Which online poker site?

I've joined PokerStars, due to a friend telling me they are pretty good, but there is a multitude of choices out there. There are seemingly some amazing startup deals, but beware, they come at a price.

Here are some things that will help make a decision:

Shop around

First of all, if you think you are good enough to get bonuses or rakebacks, shop around. There is a lot of different startup deals from different linking sites (sites that advertise special startup deals for other sites), and once you've joined, you can't go back to another deal. In fact for some of these sites, once you've visited their homepage you can't join up with a better deal, so be careful when searching for the best startup deal.

Startup Bonus

OK, the big easy, you deposit some real money into a site and you get extra money put in your account. These vary a lot, but sufficed to say, if you are a brand new poker player, most of these bonuses will cost you more than one deposit. For example PokerStars offers to match your deposit up to $50 (in one of their deals). I deposited $25, so to get the $25 bonus I need 250 FPPs (frequent player point). To get 1FPP, you need to pay tournament fees of up to $0.20, so a $1.10 tournament or a $1.20 Sit N Go (SNG), will get you 1FPP. You can also get them playing in cash games where a pot goes above $10, which is easy on higher limit cash games, but very hard on low limit cash games, so the new player should not see many FPP's from cash games. So let's say with $1.20 SNG, you will need to play 250 of these.

With $25 deposited, there is a fair chance you'll be broke well before reaching 250FPP's, and either add more cash to your account to keep playing or give up and never get the bonus.

For that reason I'd suggest not choosing a site based on the best startup bonus. One reason is you may not get any bonus, the other is that site might be good to join for the bonus once your playing level is higher.

Ongoing Bonus

Some sites offer an ongoing bonus for playing. For example if you get a certain amount of FPP's in a month you get a cash amount. Again this is usually aimed at players that are a long way better than new players, so don't pay too much attention.

RakeBack

Rakeback gives you a certain amount of the sites rake for hands you played in. The rake is the amount the online site makes from a hand which might be up to 10%, so if you get rakeback of 25%, it works out to be 25% of 10% of the pot, which in a $10 pot is 25c. It's not much, but can work out very well for people playing high level cash games. For example if one player plays in $10,000 worth of pots in a day and breaks even for the day, they have still won $250 from the rakeback, which is not too bad.

Again it's mainly aimed at higher level players, so don't take it into account too much.

Software

I would almost skip all the above if you are new to poker, and look straight to this point. This is more important, as you don't want a crappy interface to use for hours on end. Most software is pretty similar, but little things make each site unique. I joined PokerStars after hearing the software was good, and I agree now that it is.

You generally want to look for software that works well on your machine (ie do you have a really slow computer, or a Linux machine), has a good level of statistics available, both live and later as an export and something that works well with your screen. For example in PokerStars the game window can be stretched to full screen, which is nice.

If you don't have a windows machine, think about the java software such as PartyPoker.

Network

This is really important. A large network usually offers a good range of players and therefore games. There is little point joining a site and then realising nobody plays the level you want to play. It's quite simple the more players the better. I'm not sure of statistics but PokerStars, Party Poker and Full Tilt are definitely bigger networks worth playing.

Game availability

Again very important. While Full Tilt offers a lot for the experienced player it hasn't got the very low limits that PokerStars has for it's cash games. This is a vital thing that again drew me towrds PokerStars, because I didn't want to be broke within 3 days of starting.

Anti cheating software

There are a couple of ways of cheating and the bigger networks avoid this as well as possible. For example if you heard there are a lot of cheats on Site A, you would avoid it. Therefore no site can be named as a site people cheat on, as their goodwill is worth way too much, so sites actively hunt out people cheating and ban them, stripping them of all their winnings. You'd think the bigger sites already do this well, and I can't say I've noticed any people definitely cheating yet.