Stake Poker Review 2026

Licensing & Security

Medium Rare N.V., registered in Curaçao as company 145353, runs stake.com and Stake Poker under Curaçao Gaming Authority license OGL/2024/1451/0918. The certificate linked from the footer seal names stake.com and Medium Rare, and showed the license as active on September 30, 2026.

The regulator’s public register adds a detail. Its September 21, 2026 file lists the same license with an expiry of June 9, 2026 and a status of “Assessment in progress”, which is a renewal still under review. It’s a common status on that register, and Medium Rare isn’t on the regulator’s enforcement list.

So the license is real and current by the regulator’s own certificate, with a renewal the regulator hasn’t finished reviewing. That’s weaker protection than a UK or US state license, but it’s a named company with a license you can check.

Encryption & Security

Account security is strong. Two-factor authentication covers logins, withdrawals, tips and every outgoing transaction, with codes that last 30 seconds, and you can sign in with a passkey instead of a password. Stake says player funds sit in separate customer bank accounts or crypto wallets.

There’s one gap for Poker players. Stake’s provably fair system covers its own Originals games only, and there’s no published shuffle check or RNG certificate for the Poker room. You are trusting the software.

Stake has been hacked, too. On September 4, 2023 about $41 million was stolen from its hot wallets, and the FBI attributed the theft to North Korea’s Lazarus Group two days later.

Game Integrity

Stake Poker’s security policy is strict. It bans bots, including AI bots, real-time assistance, solvers, ICM calculators, seating scripts, virtual machines and VPNs, and it bans data mining and imported hand histories, which means no HUDs.

It also bans bum hunting, hit and run and ratholing, and if you leave a table with more than you bought in for, you can’t rejoin for less within 60 minutes. Stake monitors play on its servers, including checks for masked IP addresses and blockchain analysis. Penalties run from a written warning up to confiscating funds to pay back players who were affected.

Reputation & Player Reviews

Stake’s reputation is mixed but big. On Trustpilot, stake.com scores 3.9 from 11,898 reviews, with 64% five stars and 23% one star, and Stake replies to 99% of negative reviews, in about a day and a half on average. The complaints are mostly about pending withdrawals, pending deposits and slow chat, not about Poker.

Stake is also often in the news. Stake ended its UK white-label site in March 2025, and the Guardian reported that the UK’s advertising regulator had looked into Stake-logo social posts. In February 2026 Bloomberg Businessweek questioned Drake’s win rates on the site, which Stake called “categorically incorrect”.

General Terms

You must be 18 or the legal age where you live, whichever is higher, and these are the terms that matter most.

• Prohibited jurisdictions: 45 of them, including the US, UK, Ontario, Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. They apply to anyone located there, not only residents.
• VPNs: using one to get around a block breaches the terms.
• One account: suspected duplicate accounts are closed and their funds held.
• ID checks: Stake can hold a withdrawal until you’re verified, and can run extra checks on any withdrawal.
• Complaints: through live chat or [email protected].

Don’t confuse it with stake.us. That’s a separate US sweepstakes site run by a different company, with its own Poker app, and nothing in this review applies to it.

Stake Poker has no deposit-match welcome, and its rakeback is thin at 3.5% of the rake. So why bother? Because the Poker promotions are the best part, led by a $1,000,000 Bad Beat Jackpot and some of the most transparent jackpot odds I’ve seen.

Welcome Bonus

There’s no deposit-match welcome bonus. Stake’s welcome offer is early rakeback. Normally rakeback starts once you reach Bronze VIP, but if you enter a valid referral code within 24 hours of signing up, you get it straight away.

Ignore the “200% up to $3,000” codes you’ll see on other sites. They appear on no Stake page, and Stake’s own rules put Poker on the blocked list while any deposit bonus wagering is active, so you couldn’t play Poker with one anyway.

Ongoing Bonuses

The Poker promotions are the best part of Stake Poker. The $1,000,000 Bad Beat Jackpot runs until December 31, 2026 and pays when quad deuces or better lose in Hold’em, quad fours in PLO4, quad eights in PLO5 or quad jacks in PLO6, with four or more players dealt in. The loser takes 5.6% of the pool, the winner 3.5% and everyone else at the table 2.1%, and 3% of ring-game rake funds it.

• All-in or Fold Jackpot: $500,000, paid for a straight flush using both hole cards.
• Next! Drops: a $1,000,000 fund dropping 3 to 100 big blinds into pots at the fast-fold tables from $0.01/$0.02 to $0.25/$0.50.
• Weekly Treasure Hunt: a $15,000 guaranteed Mystery Bounty tournament every Sunday, with a $20 buy-in.
• Stake Showdown: a $200,000 guaranteed flagship event, with satellite steps from $0.50.

JAQKpot! is Stake’s jackpot sit and go, a three-handed hyper at $0.50, $2, $10 or $50 with prize pools up to 20,000 times the buy-in. Stake publishes the odds. The top prize comes up once in 10 million games, while a 2x prize comes up in 4,732,445 of them.

VIP / Loyalty Program

Stake’s rakeback on Poker is 3.5% of the rake, which you can claim at any time from the VIP Rakeback tab. It starts at Bronze, which takes $10,000 in wagering, unless you used a referral code at sign-up, and Poker rake counts toward your VIP progress.

The VIP club has 15+ levels, from Bronze at $10,000 wagered to Obsidian at $1 billion, with weekly boosts, monthly bonuses by email, a Platinum daily reload and a VIP host from Platinum IV. Those bonuses are Stake-wide, not Poker-specific. That 3.5% is low next to rooms built for Poker, where BC Poker pays 10% to 50% by VIP rank.

Wagering Requirements

Rakeback and VIP bonuses have no playthrough, according to Stake’s VIP page, so they’re yours to withdraw. The one rule to know is that every deposit must be wagered once before you withdraw it, and Poker play counts toward that.

That is a simple deal. There is just not much to wager in the first place.

Cash Games

Stake Poker is a player-versus-player room, so you play other people, not the house. It spreads Texas Hold’em, Omaha in four-, five- and six-card versions, Pineapple and All-in or Fold, plus Next!, its fast-fold format. It also runs Rummy, raked at 15% on Points Rummy and 10% on Deals Rummy. You can run it up to four times, straddle and re-straddle with four or more players, rabbit hunt and play up to six tables at once.

Stakes run from $0.01/$0.02 to $2.50/$5, so there are no nosebleed games. All-in or Fold goes from $0.04/$0.08 to $4/$8, and Next! tops out at $0.25/$0.50.

Next! is six-handed and raked at 7% with a single cap from $0.14 to $3.50 depending on the stake, and tournament tickets carry expiry dates, so use them. You can only play from one tab or device at a time, which stops you spreading tables across two screens.

Traffic

Poker arrived on Stake in 2024, and traffic is decent for a room that new. Two trackers put it at roughly 250 to 300 players, one counting 257 cash players on a 30-day average. The lobby needs a login, since there’s no demo mode.

Tournaments

The published guarantees are the $200,000 Stake Showdown, fed by steps from $0.50 to $100, and the $15,000 Sunday Treasure Hunt. Formats include sit and gos, mystery bounties, knockouts, satellites and multi-flight events, with JAQKpot! for jackpot sit and gos.

The full schedule lives inside the logged-in lobby. Tournaments break for about five minutes every hour, and if a tournament is canceled before the money, the remaining players get their entry back and the pool is split half equally and half by chips.

Rake & Fees

Rake is where Stake Poker costs you, and this is its rake structure. Every cash stake is raked at 7%, and Hold’em is capped on this scale.

• $0.01/$0.02: $0.16 heads-up, $0.26 with three or four players, $0.32 with five or more.
• $0.25/$0.50: $2.50, $4 and $5.
• $0.50/$1: $4, $6.40 and $8.
• $1/$2: $5, $7 and $9.
• $2.50/$5: $5, $8 and $10.

Omaha is cheaper, capped at $6 with five or more players at $0.50/$1. Still, that $8 Hold’em cap is well above CoinPoker’s $5, WPT Global’s $4 and BC Poker’s $3 at the same stakes. Stake doesn’t publish a tournament fee percentage, so check the fee in the lobby before you register.

All-in or Fold charges a flat rake plus an equal jackpot fee, from $0.01 plus $0.01 at the smallest stakes to $0.60 plus $0.60 at $4/$8.

Casino & Sports

Stake Poker is part of a full casino and sportsbook, so Slots, Live Casino games, Stake Originals and sports betting are a click away on the same balance.

That’s handy if you like a mix. It’s also why Poker counts toward the same VIP progress as everything else.

Deposits

Stake takes over 20 cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, USDT, USDC, Dogecoin, XRP, Tron, BNB and Solana, with USDT on ERC20, BEP20, Polygon, TRC20 and Solana. There’s no deposit maximum, and anything under $0.01 simply isn’t credited automatically.

You can buy crypto in the wallet through MoonPay or Swapped, and Visa and Mastercard work in selected local currencies, such as C$5 to C$3,000 in Canada. Card deposits usually land almost at once but can take one to three business days, and you must verify your email before your first deposit.

Check the network before you send USDT. Stake doesn’t support Arbitrum, Optimism or Base, so a deposit on one of those networks won’t arrive in the usual way. Local currencies such as Canadian dollars, Vietnamese dong and Indian rupees can fund your Poker play too.

Withdrawals

Stake doesn’t set a standard withdrawal time, and it says larger withdrawals may need manual processing, and it can ask for ID before any payout. The most common Trustpilot complaint is about pending withdrawals, so allow some slack.

Withdrawal Limits

• Bitcoin: minimum 0.00002504 BTC, fee 0.00001571 BTC.
• USDT and USDC: minimum 2.5, fee 1.
• Solana: minimum 0.0105 SOL, fee 0.000005 SOL.
• Maximum: none.

Those minimums are tiny, so small wins are easy to cash out, which is not true everywhere. Stake also has a Vault where you can lock away funds you don’t want to play with.

Stakes in Dollars

The tables show amounts in dollars, but Stake’s Card Room Rules say those figures are USD-equivalent indications only and that it doesn’t convert currency. You play from the wallet balance you’ve selected, so a Bitcoin balance rises and falls with the Bitcoin price while you sit.

Website Design and UI

Stake Poker runs in the browser inside stake.com, on desktop and mobile. There’s no Windows or Mac download, and you add tables with the plus icon, up to six at once from one tab or device.

The site is fast and polished, like the rest of Stake. The downside is that Poker is one tile in a huge casino, so it’s easy to drift into Slots between hands.

Mobile App

Stake’s main app is a web app. In Safari you tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. There’s also a native iOS app, Stake Poker – Real Money, released in June 2025 and rated 4.9 from 8 ratings in the Canadian App Store, but it isn’t available in the US or UK stores.

The “Stake US – Poker” app is a different product for the sweepstakes site.

Customer Service

Support is 24/7 live chat plus email at [email protected], and the help center has a Poker collection covering formats, tournaments and table features, plus articles on rakeback and the Poker exclusion. Stake’s VIP page promises real support from real people, and its 99% reply rate on Trustpilot backs that up.

Some Trustpilot reviewers say live chat was slow to reply, but it’s there around the clock.

Responsible Gambling

Stake’s Stake Smart tools are excellent. You can set deposit, loss and wager limits by day, week or month, take a break of one day to a month, or self-exclude for at least six months, and raising a limit takes 24 hours.

Poker gets its own Poker-only exclusion, from one day to indefinitely, which can’t be reversed once it’s set. Stake links to Gamblers Anonymous, Gambling Therapy and blocking tools such as BetBlocker, and our Responsible Gambling guide lists help in your country.