For Canadians who want to open online poker accounts, there are often few choices available. There are even fewer truly reliable and secure means of transferring money from your bank to the online poker room of your choice. Credit credits at Canadian online casinos are sometimes the most secure way to fund your account, and are often the most popular deposit methods. The use of a credit card is a very easy way to send money securely from your bank accounts to your poker account.
Canadian Online Credit Card Poker Sites
Not all Canadian casinos that accept credit card payments offer the same services. The casino you join should offer a poker game variety you’re happy with, a design you like, and other features (like bonuses or side games or whatever it is you’re looking for) that appeal to you. Just because you have to use a credit card to fund your account doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy all the perks of online poker play.
How to Find the Best Online Credit Card Poker Rooms
Look for casinos that accept credit card payments that offer good value sign up bonuses, a wide variety of payment options, games you like, and reliable customer support.
Here are a few of the best Canadian online poker rooms. Reviewers all over the Internet suggest that any of these online credit card poker sites in Canada would be worth a look.
All of these poker sites take credit card deposits from Canadian poker players as of this writing. Opening an account with one of these sites will ensure you can use your credit card to deposit and trust the customer service team to take care of your player account.
888 Poker Credit Card Deposits
888 is one of the best known casinos that accept wagers from Canadians. 888 has more poker games, more players, and more deposit options than anyone else, especially when you consider that they accept wagers from Canadian customers.
888 actually accepts credit card and other bank transfer methods for citizens of 120 different countries around the world. 888 Poker is a truly international poker site which also means that 888 is one of the most popular venues as far as credit card deposits online are concerned. Some international players can only deposit with credit cards.
Canadian Poker & Credit Card Deposits
While credit cards are accepted as a deposit method at many online poker sites open to Canadians, not all of the offer the best features, such as “instant deposit.” With instant deposit, a casino stakes you your deposit or a portion of it until your credit card goes through, whether it takes just seconds or a little longer (as with some international credit card transactions). Instant deposit puts you right into the poker room without a wait time, and is one of many features you should look for as a Canadian poker player willing to use credit cards to deposit into their poker account.
Why Should Canadians Consider Credit Card Poker Deposits?
As it stands now, and for no legal reason that anyone has yet found, all bank account transactions to and from any online casino inside the borders of Canada is not allowed for Canadian citizens. The reason that Canadian credit card poker sites even exist is because most credit card servers are located outside Canada, so these transactions aren’t explicitly illegal.
Credit card deposits to casinos are actually responsible for a big part of online poker play in general. Obviously the Canadian government figured out how much money they were missing out on by allowing these credit card deposits but not taxing or controlling them in any way. The recent movement to tax and regulate online poker play and casino gambling is in part a move by the Canadian government to cash in on a big opportunity for revenue.
So far, any piece of anti-gaming legislation in Canada is based on a similar law inside the United States which also proved impossible to regulate. It turns out that online casinos have too many perfectly legal ways of getting around existing and suggested legislation for these laws to do any harm to casino business, so the new attempt is to legalize certain types of online gaming and have them be controlled (and taxed and regulated) by the Canadian government.
Third Party Credit Card Processing Sites
Canadian citizens who are unfortunate enough to find their credit cards decline due to their Canadian address can always turns to third party credit card processors for a little subterfuge. Poker sites as diverse as Sportsbook Poker, Players Only, and Ultimate Bet all teach their players to use these third party websites in order to “make the deposit process faster.” Money processing centers, like servers for credit card companies, are all located well outside of the Canadian border so the government can’t touch the money they process.
Requirements for Canadians to Use Credit Card Deposits
Every casino and poker site has their own specific signup procedure, but for the most part you’ll need some combination of the following to make a deposit to a poker room with your credit card.
You’ll start by choosing the deposit method you prefer.
Once registered with the deposit method, find the ‘Cashier’ and type in the amount you wish to deposit. When your deposit has cleared and registered, the site will text, email, or call you to let you know, or you can check your balance on your own time.
More About Credit Card Deposits
Canadian poker players can choose from any credit card type they like as long as its MasterCard. At one time, VISA was in on the action, but recently pulled out supposedly because the revenue stream wasn’t as big as they’d expected. So as of this writing, MasterCard is your only option in terms of what credit card brand you use to fund your account.
Canadian Regulations about Credit Card Deposits
The truly frustrating thing about being a Canadian online poker fan vs. an American poker junkie who can’t get his fix is that the Canadian government hasn’t done anything to outright ban or limit the use of online casinos by Canadian citizens. At least Americans have (really crappy) laws to back up the whole “you can’t play poker” thing—in Canada, there’s not a word yet on the books on the topic.
In America, a bill called the UIGEA made it illegal for Americans to make bank transactions with online casinos. That law had no teeth—it isn’t possible for the US Department of Justice to look into every American bank transaction and find the ones going to casinos. What it did was convince a good number of casinos not to do business with anyone in America.
So why do Canadian players have trouble playing at some online poker sites? Many online poker rooms lump Canada in with the United States and ban all play from “North America.” Still others, most notably all Canadian sites except those licensed out of the sovereign nation of Kahnawake, restrict Canadian players because it seems the Canadian government is almost always on the verge of putting together some anti-gaming legislation that might actually make providing service to Canadians illegal.
VISA’s recent announcement that they would block all online gambling payments, even those from citizens of countries where online gaming is legal, shows that online gaming is still very much a contemporary moral issue. Until the world’s economy gets bad enough, no amount of potential tax revenue is enough to sway the minds of some big names in the financial and political sectors.
Using a credit card to fund your online poker account may not be the most popular or the easiest way of sending money to your favorite poker site, but for many customers (including many in Canada and the US) using an American Express, MasterCard, or Discover branded credit card is the only way to post funds to their favorite online poker site. Canadian poker players interested in funding online accounts should be particularly interested in the credit card deposit method, as many of them have even fewer options than American wanna-be online poker players.
Best Overall Canadian Casino with Easy Deposits : Royal Vegas
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