for "bitcoin poker"
Most trustworthy
Cons:Clunky, slow interface
Potential lag issues with server located in europe
Several small bugs that can cause freezes and people get upset when they have their hand folded as a result
Comments: Oldest, most trustworthy, definitely worth checking out, they have freerolls in the "tourney" section, highly recommend

btcot
URL:btcontilt.com
Pros:People seem to play looser, since 1 bitcoin gets them 1000 chips as opposed to 100 on betco.
Live 24/7 support, all issues resolved quickly
Player to player transfers
WCOPB:World championship of bitcoin poker, being held on October 10th, a 2 bitcoin rebuy with 35 bitcoins added.
Cons:
Newer
Closed source
Lobby is cluttered
Comments: This site is also worth a try, it has daily freerolls, and plenty of action, usually a big sunday tourney, and the WCOPB mentioned should be very interesting.

seals
URL:sealswithclubs.org
Pros:Insta deposits
Quicker cashouts
People seem to play looser, since 1 bitcoin gets them 1000 chips as opposed to 100 on betco.
Player to player transfers
Owned by a 2p2er who is willing to work hard to make the site successful

Cons:Least action
Newer
Closed source

Comments: I do like this site, they have freerolls giving away the days rake right now, and more plans for the future apparently

So why aren't you playing bitcoin poker? I can think of several reasons:
You are an idiot
You hadn't heard of it before now
You don't know how to get bitcoins (its easy, use exchangebitcoins dot com and just deposit funds in a bank acct, scan/photograph the reciept and email it to someone and get bitcoins within 15 minutes....)
You are afraid you won't be able to cashout bitcoins (trust me its way way easier to cash them out than it is to get them in the first place)

Seriously though, the world championship of bitcoin poker. What more do I really have to say at this point? I'm in it to win it, gl to all players.

Killer post sir! I had not even heard of that third room. In fact your post is so good, it should be separated into its own thread.

I looked at one of these sites and they had a freeroll for actual bronze bitcoins - but I'm not sure if that also corresponded to an actual bitcoin.

So we can obv build up a "bitcoin bankroll" on some of these sites, but how about cashing out of one of these rooms. Do you have to deposit a few bitcoins on bitcoin room A before you can cashout on said room? (Like how if you win a freeroll on a poker site, they usually want you to deposit first and then play some more before you make a withdrawal.)

I'd like to try out bitcoins, but first of all my video card sucks so I can't make my own. I also really don't feel like spending even $25 to get a 0.5 Bitcoin or whatever it is right now.

As far as I know, none of the sites restrict payouts at all. If you win a freeroll, you should be able to cash out.

Right now, 1btc is going for $5. That gets you 1000 "chips", or 5 buyins for the smallest nhle game.

Mypoorlil: who is the sealswithclubs 2+2er and is there a thread specific to that site?

Ughh $5.5 now per BTC, they just keep going down!!

BTC will end it's run soon I believe, I just don't see the momentum there anymore needed to grow BTC, they had a little boom a few times, now it seems to be drying up.

The guy is AlbertoKnox, you can PM him if you have questions, he's too lazy to do anything like post himself or make a thread right now, because its still so small. You gotta understand that right now there are like 50 players right now in bitcoin poker. Maybe. But, it is real, it does WORK, people ARE playing, and most importantly, it IS growing....very very slowly but surely.

Yeah what a failure. Oh wait I bought at $2 per coin. What you don't understand is it isn't a get rich quick scheme. Its meant to be used as a currency, and right now its most viable use is online gambling. Price variance doesnt matter because....its so easy...and will just keep becoming easier to exchange btc for usd, since you can avoid exchanges and just used trusted friends, and just clean untraceable cash changes hands, and bitcoins are sent to an address. everyone wins. This happened all the time in the past with pokerstars cash, and it worked because if you REALLY have to you can use an exchange, just like in the day if you really had to you could cash out of pokerstars you could get a check, or a more accurate analogy would be cashout to neteller then to your bank account, since if you use an exchange you have to use a 2nd ewallet service which as far as I understand does this, and all these places charge fees, which makes it less appealing. But the point is, you CAN do that.

It won't succeed in online gambling and won't be used by popular rooms, I can tell you that right now.

I'm aware it's not a get rich quick thing, but the fluctuation of BTC isn't stable enough for it to succeed in the long run IMO. BTC needs to be accepted by more reputable places, and it's not not panning out this way. Sure it's accepted but not enough to where it should be, needs to be to be put on the map.

Not everyone can use/ has neteller so you're only appealing to Euro here and elsewhere. The exchange is just another slippery slope in the long run I feel as well with the dodging of the fees and regulations.

BTC Will Die Off Eventually

No, I can tell you right now that is has ALREADY succeeded, far beyond your understanding. If it hasn't then what is all this cash sitting here next to me from? Did it just materialize out of thin air?

When I was talking about neteller, I was referring to back in the day when all the US players used it, and it was super easy to trade funds site to site with it. So you didn't neccessarily have to cashout with it, but I was just using it as an example to say people have been willing to go through that extra step before, so why wouldn't they now?

We're gonna win, honestly I'm just trying to spread the love, for example my friends a recreational player, he never woulda played on bodog or merge or anything like that, but he did used to play on stars, and when I introduced him to one of these new sites and sold him a few coins, he just said to me how amazingly happy it made him to be playing online poker again. its just so satisfying to have that freedom, and i wanna share it with more people. it really just made me happy to see him so happy, because i also knew how he felt, since it was taken away and then i got it back.

Won 100 chips (that's 0.1 BTC) on sealswithclubs tonight, cashed out to my bitcoin wallet, then redeposited, owner even covered the fee for me on the redepositing (there was a 0.55% fee on that). Didn't have any bitcoins before so now I do.

Ugh. I'm convinced I wasted a day on bitcoins and bitcoin poker. I'm convinced this is a ponzi scheme equivalent now. What is a bitcoin good for? You can sell it to other people for profit. What does the person that you sell the bitcoin to hope to do? The same thing

It'll never take off, It'll go to $1 / BTC or less

Watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoK8HXMSsNg

I know this is going to piss off bitcoiners, but Bitcoin people are like a fundamentalist religion; they remind me of the Jehovah's Witnesses who raised me and tried to brainwash me!

Hahahah. YOULL BE BACK AND THATS A DAMN GUARANTEE. What do you care what the person you sell a bitcoin to does with it? Do you care what someone you sell a chip to in a casino does with it? Actually, what the F*#@ business is it of yours what someone else does with your former bitcoin. Its not your property anymore, so don't worry about it.

You sound pretty damn unconfident there saying it'll go to $1 a btc. Its especially obvious because if you really felt that way you could just go to bitcoinica the new exchange where you can short sell the heck out of it....yeah you could make a literal boatload of money if you actually knew it was going to $1 a btc.....what's that? You're not doing that? Yeah I thought so.


hahaha at it being a religion, I can see the similarities, but we're not saying Christ is gonna return some day buddy, at least I'm not....all I'm saying is it WORKS RIGHT NOW as a currency and is working for me, and others. Haters gonna hate.

Funny how you sound exactly like the fanatics on the bitcoin message board, mypoorlil. Absolutely no downside to bitcoin, BUY BUY BUY!

Bolded ftw. Tulips IMO:

Tulip mania or tulipomania was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the recently introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed.[2] At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble (or economic bubble),[3] although some researchers have noted that the Kipper- und Wipperzeit episode in 1619–22, a Europe-wide chain of debasement of the metal content of coins to fund warfare, featured mania-like similarities to a bubble.[4] The term "tulip mania" is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble (when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values).[5]

When did I ever say there was no downside? I don't care what you do, I'm not posting to try to convince you guys, you're beyond hope, I'm posting to try to help out smart lurkers who are legitimately thinking about trying this out.

Yeah, totally dude. Tulips. You could obviously divide tulips into infinite pieces. Also, the worldwide supply of tulips was capped at 21 million tulips, I remember those good ole days. Ah, the similarities. I remember when my butler ate a USB stick with my private keys on it last year, almost had to fire the man. He didn't know any better though, thought it was an onion. Poor dumb servant class.

I mean you guys are just pathetic. You have literally no business being on an internet poker forum. Whining about the volatile price of coins....hmmm lets see....how were you affected by coins dropping to 4$? Not at all, you say? Damns, how was I affected.....I lost thousands of dollars? Ohhhh right. Thats the FACTS. And I'm still here, and still playing.

No, you're posting to increase the value of your bitcoins.


hay guise silk road is down let's start making bitcoins about teh gamboooool

Actually I could care less what they are worth, considering I sell them as soon as I win them. As long as people are gambling for them, I'm happy. Which they are. So its not let's start. It's lets continue.

Hello

Silk road is not down.

Hey MyPoorLil5850s you made it to gambling 911 .
http://www.gambling911.com/poker/bit...rs-091311.html

It's true the rise to 30$ was a huge bubble, that does not mean it will
die. I mean it could happen, but it could also work, its 50/50 anyway.
If it falls below 3$ or 2$, then we can really start worrying.

It is true that in the beginning you could mine thousands of coins just with
a cpu, BUT nobody had known that they will be worth over 1$ oneday.
So they took a risk too running their computers and paying the electricity if you know what I mean.

I still think from a technical standpoint the underlying system is rock solid
and is still working 100% fine. Its a huge experiment in some sense and we
will see if it will work out or not.

Also in the mean time there are services popping up like bit-pay where you
can just pay and receive USD which is kinda like proxied over bitcoin, so in
that application the current price does not matter much.

The BTC poker rooms at the moment are missing physical clients (I hate flash and webbased clients)
which are compatible with holdem manager.
If someone would come up with that I think it could attract alot of 2+2ers.

And Bitcoins have one extrem advantage in the gambling world:
DOJ and friends can't freeze them.

My 0.02 BTC on this topic

Dammit man, I'm trying to be credible here. Please don't post that nonsense (only half kidding) don't wanna be affiliated in any way with that site haha

I personally think the flash and webbased clients are great. I hated PTR and holdem manager, ppl who rely on HUDs or PTR are bad for the game....I basically never used a HUD and I've 24 tabled a decent bit on stars....I mean I don't mind using it, I have used it before, but 99% of the time haven't seen the need and think it helps the fish that no one is able to, so thats very good for the game. Of course you're welcome to your opinion, and I actually hear rumors that another site is coming out soon, with a standalone client that will be even more slick than any out now.

Also, a VERY huge name in poker (bracelet holder, huge success both live and online) may be putting his name on bitcoin poker soon. Either sponsored by one of the sites, patches at live tourneys, etc, or just starting a new site.

is there a manual out where the bitcoin propaganders read from and rehash the same old bunch of bull****?

yes, such a risk paying a few cents a day to have a massive monopoly and creation of artificial scarcity over this supposedly "p2p" currency. and if one of you two mentions infinitely divisible again I'm going to infinitely divide your face with my fist.


to the community at large know this: at any point 10s of people have the power to make bitcoins worthless. When they were worth $30, someone decided to make a quick 500k and that's when they dropped to the 10-15 range. I stopped paying attention, but I'm guessing something similar happened again to bring it down to 5. I can only imagine why there is still 10THash going into the network when the ROI is now around 0 at $5. And soon 25BTC will be awarded instead of 50 per block.

nope not a ponzi scheme, not at all.

how do you know one person wanted to make 500k? it could have been tens or even hundreds of ppl cashing out at that price. this is an unregulated free market and if you're dumb enough to buy a bitcoin for $30 right now its not suprising there's someone willing to sell it to ya.

the fact is you are just making stuff up with no evidence. There is no way to tell if its even 10s of people, it could just be one person with all those early coins. Like 99% of early coins still have not been spent, fyi, despite the bubble crash from 30 to 5....hmmm yeah it was prolly 1 early adopter cashing out 500k ....(sarcasm).....more like the big player speculators liquidating their positions....

u got a problem with a free market eh baws? prob think government should like control stuff and issue currency.....yeah thats cool....government is the reason we have to resort to this for online play....its ok though, be mad at an early adopter who produced a product of this value in a free market....be mad at him its ok....success breeds jealousy...

uh let's see.. the transactions are public.. and there was one wallet that sold 25k coins. but keep please keep up your bs.

and please don't put words in my mouth. Bitcoin is flawed, plain and simple. that doesn't mean I think the government should "control stuff and issue currency"

blah blah blah. the US dollar is flawed, plain and simple. it is given to private banks and governments way way way before us, the common people, have a chance to get our hands on any. there's your real ponzi scheme. thanks for proving my point, all transactions are public. in fact, everything about the network is public, and out in the open. no closed door deals here

anyways, its great that one wallet sold 25k....how did you know the person who owned those wasn't selling them behalf on a group of investors or something again? oh wait you don't? right, thought so.

anyways its all besides the point, anyone can do whatever they want with their property...if ppl wanna sell thats their choice....im not too worried because ppl who have tons of coins stashed have much more incentive to see bitcoin succeed than anyone......why would one of them cash out 500k? thats not really alot of money, definitely not enough to retire for life on.....500mill though, now that's something......

I fail to see the reason for all the vitriol regarding bitcoins. Clearly the price is very unstable and I certainly don't intend to invest in the things.

However, it surprises me that you guys in the states are not interested since it seems to be the only way you will be able to play poker for real money anytime soon. If you're worried about the fluctuations you can sell up after every session. Why all the hate?

Also, the recent trend of calling things you don't like 'ponzi schemes' is very tiresome.

The traffic at Betco has gotten so low recently that I haven't found a single game to play in for three or four weeks. Maybe because of the recent BTC price crash? I don't know. But I found this thread as I was Google'ing for some information about it, and wondering if there had been a confirmed superuser scandal or something. I didn't find anything like that (and actually, the owner seems like a nice guy), however it could easily be possible owing to the independently designed software client being used.

btcontilt uses the (compiled) 'Poker Maverns' client, so cheating there would presumably be more difficult for the owners. Unless of course they had access to the Poker Maverns source code. I haven't actually transferred BTC to, or played at this site yet because most of the traffic at btcontilt seems to only be playing freeroll tournies for the BTC equivalent $ .25 or whatever. But I guess I did see one relatively full small stakes ring game table going there one night. So maybe I'll eventually transfer a few BTC in and see how it goes. NOTE - I simply could not get Firefox w/Flash to work at btcontilt. I had to switch to using Internet Explorer.

As for my impressions of BTC poker in general (drawn only from playing at betco), well, they are mixed. On the plus side the play is generally very loose and inexperienced, and I managed to more than double my buyin quickly. But on the down side the games are scarce, and are usually only for extremely small stakes. And actually, I ended up losing half my original bankroll because of the drop in BTC price. Also, at least at Betco, you aren't going to see mucked cards. And because of anonymous registration at these sites you WILL find collusion. I was getting whipsawed pretty good one night. However no big deal. It was being done poorly, and I simply quite that session post-haste. But BTC poker is the wild, wild west. So don't expect to go crying for security here.