Poker Sites Not on GamStop: Offshore Tables Priced Hand by Hand, With the Cover You Give Up

Poker outside Gamstop in one minute

• Read the offer for what it is. It is a casino deposit package needing £20 or €20, with spins and matches at 35x to 40x. Whether a casino deals poker at all, and which kind, is for its lobby to show; the terms list the licence, payment methods and conditions, not the games.
• Know which poker you are paying for. Player tables charge rake, dealer tables keep a house edge of roughly 2.04% to 5.22% with perfect play, and video poker returns whatever its paytable says.
• Check the price before the first hand. A rake of 5% instead of 3.5% costs a 10p/25p regular 45p more an hour on our assumptions; a 7/5 Jacks or Better machine costs £13.56 more an hour than a 9/6 one at £1 a hand and 400 hands.
• Keep the bankroll on the site small. Poker money tends to stay on account for weeks, and an offshore balance has no British scheme behind it. Withdraw winnings weekly.
• Count the cover you give up. No Gamstop, no complaints process with a deadline and an outside reviewer at the end of it, and no Commission watching the room.

A poker player gets little from a slot-led welcome package. The value, if there is any, is in choosing the cheapest game and keeping your money where it is safe.

A ten-minute check before you sit down

Run this before you deposit anything. Most of it can be read in the lobby and the help pages, and every line moves what an evening of poker costs you.

Two lines matter most for a regular. The rake or paytable decides the hourly price, and the paperwork line decides how quickly you can take money off the site. If either is unclear after ten minutes of looking, choose another room.

What a slot-led package is worth to a poker player

Casinos out here are licensed in Costa Rica, Curaçao or Anjouan; the Gambling Commission has licensed none of them, and none takes part in Gamstop. They want a deposit first, £20 or €20 at the least, and pair it with 35x to 40x wagering and a run of 150 to 500 free spins over later deposits. The shapes vary: a headline adds up to 300% over three deposits but never 300% on any single one, elsewhere 200% starts it on the first deposit, in places the matching stretches across five, and a free bet is thrown in elsewhere. A few sets of terms state that spin winnings are paid as cash, and identity papers are wanted before money leaves the site.

Spins are slot play by definition, and match bonuses at these multiples are normally cleared on slots. If the offer’s terms do not list poker among the games whose stakes count towards the wagering, a poker player has two honest choices: clear the match on slots, or leave it.

What clearing a match on slots asks of a poker player

Suppose you deposit £50 where the first deposit earns a 200% match, so the bonus is £100. At 40x on the bonus and a 96% return, the sums are:

40 × £100 = £4,000 of slot stakes; £4,000 × 4% = £160.00 expected cost; £100 × (1 − 40 × 0.04) = −£60.00

At £1 a spin that is 4,000 spins, close to 2 hours 47 minutes at a 2.5-second pace, which is an evening you could have spent at the tables. We ran it 50,000 times on the “Classic” model, which pays 96.0% with medium volatility, with your £50 and the £100 bonus in one balance. Only 10.1% of sessions finished the 40x, 89.9% ended with nothing, deposit included, and 9.8% ended above the £50 you put in. The average finish was £99.26, lifted by a few sessions with very large wins, which is not what most players will see.

The spins are the usable part

If an offer pays spin winnings as cash and each spin is worth 10p, 300 spins on the same model paid £28.75 on average across 250,000 simulated sessions, close to the formula 300 × £0.10 × 96% = £28.80. Half paid £23.33 or less, 68.3% paid at least £20 and 6.5% paid £50 or more. That cash can go to a poker table once it is yours.

If you take a package anyway, pick it the poker player’s way

Three lines in the terms matter more to you than to a slot player. First, the multiple: on a £100 bonus, 35x means £3,500 of slot stakes and an expected cost of £140.00 at 96% RTP, against £4,000 and £160.00 at 40x. Second, the number of deposits: a package spread over five deposits pays its headline only if you keep funding an account you mainly want for cards, so a shorter package suits you better. Third, spins paid as cash: they are the one part you can turn into table money without any wagering.

Put those three in order and the choice usually makes itself: the lowest multiple, the fewest deposits, and cash spins where an offer has them. Everything else in the terms is detail for slot players.

Rake at player tables: what a regular pays an hour

At a peer-to-peer table the room does not play against you. It takes a small share of each pot, the rake, usually up to a cap that depends on the stakes. At British-licensed rooms rake typically runs from about 3.5% to 5% of the pot, with caps that rise with the blinds. An offshore room sets its own figures, so read its rake page before you sit down.

Rake is easiest to judge as a cost per hour. Here are four cash-game levels on one set of assumptions: six players, 60 hands an hour, an average raked pot of 12 big blinds, and every player contributing equally.

Per player per hour = rake rate × average pot × 60 hands ÷ 6 players; at 10p/25p and 5%: 5% × £3.00 × 60 ÷ 6 = £1.50

In big blinds the cost is the same at every level on these assumptions: 6 big blinds an hour at 5% and 4.2 at 3.5%. That is the honest way to compare rooms. To break even, a player has to win more than that from the other players.

When the cap starts to matter

The cap only bites on big pots. At £1/£2, a £100 pot at 5% would owe £5.00 of rake, but a £3 cap stops it at £3.00, an effective 3%. At the small average pots above, no cap is reached, so the percentage does all the work. If you play short-handed or aggressive games with large pots, the cap matters more; if you play small pots, the rate is everything.

Our recommendation: write down each room’s rate and cap at your stake, convert them to big blinds an hour with the formula above, and treat any room that will not publish both as too expensive to try.

Tournament fees, guarantees and field size

Tournament buy-ins are written in two parts. In a £10+£1 event, £10 goes into the prize pool and £1 is the room’s fee. That fee is 9.1% of what you pay, £1 ÷ £11, and the same split holds at £5+£0.50 or £20+£2. It is the tournament version of rake, taken once at the door instead of from every pot.

Field size decides what the pool is worth. Four hundred runners at £5 build a £2,000 prize pool; forty runners at the same buy-in build £200. A small field also means fewer places paid and a schedule that thins out quickly, which is why traffic is the first thing a tournament player should look at in any lobby.

Guarantees and overlays, worked through

Many rooms promise a minimum prize pool, called a guarantee. Take a £1,000 guarantee on a £10+£1 tournament:

The top-up in the first row is called an overlay, and it is the rare case where the field as a whole is paid more than it put in: 80 entries pay £880 including fees and share £1,000. Rooms that run overlays often are rooms whose guarantees are bigger than their traffic. That is good news for the field on the night and a warning about the room’s long-term health.

Warning signs in an offshore poker lobby

• No published rake or fee schedule. If a room will not tell you its price, assume it is a high one.
• Guarantees missed or events quietly cancelled. A room that adds an overlay every night has promises larger than its traffic; one that cancels short-handed events instead is a bigger worry.
• No hand histories. Reviewing your own hands is how you check a disputed pot.
• Nothing said about collusion or bots. At a table of players you are up against people, and the room should explain how it protects the game.
• A withdrawal queue that grows after a win. Note the date of every request and every reply.

Offshore, no British body checks that a guarantee is paid in full. Keep a screenshot of the lobby before the start and of the payout list at the end; if they do not match, you have evidence to put in a complaint, even if no British body can hear it.

Poker against the dealer: the edge on each game

Many casinos deal poker as a house-banked game: you play your hand against the dealer’s, not against other players, and the casino keeps a built-in edge. With perfect play the edges are known:

Cost of an hour = 50 hands × £2 ante × house edge; Caribbean Stud: £100 × 5.22% = £5.22

Fifty hands at £2 is £100 of antes, which makes the last column easy to read: the cost in pounds equals the edge in per cent. The pace is our assumption; a live dealer table with a full seat count may deal fewer hands, a fast online table more.

Perfect play is doing real work in that table. In Three Card Poker it means a simple rule: play any hand of Queen-6-4 or better and fold the rest. Casino Hold’em rewards reading the flop against the dealer’s likely hand. Play by feel instead and the edge grows. Side bets and jackpot add-ons carry edges of their own; price each one separately before you add it to a hand.

Live tables against the dealer

A live table with a human dealer deals fewer hands an hour than a software table, so the same edge costs less per hour even though it costs exactly the same per hand. At 30 hands an hour, a £2 Casino Hold’em ante costs about £1.30 an hour on average: 30 × £2 × 2.16% = £1.296. The trade-off is time, not price per hand; if a live table keeps you seated longer, the evening can cost more in total.

One British rule is worth knowing here. The £5 and £2 stake limits apply to online slots, not to other casino games, so a licensed site does not cap a Casino Hold’em ante either. The difference offshore is not the stake limit; it is everything else, from Gamstop to a complaints route.

Our recommendation: if you play against the dealer, choose Texas Hold’em Bonus Poker or Casino Hold’em over Caribbean Stud, learn the basic strategy before you play for money, and skip the side bets. Live dealer versions follow the same arithmetic; the live casino guide compares them on house edge.

Video poker: read the paytable before the first hand

Video poker is a machine game, but unlike a slot it shows you its price. Jacks or Better is the standard. Its full-pay version pays 9 for a full house and 6 for a flush for each coin staked, the 9/6 paytable, and returns 99.54% with perfect strategy. Shave those two numbers to 8 and 5 and the return falls to 97.30%; at 7/5 it is 96.15%.

We used 400 hands an hour as the pace, which is our assumption for a player who takes a moment over each hold. Faster play multiplies every figure in the last column. The gap between the best and worst paytable is £13.56 an hour at £1 a hand, £15.40 − £1.84, for what looks like the same game.

Two variants go further still. Full-pay Deuces Wild returns 100.76% and full-pay Joker Poker, Kings or Better, about 100.65%, both with perfect play. Those figures assume flawless strategy on every hand, and reduced paytables of both games are common. Treat them as the best case, not as a promise.

Multi-hand video poker plays three, five, ten or more hands at once from separate decks. It does not change the paytable’s return, but it multiplies the money put through per minute, and with it the hourly cost and the swings.

Our recommendation: read the full house and flush lines on every Jacks or Better machine before you press deal. If they are not 9 and 6, decide whether the game is still worth it at the price in the table above.

Where your poker money sits, and why that matters offshore

A slot player usually deposits for an evening and is done. A poker player often keeps a working bankroll on the site for weeks. Say you play 25p/50p with £50 buy-ins and keep 25 buy-ins in reserve: £1,250 is sitting in an account at a casino with no British licence. If that site stops paying, delays withdrawals or closes, nothing British protects the balance, and no UK complaints service can pick up your case.

Coins add a second layer. If the balance is held in a cryptocurrency, its value in pounds moves with the price. A 15% fall turns £1,250 into £1,062.50, a loss of £187.50 before a hand is dealt. Bitcoin payments cannot be reversed once sent, and the FCA’s warning on cryptoassets is blunt: people who buy them should be prepared to lose all their money.

Tax is worth a minute too. Gambling winnings are not taxed in the UK, and HMRC has said that holds for crypto gambling as well. The coins are another matter: spending or swapping them may be treated as a disposal for Capital Gains Tax, and whether a gain is taxable depends on the facts. For the 2026 to 27 tax year the first £3,000 of gains is exempt, and gains above it are taxed at 18% within the basic-rate band and 24% beyond it.

1. Keep only this week’s stake on the site. Decide the number on Monday and leave the rest in your own bank. If you plan two evenings of up to three £25 buy-ins, that is £150 on account and no more.
2. Withdraw winnings the week they arrive. Money you have taken out cannot be lost to a site that stops paying.
3. Clear the paperwork first. Get your identity papers accepted before your first session, so a payout is never held up by a document request.
4. Hold pounds, not coins, between sessions. That removes the price swing from your bankroll.

For more on coin deposits and what a crypto payment cannot undo, see the crypto payments guide. For what offshore sites ask before paying out, see the guide to identity checks offshore.

An evening at the tables, planned and priced

Put this page’s prices side by side and the cheaper ways to play poker stand out. Here is what one hour costs on average on the assumptions used above, seen from your seat:

Two cautions go with the table. The cash-game line is only the rake: whether you win or lose against the other players depends on how you play compared with them, and no formula can promise you come out ahead. And every figure is an average, so a single evening can land far above or below it.

The slot hour costs more than every poker line above added together, £57.60 against £28.16, and the reason is pace. 1,440 spins at £1 put £1,440 through the machine in an hour, while 50 hands at a £2 ante put £100 of antes on the table.

A session plan that keeps the evening yours

1. Set the evening’s budget in buy-ins. Say a full buy-in at 10p/25p is 100 big blinds, or £25. Three buy-ins, £75, is a sensible ceiling for one evening.
2. Time-box it. Two hours at 60 hands is 120 hands, and on our assumptions about £3.00 of rake from your seat.
3. Pick the cheapest format you enjoy. On the table above, 9/6 video poker and a low-rake cash table cost least; Caribbean Stud and short-pay machines cost most.
4. Keep score in big blinds, not pounds. It shows how you are doing against the game rather than against your mood.
5. Cash out at the end of the week. Leave nothing on the site that you would mind losing to a closed account.

Ten offshore names, read for a poker player

These ten offshore brands are among the names a poker player outside Gamstop may come across. What follows is the public record: owner, licence, how long they have traded and what a British regulator can do. That record does not say which of them deals poker, whether at player tables, against a dealer or on video poker, and no offer should be read into any brand on the offshore side. None holds a licence for Great Britain.

Velobet, Rolletto, Donbet, Mystake and Goldenbet: one balance sheet behind five names

The five share an owner, Santeda International B.V., and a Curaçao licence. They are missing from the UK register and sit outside Gamstop, no ceiling applies to their bonus wagering, and a complaint about any of them is beyond the Gambling Commission’s reach. For a poker player the question is who holds the bankroll. At all five it is the same company, so spreading your money across Velobet and Mystake spreads the logos, not the risk.

Kinghills and NineWin: too new to judge on payouts

Each carries a Curaçao licence, and behind each is a Curaçao company that also runs a set of sister sites. Neither has a public record yet, being too recently launched, and their route to British players runs through “not on GamStop” listings. A poker room’s reputation rests on years of paying winners promptly. These two have not had the years, so any balance there is a bet on the operator as well as on your hand.

Rainbet: a bankroll in coins

RBGAMING N.V. operates Rainbet on a licence from Anjouan, in the Comoros, and runs it crypto-first. For a player who leaves money on account between sessions, that means the bankroll’s pound value moves with the coin, as the bankroll section works through.

Roobet and Gamdom: coin casinos on Curaçao licences

Their roots are in trading video-game skins; today both operate as crypto casinos under Curaçao licences. Neither holds permission to serve Great Britain. If a pot, a payout or a closed account is disputed there, no British body will hear the case, and a bank cannot recall a coin deposit.

Our recommendation: if you play at any of the ten, treat the account as a place to play, never a place to store money. The guide to bigger stakes at offshore sites covers limits and what large balances risk.

Licensed poker and what the regulator has done

Inside the British system, Gamstop has been compulsory for every online operator since 31 March 2020, your age and identity are confirmed before the first hand, bonus wagering cannot pass 10x since 19 January 2026, and credit cards were barred from gambling on 14 April 2020. A complaint runs through the operator’s own process for up to eight weeks and can then go to an independent ADR provider. The Commission itself does not settle individual disputes, but it does act against licence holders, and its findings are public:

• Party Poker belongs to Entain, alongside PartyCasino, bwin and Sportingbet. Entain paid £17m on 17 August 2022; one case in the findings was a customer who gambled overnight for 18 months, depositing £230,845, with a single chat interaction.
• William Hill, which joined evoke in 2022, was part of a £19.2m penalty on 28 March 2023. Among the failures, WHG (International) let 331 people gamble even though they had self-excluded from Mr Green, another business in the same group.
• 888, in the same group, was fined £9.4m on 1 March 2022. Its affordability checks only began once deposits reached £40,000, and an NHS worker on £1,400 a month was able to set a £1,300 monthly deposit limit.
• Unibet, the sportsbook-first brand in Kindred (FDJ United), shared in Kindred’s £7.1m penalty in 2023, and bet365 settled for £582,120 in 2024.

None of that makes licensed rooms flawless. It shows the opposite: failures happen, they are found, they are fined and they are published. The William Hill case is the clearest for anyone reading this page, because it was self-excluded players who were let through, and the Commission called the group’s failures “widespread and alarming”. Offshore there is nobody to find such a failure, let alone fine it.

For a wider comparison of licensed sites, see the casino sites hub. If you are on Gamstop, every licensed room will refuse you until your exclusion ends, and that refusal is the point of the scheme.

Price your own session

Use the cost calculator with your own game, stake, pace and hours. It starts at Casino Hold’em: a £2 ante, 50 hands an hour, two hours, and a return of 97.84%, which is 100% minus the 2.16% house edge.

With those numbers, two hours cost about £4.32 on average: 100 hands × £2 × 2.16%. Change the return to 94.78% for Caribbean Stud and the same two hours cost about £10.44.

For video poker, set the stake per hand, the hands per hour and the paytable’s return. It starts at £1 a hand, 400 hands, one hour and 9/6 Jacks or Better at 99.54%.

Then change the return to 96.15% and watch the hour go from £1.84 to £15.40. If the machine does not show its paytable, assume the worst one.

Self-excluded? Poker is covered too

Some people who join Gamstop feel that poker is different because it involves skill. Your exclusion does not make that distinction, and for good reason: chasing losses at a poker table works exactly like chasing them anywhere else. Offshore rooms are outside the scheme, which is why they surface in your searches. While your exclusion runs, treat any such offer as not addressed to you.

1. Make the call. Dial 0808 8020 133. That is the National Gambling Helpline: free, and open day and night.
2. Block payments to gambling sites. Set up your bank’s block on gambling payments and pick the longest cooling-off it offers.
3. Block the sites on every device. Use GamBan or similar software on your phone, tablet and computer.
4. Let the exclusion run its course. Gamstop’s site sets out how long it lasts and what follows at the end.

If you miss the game itself, the strategy, the reading of hands, say so to someone you trust. The urge is easier to manage once it has been named. The safer gambling page lists more ways to get support.

Assumptions and sources

Poker costs on this page are arithmetic, not any room’s figures. Rake assumes a six-handed table, 60 hands an hour, an average raked pot of 12 big blinds and equal contributions, at rates of 5% and 3.5%; per player per hour is rate × pot × 60 ÷ 6. House-banked costs assume a £2 ante and 50 hands an hour; video poker assumes £1 a hand and 400 hands an hour. House edges and paytable returns are the published theoretical figures with perfect play; real play usually costs more.

The slot figures for packages of that size come from simulated sessions on our own “Classic” model slot, medium volatility and 96.0% RTP, not a real game. The match case ran 50,000 sessions with a £50 deposit and a £100 bonus in one balance, £1 spins and 40x on the bonus; each session stopped at the end of the wagering or at the first spin it could not afford. The 300 cash spins at 10p were run 250,000 times, and the match is valued with B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP)).

Rules, dates and fines are taken from the Gambling Commission’s own publications, tax points from HMRC and the crypto warning from the FCA. Brand statements stay within owner, licence, trading history and published enforcement, and the offshore packages are described from terms read in October 2026.