Everything on Basepoker

Poker is what Basepoker is built around and what we go there for. The lobby has four kinds of game and a club system, and the money is the same USDT balance for all of them.

Cash games: Hold'em from a cent

The Hold'em tables run from $0.01/$0.02, where a full buy-in is $2, to $200/$500, where it is $50,000. Each stake has a name, Iron at the bottom and Pro at the top, and the buy-in is 25 to 100 big blinds. When we looked at 07:00 Berlin time, the busiest table was $0.05/$0.10 with 18 players, the three stakes around it had 12 each, and nothing above $5/$10 had a player seated. The games are at the small stakes, which suits a bankroll that starts with a few dollars.

Hold'em cash tables. There are also two play-money tables.

Table	Blinds	Buy-in	Playing when we looked
Iron	$0.01 / $0.02	$0.50 to $2	12
Steel	$0.02 / $0.05	$1 to $5	9
Copper	$0.05 / $0.10	$2 to $10	18
Bronze	$0.10 / $0.25	$5 to $25	12
Nickel	$0.25 / $0.50	$10 to $50	12
Silver	$0.50 / $1	$20 to $100	8
Gold	$1 / $2	$40 to $200	10
Platinum	$2 / $5	$100 to $500	4
Diamond	$5 / $10	$200 to $1,000	4
Ruby to Pro	$10 / $20 up to $200 / $500	$400 up to $50,000	0

Omaha runs in three sizes: PLO with four cards, PLO5 with five and PLO6 with six, each from $0.01/$0.02 up to $5/$10. The players were at the two smallest stakes, nine and ten at a table at $0.02/$0.05, three to five everywhere else. If you have only played Hold'em, our Omaha page says what changes.

Tournaments: small buy-ins and a ladder of freerolls

The tournament lobby is a daily schedule of small events rather than big guarantees. On the day we looked it listed the Daily Standard at $20 with $2,000 guaranteed (91 entries and a $2,038 prize pool at the time) and at $10 with $1,000, the Daily Turbo at $2.50 and $5, the Daily Hyper at $1 and $2, the Special Hyper at $7 with $700 guaranteed, the Special Standard at $1 with $100, and the Daily Deep Stacks at $0.50.

The freerolls form a ladder. The Weekly Freeroll has $2,000 guaranteed and is entered with a ticket. The tickets come from the Daily Freeroll and from the 10BB Freerolls that run through the day, and a Boost Freeroll pays a few dollars straight out. The Freeroll Step and the Ultra Freeroll Step feed the $500 Daily Main Event, and a $0.25 satellite goes there too. A patient player can reach the $500 event without a deposit. For tournaments with large guarantees we go to WePlay, which has $76,325 of them a week; our WePlay review has that schedule.

The casino is Basepoker's own. The thirteen games are called Basepoker Originals, they are built in-house rather than licensed from a games studio, and they open in the same browser window as the poker. Four things are the same in every one of them: bets are in USDT from your poker balance, a bets feed under the game shows every settled bet on the site (My Bets, All Bets and High Rollers), 15% of the house's take comes back to you as rakeback, and every result is provably fair.

Provably fair means you can check the result yourself. Each game has a Fairness button. The operator uses a shared daily seed that rotates at midnight UTC and is revealed 24 hours later, you have your own player seed that you can change at any time, and the result is the hash of the two together. Once the day's seed is published, every bet from that day can be recomputed and checked against what you were paid.

Basepoker prints a return figure on the slots but not on the Originals. For Dice and Limbo the numbers on the screen give it away, 1%, which is low for a casino game. For the rest, the edge sits in the gap between the true odds and what the game pays, and the only way to know it is to read the multipliers before you bet. Our Casino Game Helper explains the rules and the usual house edge of twelve of these games, with a free practice table for each.

The slots are made by Base Studios and there are four of them. Unlike the Originals, each one prints its return to player, its biggest win and its bet range on the rules screen behind the small i button, and each one has a Fun mode where you play with no money. Bets run from $0.10 to $1 on all four, so the biggest possible payout is $10,000.

A return of 96.5% means that of every $100 put through the slot, $3.50 stays with the house over a long run of spins. That is in line with most online slots and far more than the 1% of Dice. The buy features cost exactly what they say, 100 times the bet for a round of free spins, and return the same percentage as a normal spin, so they change how the money moves, not how much of it comes back.

Everything above feeds the same reward system, which is the part of Basepoker that pays whether you win or lose.

• Rakeback: 32% of the rake you pay at poker and 15% of the house's take on casino bets, credited on every settled hand and bet and claimed whenever you like. How rakeback works.
• Ranks: play earns XP, and 10,000 XP takes an Unranked account to Iron 1. The ranks run Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Emerald and Diamond and never go down. A daily bonus unlocks at Iron 1, a weekly bonus at Bronze 1, a monthly bonus at Silver 1 and a rank-up bonus from Gold 1. Basepoker puts the combined value at up to 80% of rake at the top rank.
• Races: every poker hand and casino bet earns race points, and the top 200 of the day share $1,000, the top 500 of the week $10,000 and the top 1,000 of the month $50,000. The races, in full.
• The welcome bonus: 100% of a first deposit of $20 or more, up to $2,000, unlocked as you play over 60 days. It locks withdrawals while any of it is still locked, so read our bonus page before you switch it on.

We go to Basepoker for the cash games at the small stakes, where the players are, for Spin & Cash when there is half an hour, for All In or Fold as practice, and for our own club. Rakeback and the races are the reason to put the volume there rather than somewhere that pays nothing back.

The casino and the slots are there, and we opened every one of them in Fun mode to write this page. Our advice is the plain one: a casino game is entertainment with a price on it. Dice and Limbo price it at 1% of turnover, the slots at 3.5%, and no rakeback, race prize or rank bonus turns that into a profit. Decide the amount before you start, treat it as spent, and keep it apart from the poker bankroll. Poker is the game where skill moves the result; the others are games where it does not.