PokerStars review: bonus, rewards, rake and which PokerStars you get

PokerStars has dealt real-money poker since 2001 and is still the brand most players think of first. The international site runs under a licence from the Malta Gaming Authority, publishes its full rake table, and hosts the Sunday Million, SCOOP and WCOOP. Its cash games are the second busiest online, though well behind GGPoker.

The catch in 2026 is the word “PokerStars” itself. In New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania it now means PokerStars on FanDuel, a new product on different software. Ontario moved to FanDuel in June. Since October, UK players log in through Betfair. This PokerStars review covers the international site, PokerStars.com, and explains in each section where the other versions differ.

Which PokerStars do you get?

PokerStars is no longer one site with one player pool. Owner Flutter has turned it into the PokerStars Network: several brands and licences, some sharing tables and some not. Where you live decides which version you can open, what software it runs and which bonus and rewards apply. The chart sums it up before the details.

The table adds the practical details for each version.

For a UK player little changes at the table: the software, tournaments and opponents are the same as on .com, but the account, cashier and rewards are Betfair’s. Existing PokerStars.uk accounts were moved over in October, and Paddy Power Poker and Sky Poker are due to follow onto PokerStars software.

The US is a different story. PokerStars on FanDuel replaced the old PokerStars US sites on 1 April 2026 and runs on new software, with a FanDuel account, its own offers and its own rewards. It joined the players of the three states into one pool for the first time, but they never meet the .com field. Everything below about bonuses, Rewards chests and rake refers to PokerStars.com unless a section says otherwise.

Who can’t play on PokerStars

PokerStars publishes a list of prohibited jurisdictions, and its terms forbid deposits and real-money play from any of them. During our check (November 2026) the real-money ban covered, among others:

• The United States, except states where PokerStars is locally licensed (today through FanDuel), and the state of Washington for free games as well
• Australia, Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates
• Russia, Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Georgia
• Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Macau, Taiwan, Israel and Turkey
• South Africa, Morocco, Kenya, Nigeria and most of sub-Saharan Africa
• Croatia, Cyprus, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Albania

The full list runs to well over a hundred countries and territories, and it changes. Russia left in 2022; Poland is on it now. Germany, India, South Korea and Ukraine appear only for the free “freemium” games, so the real-money ban does not apply there in the same way. Check the official page before you register, especially if you are moving or travelling.

Sections 9.1 and 9.2 of PokerStars’ terms treat playing from a prohibited jurisdiction, or hiding your location with a VPN or false details, as a serious breach. The account can be closed and the balance handled under the terms for prohibited events. A VPN does not make a banned country allowed; it only adds a breach of the terms on top.

Is PokerStars legit?

Yes. PokerStars is one of the most heavily licensed names in online gambling, and its record with player money is the strongest in the industry. The details below show what that rests on.

Licence and owner

The terms name the operator of PokerStars.com as TSG Interactive Gaming Europe Limited, a Maltese company (number C54266), licensed by the Malta Gaming Authority under licence MGA/B2C/213/2011. Play-money games come from a separate Isle of Man company, Stars Mobile Limited. The whole group has belonged to Flutter Entertainment, the owner of FanDuel, Betfair, Paddy Power and Sky Bet, since 2020.

A Malta licence matters in practice. The MGA requires player funds to be kept separate from the operator’s money, runs a complaints process, and can fine or suspend a licensee. That gives you somewhere to go in a dispute, which an offshore site licensed in Anjouan or Curaçao cannot offer to the same degree.

Game integrity

PokerStars bans bots, collusion, real-time assistance software and seating scripts, the programs that hunt for tables with weak players. It runs its own security team and closes accounts it catches, with the money handed back to affected players where it can be traced. The tools rules are covered in the software section below.

Fair deal and player funds

The best evidence for PokerStars is what happened in April 2011. When the US government shut down the big offshore sites on poker’s Black Friday, PokerStars returned American players’ balances within weeks, while Full Tilt Poker could not pay. A year later PokerStars bought Full Tilt and funded the repayment of its players. No other poker brand has a test like that on its record.

PokerStars welcome bonus: 100% up to $600

New players on PokerStars.com get a 100% match up to $600 (€500, £400 or C$600, depending on account currency) with the bonus code STARS600. The minimum deposit is $10. You can reach the maximum across up to three deposits made within 60 days of the first one, entering the code each time.

The bonus is locked at first and released as you pay rake in cash games or fees in tournaments. Every $1 of rake earns 5 redemption points, and every 75 points release $5. Put plainly, each $15 of rake frees $5 of bonus, so you pay three times the bonus in rake. You have four months after each qualifying deposit.

A player at $0.05/$0.10 who pays around $2.50 in rake a day clears a $100 bonus on time. Clearing the full $600 takes roughly $15 a day, which is regular play at $0.25/$0.50 or higher. Size the deposit to the rake you will really pay, because whatever is still locked after four months is gone.

Our PokerStars bonus code guide covers the rest: the rake each deposit needs, how the clearing rate compares with ACR and CoinPoker, how to claim STARS600 step by step and what PokerStars offers in the US, UK, Ontario and Europe.

Withdraw nothing until you have made all the deposits you want the bonus on. Under the terms, a withdrawal after a qualifying deposit stops any later deposit from qualifying, though deposits made before it keep their bonus. Forgot the code? Support can add it if you contact them within 7 days of the first qualifying deposit.

The bonus terms above are for PokerStars.com. PokerStars on FanDuel in the US and Ontario runs its own welcome offer with different terms, and during our check (November 2026) PokerStars on Betfair in the UK listed no poker welcome bonus.

PokerStars Rewards: chests and real rakeback

PokerStars Rewards is the loyalty programme on .com. You opt in once with the Start button in the client, and from then every $1 of rake or tournament fees earns 100 Reward Points (110 per €1, 130 per £1). Points fill a progress bar, and each full bar gives you a chest with a fixed cash value.

How the chests work

There are six levels. The chest value and the points it needs rise together, so the share of rake you get back climbs from 15% to 40%. To move up a level you must earn five chests within a rolling 28-day period. Go 28 days without a chest and you drop one level; unopened chests expire after 30 days.

To see what that means for an ordinary player, work out the 28-day rake each level asks for. Five Blue chests cost $100 in rake, so a player paying about $3.60 a day reaches Bronze and stays there. Moving from Silver to Gold needs $1,000 of rake in 28 days, about $36 a day. Black, at 40%, needs five Diamond chests: $6,000 of rake in 28 days. Most recreational players will sit at 15% to 20%.

Above the chests sit two tiers you reach automatically through volume. PokerStars Select starts at $50,000 of rake and fees in a rolling 12 months and pays 50% back as daily cash. Select+ starts at $100,000 and pays 60% on Spin & Go and Zoom, 50% on everything else. Players in either tier leave the chest system and its promotions.

How does that compare? GGPoker’s Ocean Rewards starts at around 16% and reaches about 80% at the very top; ACR pays a flat 27% or its Elite Benefits. Details in our guide to GGPoker rakeback.

Bonus and chests together

The welcome bonus and Rewards run side by side, because the same rake feeds both. To see what that adds up to, take a new player at $0.05/$0.10 who deposits $100 with STARS600 and pays about $2.50 in rake a day, or $75 in a 30-day month.

• Bonus: $75 of rake earns 375 redemption points, which release $25 of the $100 bonus.
• Chests: the same $75 earns 7,500 Reward Points, three Blue chests worth $3 each, so $9.
• Total: $34 back on $75 of rake in the first month, about 45%.

Once the bonus is cleared, that player is back to the chest rate alone. Three chests a month are not enough to reach Bronze, which needs five Blue chests inside 28 days, so the long-run figure is 15%. The bonus months are the cheapest time to play on PokerStars, and it pays to plan your volume around them.

UK and North America

PokerStars on Betfair uses its own programme, Stack+, launched in October 2026 with up to 25% rakeback. PokerStars on FanDuel uses FanDuel’s rewards. The chests and Select tiers above apply to .com only.

Our guide to poker rakeback sets these returns against GGPoker, ACR Poker, CoinPoker and WPT Global, and GGPoker vs PokerStars compares the two biggest sites head to head.

Rake at PokerStars

PokerStars takes a percentage of each cash game pot up to a cap that depends on the stakes and on how many players were dealt into the hand. It uses a “true percentage”, so even a few cents are raked at the exact rate. Hands that end before the flop are not raked at all. The table shows the No-Limit Hold’em and Pot-Limit caps for the most played stakes in US dollars.

Zoom, the fast-fold format, uses the same table except at the three lowest No-Limit Hold’em stakes. There it takes a smaller percentage with much lower caps: 3.5% up to $0.30 at $0.01/$0.02, 4.15% up to $1 at $0.02/$0.05, and 4.5% up to $1.50 at $0.05/$0.10. Pot-Limit Omaha at micro stakes has its own, cheaper caps as well, starting at 3.3% up to $0.30.

Caps sound reassuring, but at the lowest stakes they almost never come into play. A $1 cap at $0.01/$0.02 is 50 big blinds of rake, reached only in a $20 pot. To see where caps start to matter, take one pot of 100 big blinds and rake it at each stake.

That is why micro stakes cost the most relative to the stakes: a winning player at NL10 hands over a bigger slice of every pot than one at NL100. Our guide to rake in poker compares these caps with other sites. Tournament and Spin & Go fees are shown in each lobby as part of the buy-in.

Games and traffic

PokerStars still spreads more game types than any other big site. The trade-off is volume: fewer tables run at each stake than on GGPoker, especially at night in Europe.

Cash games

No-Limit Hold’em and Pot-Limit Omaha run from $0.01/$0.02 up to high stakes, alongside five-card PLO, Omaha Hi-Lo, Stud, Draw games and mixed games, which are hard to find anywhere else. Zoom tables move you to a new table and hand the moment you fold. Run It Twice is available on many tables, and All-In Cash Out lets you lock in your equity in an all-in for a 1% fee. Home Games let you set up a private club for friends.

Spin & Go

Spin & Go is PokerStars’ three-player lottery sit-and-go: a random multiplier sets the prize pool before the first hand, from twice the buy-in up to 10,000 times. The top prize therefore depends on the buy-in: $50,000 on a $5 Spin, and the advertised $1 million only from the $100 buy-in up. Almost every game you play will carry one of the lowest multipliers. The app screenshot shows a Spin & Go table on mobile.

GGPoker’s version, Spin & Gold, works the same way with its own multiplier table; our guide to Spin & Gold breaks down how often each multiplier comes up and what that does to the rake.

Tournaments and series

Tournaments are where PokerStars still leads. The Sunday Million has run since 2006, and the two big online series, SCOOP in spring and WCOOP in autumn, award titles that many professionals value as much as live ones. Around them run daily schedules, bounty events and satellites to live events. During our check (November 2026) Power Path, the satellite route to live PokerStars events, sold passes at $109, $530, $2,500 and $10,300. More on formats in our guide to multi-table tournaments.

How busy it is

By SharkScope’s figures for September 2026, PokerStars’ cash game index was 2,268 against GGPoker’s 9,359, about a quarter of the activity, which still makes it the second-largest network. Tournament entries showed a similar gap: about 179,000 against GGPoker’s 665,000. The Betfair move brings UK players into the same pool, and Paddy Power and Sky Poker are due to follow, so the gap may narrow. At NL2 to NL25 you will find games at any hour; above NL200 tables can be thin outside European evenings.

Software and third-party tools

PokerStars has a downloadable client for Windows and macOS and apps for iOS and Android. The desktop client remains the most complete version, with table tiling, notes, hand histories and a replayer. The app covers cash games, Zoom, Spin & Go and tournaments, as the lobby screenshot shows.

PokerStars is one of the few big sites that still allows third-party HUDs and trackers, but only approved programs and only within strict rules. HUD stats must be numeric, colour coding is limited, and a HUD may not change what it shows according to what is happening in the current hand. The policy splits everything else into three groups:

• Allowed at all times: approved trackers and HUDs used within those rules, and basic reference material.
• Banned while the client is open: range-versus-range equity calculators, ICM and Nash calculators, solvers, and charts that go beyond basic starting-hand tables.
• Banned at all times: seating scripts, bots, real-time assistance and anything that automates decisions or actions.

That sets PokerStars apart from its rivals: GGPoker has banned all third-party poker software running alongside its client since October 2026, and CoinPoker allows only its own HUD since June 2026.

Check the approved-tools list before you install a tracker. Programs and versions change, and an unapproved tool, or an approved one used in a banned way, can cost you the account. Close solvers and range tools before you open the client, not just before you sit down.

Deposits, withdrawals and KYC

PokerStars.com takes cards, e-wallets, bank transfers and local methods that vary by country; the minimum deposit for the bonus is $10. Withdrawals follow a fixed path. The flow shows what happens after you press the button.

A few rules shape every cash-out. Money goes back to methods you deposited with in the last 12 months, so the method you choose for depositing matters. Each deposit should be played through once before withdrawal; cashing out an unplayed deposit can be refused or charged. Identity checks are mandatory once your deposits pass €2,000 within 180 days, and PokerStars can ask for documents earlier. Have your ID, a recent proof of address and proof of the payment method ready to avoid a held withdrawal.

PokerStars charges €5 a month on an account with money in it after 13 months with no log-in or transaction, until the balance reaches zero. You get an email at least 30 days before the fee starts. If you stop playing, withdraw what is left.

Responsible gambling and support

As a Malta-licensed site, PokerStars has to offer real limits, and you set most of them yourself in the client or app. The app screenshot shows the menu:

You can cap deposits, limit the stakes of the tables and the buy-ins of the tournaments you can join, take a short break, or exclude yourself for longer periods. Help with accounts and payments runs through the Help Centre on the site and in the client. For helplines and more tools, see our responsible gambling page.

Who PokerStars suits

The same strengths and weaknesses fit some players and not others.

• Tournament playersThe Sunday Million, SCOOP, WCOOP and Power Path satellites.
• Players who value a strong licenceMalta regulation and a clean record with player money.
• Mixed-game and HUD usersStud, Draw and mixed games, and approved trackers.
• Micro-stakes cash grindersPlenty of games, but 5% with a $1 cap takes a large share at NL2–NL10.
• Rakeback hunters15–20% for most players; real value starts at Gold or in Select.
• US and Ontario playersPokerStars.com is closed to you; FanDuel is a different product.

PokerStars review: pros and cons

Side by side, the picture is a trusted site whose strengths lie in tournaments and regulation rather than in cash volume or price.

For a quick side-by-side, the table puts PokerStars against the two sites players most often weigh it with, on the points where they differ most.

GGPoker wins on traffic, ACR on access for most US players, and PokerStars on licence, tournaments and the cheapest bonus to clear. The other two are covered in our GGPoker review and ACR Poker review.

PokerStars FAQ

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