CentPoker.com is just one of many places on the Internet where you can play, free online poker, with other people.
What makes CentPoker unique is that we're actually legal. Currently you can't run a gambling website from inside the U.S.
The way the site works is simple ... we give you 100 chips to start out with for free (the money value of that is dependent on the community pot). The community pot is equal to the total revenue the site has made. And you play poker like you would at any other online casino.
When (cough ... if) your balance gets high enough ($10), you have the option of cashing out for real money.
Q. What is the CentPoker Community Pot?
A. All ad money from this site goes into a community bank account. Your chip percentage determines how much of this money you have access to. Your percentage is your chip amount divided by the total chips in circulation. Any time your percentage translates into you being entitled to more than $10, you are able to cash out.
Q. What do you guys do to limit the chips in circulation so our balances stay higher?
A. If a user hasn’t been signed in for over 1 week that user’s chip total doesn’t count towards the overall community pot. If they sign in again after that time they still have there chips, and there chips count towards the community pot again.
The project started in response to a recent law Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (which, shamefully, was officially termed the "Security and Accountability for Every (SAFE) Port Act of 2006" by congress ... look it up on Wikipedia). That bill made it illegal to use any online betting or gambling site that you could deposit money into, effectively shutting down all such sites which existed at that time.
For those of us who enjoyed playing poker for money, this was bad news. This project was our response to that. So there ... here's a site that is legal, and where people can play with real money. It's just like fantasy sports...if you've played that. Except this is poker, and we give you chips to start out for free, and if you get your balance high enough, you can cashout for real money.
Basically, when you first sign up for CentPoker, we give you 100 chips to play with. You can use this to play poker in the rooms. There are many different types of staked rooms in the game. If you lose all your money ... well, you start off with another 100 chips. Anything you win you keep and can use to keep playing, accumulating money as you go.
You can cash out whenever you want (as soon as you have a balance of over $10.00) ... procedurally, we literally just tell our bank, to print and mail out a paper check for your balance ... just straight up, dollar for dollar.
Again, overall, the site makes more from advertising than people cash out ... though one of our goals in creating the site was to make sure that as much of the site's advertising revenue goes back to CentPoker users as possible (after all, they're the ones who earned it by viewing ads in the first place).