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Legal Poker Sites Online

existing SAFE Port Act. Since then, online poker rooms have been under the close scrutiny of the DOJ. It’s true that the feds have taken legal action against the poker industry in the past couple of years. However, things changed drastically on Black Friday, April 15, 2025. The uncertainty encompassing legal online poker rooms deepened. That morning, the U.S. DOJ indicted three of the most prominent poker sites on the poker platform: Full Tilt, Absolute Poker, Pokerstars. This was just a start, they were not done yet. The incidents of this day left many to wonder, “is playing poker online legal?”

Two key issues are discussed in this page.

- We will briefly clarify why you need to do away with fear regarding the existing laws touching on playing online poker. In case you have found yourself uncertain whether you are breaking the law or not while playing online poker, whatever we discuss here will lift those uncertainties.

- Issue number two will be where you can find online poker sites that are legal. The DOJ, and to some occasional instances the FBI, poker fans are finding it extremely hard to find sites they can rely one. We will highlight some of the ones we like later on.

ONLINE POKER ROOMS THAT ARE TRUSTED AND LEGAL
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Is playing online poker a crime?

Before going any farther, understand that we are not lawyers, hence this prefaces all discussions touching on legal issues. With that said, we can highlight a couple of facts as to why U.S online poker players have little to fear in line with the present laws governing legal poker.

1. To begin with, most people hold the notion that legislation has made it a crime playing online poker. Some hold fears that they might be fined, prosecuted or even worse be arrested. In real sense, nothing in the existing federal legislation makes it a crime playing poker on the internet. In addition, never has there been any federal case we know of against any U.S player for playing poker online.

2. Since the passing of the UIGEA, online poker has attracted a lot of attention, but it’s crucial to understand this bill does not in any case mention poker. It touches on “games subject to chance.” This is definition wide enough to include all casino games.

3. Thirdly, the legal online poker subject centers on the specific financial institutions interacting with the sites. This mainly touches on the payment processors the sites use to process the deposits of their members. To be specific, the current U.S legislation forbids financial institution like credit card issuers, banks among others from processing transactions involving sending funds to poker sites.

The current U.S legislation doesn’t directly target U.S citizen’s actions. It doesn’t make legal or illegal playing poker online. In short, residents are not addressed. With that said, the biggest challenge remains in finding legal online poker sites.

Where can you play legal poker online?

After the domains of Full Tilt, Absolute and Stars were seized by DOJ on Black Friday, a vacuum was left in the industry. These were three dominant sites with a wide base of followers. Plenty of online poker players had to search for new sites to play poker online, irrespective of the industry contracting.

A good number of companies grabbed at this opportunity to plunge into the industry and fill the void. Some of these companies are beginners with regard to online gambling. However, others for instance Lock Poker and RedStar Poker are full fledged and have a legacy. The sites are open to U.S poker players, and this gives us a brand new list to review as far as legal online poker sites are concerned.

List of Legal Online Poker sites we recommend

Each site in our list has got its positive and negative traits, but we have hopes that the negatives are going to improve as time goes by. The specific features you like game variety, poker tournaments, promotions among others play a main role regarding your feelings towards each site. The most significant thing however, is that the three of them give outstanding qualityreal money online poker, and open the doors for U.S players.

The initial question was whether playing poker online is legal, and the answer is yes. We have dealt with that already, and if you would like to make a start, our recommendation is that you closely look at our list of the legal online sites above.