Use the Play Money tables to get familiar with the different games. I've been trying to compare the different varieties of poker available on Paradise Poker. I'm coming to the decision that my best chances of winning consistently are in the Draw poker (look in the New Games section). In Draw poker, no one else can see your cards until the bets are all in. You can choose which cards to hold and discard, from zero to five cards. And you're only playing against 4 other players at the most. There's a lot more room for skill and for luck to determine how often you can win. In Texas Holdem, you can't discard. You're just given two cards, to play against the five table cards that you share with everyone else. So basically, of 10 players, one player will be handed the best pair of cards in each round. Pretty much your odds of getting those two cards are 1 in 10. And everyone else knows whether their hand is likely to win against yours or not. To play the Perfect game of Holdem, you pretty much would need to fold 9 times out of 10. Also, in Draw poker there's a lot less betting rounds in each hand. That means that if your cards aren't the best, you won't be dragged through a long series of betting rounds the way you are in the other games. It also means that hands go quicker, and if you just fold and wait out the hand, you won't get bored and impatient to overplay as readily as in the other games. I think the odds are more in your favor in Draw poker, than in the other games that play strip-tease with your hand, so you have to keep betting and betting before you can even know what your actual hand will be. The number of betting rounds in the other games can equal two or three hands of Draw poker.
I have a Credit Card with a $500 limit that I use for online transactions - this has worked fine for me - I presume that net teller will also work well, and most of the major sites accept payments from them. You can play minutes after funding your account if you use a cc. Re: payouts - I had requested my first payout from UB about 2 weeks ago - the initial amount of my deposit was credited back to my cc - the balance was paid by cheque. The cheque didn't arrive within the time they promised, so I contacted customer service and they cancelled that cheque and Fed-Ex'd me another one. It was sent today so I should have it in a day or two - I will post here when it actually arrives. Hope this helps
Most U.S. credit cards won't allow gambling purchases. I use NETeller. No fees, they deduct from your bank account, it takes a week to be available in NETeller. Cashouts from Paradise Poker are practically immediate, the money is back in my NETeller the next day if not the same day.
sorry - wasn't aware that US cards weren't accepted - shouldn't have assumed, I guess, although it seems strange to me, given that there's a lot more legal gambling in the US than here in Canada
we do lots of strange things stateside then again, everytime I've been to Canada I've gambled thrice: once in the casinos and twice at the borders
lol...well actually, the fact that gambling is only semi-legalized here is stranger, to me, than the situation in the US, given the fact that the Cdn. government runs a sports book but won't allow me to do so. What I wouldn't give for something even remotely approaching Vegas. ..but at the border, do you mean that you have problems on the way in? or on the way out? just read your reply... been there, know what you mean
Credit cards are accepted by the casinos, but the credit cards won't approve the transactions. The government runs gambling (lottery), and encourages casinos to promote tax revenue. But it's still supposed to be illegal. They have to put the casinos on "Indian" reservations, because supposedly the reservations have sovereign laws and are not subject to the White Man's proscriptions against gambling. Nevada is a peculiar exception in this country, a holdover from the lawless cowboy days when it was just a pioneer territory and not an official state.