888 Poker Review 2024

888 Poker is from the old days of online poker, yet lives on to this day. It has managed to maintain a high number of players, despite having the most annoying software I have encountered in modern online poker.

The 888 brand is solid and has been around for years, which most likely explains the consistent player traffic. However, with all the other online poker rooms you can choose from in 2024, it’s difficult to find a reason to make 888 your destination of choice.

There are much better poker rooms out there.

What are the players like?

888 Poker has a reputation for having particularly fishy players. This is because they have a popular casino, and casino players have a habit of drifting over in to the poker room from time to time, which makes for profitable games if you know what you’re doing.

However, I can’t say I’ve had much contact with these elusive fish.

To me the room feels full of old battle-hardened players that signed up years ago and haven’t made the switch to another room. They’ve been around long enough to adopt a tight playing style, and the games are generally boring because of it.

I may have been unlucky with my table selection, but I don’t have the enthusiasm to play at the room long enough to wait for the casino players to arrive.

What’s the software like?

It’s aggressively bad.

In short, it feels like it was released in 2012 and was pretty cool at the time, but now it’s unwieldy. There's a continual uneasy feeling that the software could crash at any time.

The instant-play version is no better.

However, the most deeply offensive thing about the software is not the design, but the unrelenting advertising that pops up between actions. I just want to switch tables, but before I can I'm spammed with casino offers like I’m some sort of degenerate, which they couldn’t possibly have known.

All in all it’s an unpleasant experience. If you’re still stuck playing at 888, I promise you there is a better world out there.

Don’t forget to close that one last ad as you try to exit the software.

What’s the traffic like?

The traffic levels at 888 are very good. This high number of players is the sole reason you’d want to play at 888 Poker.

You’ll find consistent action from the micro-stakes games of 1c/2c right up to the higher stakes of $10/$20 and above. I don't know how they still manage it.

What deposit options do they have?

888 Poker has a nice selection of traditional payment options to choose from, such as Debit card, Neteller, and Skrill. But the handiest of all is the ability to deposit and withdraw using PayPal (if you live in some countries), because who doesn’t have an old PayPal account lying around.

There’s no Bitcoin option here though (my deposit option of choice). But that’s to be expected, as this is a heavily-regulated public company, and there ain’t no paperwork for handling digital currencies like that yet.

So overall it’s a reasonable old-school cashier. Just be prepared for it to open up in a browser window at a domain unrelated to 888… it’s all part of the 888 Poker experience.

So why would you play at 888 Poker?

Well, it’s hard to escape the fact that 888 is a well-established poker room. It has high traffic with players from all over the world, and as a public company you have strong assurance that your money is safe.

This is not to suggest that any other recommended rooms on this site are unsafe, but the heavily-regulated nature of a beast like 888 can provide a greater depth of confidence that’s hard to replicate. I respect anyone who values this when choosing where to play poker online.

However, all of this comes at the cost of playing at a poker site that is well past its prime. The software is archaic, the advertising is annoying, and the games are lifeless.

If you want all the security of a site like 888 Poker, but with much better software, try Betsafe Poker instead. Or, if you want to play at the frontier of modern online poker, check out SwC Poker.