Online poker is a game which is widespread across the world and it involves and connects millions and millions of players. It is very convenient since you can play it sitting at your home, enjoying the comfort of it and feel much more at ease than you would feel playing a traditional casino poker. There are also many helpful tools which can make your game even more amusing and maybe more lucrative as well. So, let us have a look at some of the most popular ones.
First of all, many sites offer benefits in the form of different bonuses. These serve as a kind of incentives which are especially convenient for the beginner players. The bonuses are usually awarded once you have played a number of raked hands specified by the site. A rake is actually a percentage that is taken the operator of the game. It is a kind of fee and it is usually between five and ten percent. However, not all cardroom operators take this fee. For instance, some of them do not take a percentage when a hand does not have a flop in games such as Texas hold’em. Anyway, if you deposit $100, you might be offered a $50 bonus once you have played five hundred raked hands. Also, some cardroom have the so-called VIP programs where regular players are awarded.
Further on, we come to different types of software used for online poker. In fact, the way the rooms usually operate is through separate pieces of software. There are the so-called cross-platforms which usually use a Java Applet and these enable the program to be compatible and to work equally well on different systems including Windows, Linux and Mac. Nevertheless, many rooms do not have this kind of platforms, but they offer a special program that can be downloaded and which is usually compatible only with Windows. In order to install it on Linux or Mac, you need to have some kind of compatibility layer, i.e. Wine.
However, some providers of mobile content have developed poker for portables such as PDAs and mobile phones as well. The software functions pretty much the same as that for computers but, of course, it is adapted for mobile phone use. Of course, your phone must receive a signal in order for you to play.
There are also poker forums and poker portals which can be useful for they contain much of content that is poker-related. The content may include tournament results, news, discussions on strategies, cardroom information and much other information that can be useful in different ways.
All in all, online poker is a very interesting game that offers you excitement as well as a chance to earn money. With the help of the tools that are mentioned in this article you can make the game even more interesting, you can make it perfectly compatible with your computer system and you can practice and perfect you skills and share your experience with other players.