Boyle Poker

Boyle Poker Review

Boylesports is one of the most iconic brands in the gambling industry. They are very much old school in their approach in that, they are still an independent company and run over 300 high streets shops around the UK.

Whilst the brand’s history is strongly linked with sports betting, their poker room came after the initial success of their online platform back in 2004. Since then, it’s seen many changes, but it’s now widely regarded as one of the bigger online poker sites in the sector.

Throughout this review, we are going to take a look at how well the poker room stacks up in the modern world of online poker. To do this we will look at their welcome package, software, games, networks and anything else that makes it stand out from the crowd.

Welcome Pack – €1,000 Bonus + Extras

When you create a new account at Boyle Poker, you’re going to be able to claim a rather lucrative welcome offer. In fact, given that there are multiple offers to grab here, it’s more of a welcome pack, than a singular offer.

The main part of the pack is the matched bonus. For this, you’re going to be able to get a 100% match on your first deposit that’s worth up to €1,000. To trigger this offer you need to deposit €10 or more and there is no bonus code needed.

Wagering requirements for welcome bonus means that for every 100 iPoints you earn, you will redeem €1 of your bonus. You’ve got 7 days to clear the bonus and any amount left after this period will be removed from your account.

On top of this, you will be given €20 after 7 days of being online with Boyle. Throughout the 7 days, you will be given missions to complete and for each mission completed, you get a bonus.

Missions for this will range anywhere from claiming tournament tickets, playing a certain number of hands, spins at the casinos, getting dealt certain card values and more. The website will outline what you need to do, and it will automatically be ticked off once it’s complete.

Software and Usability

Boyle Poker runs on the iPoker network, which is deemed to be one of the better online poker networks right now. They’ve moved around quite a bit since they’ve been live, but it does look like they seem settled here.

If you’re accessing the poker room on a Windows computer, then you’ll be able to download the software directly from the site. If you’re on a Mac, then you’re going to have to make do with instant play version, which is actually quite good.

The lobby has a bit of a retro feel to it, however, it’s one that functions really well. There aren’t too many bells or whistles, just a simple menu where you can easily navigate to your game of choice. The top section of the lobby will allow you to find the game type, then once in, you can use the filters to narrow this down a little.

The game tables are super clean and they include a good range of features to allow you to set them up as you need. Things like deck colour, card designs, avatars, table colours, sounds and dealer animations can all be adjusted.

If you’re someone who is going to multi-table, then you’ll be pleased to hear that you can get up 15 tables running at any one time. You have a choice of how they work, with a tiled or cascaded view available. On bigger screens tiled works really well and if you couple that with a few design tweaks, you can totally declutter the tables making them extremely manageable.

Game Types and Standards

Cash games make up the bulk of the games on Boyle Poker. They are extremely active and in peak times you’re looking at over 7,000 players online, which is quite impressive.

Games range in stakes from as little as 1p/2p up to €50/€100. There are times where games can be even bigger than this, but we assume that these are private games given that you’re not able to sit at those tables.

The downside to the cash game section comes directly from the multi-tabling feature that we spoke about earlier. Players have the ability to play up to 15 tables at once, which means it’s a haven for grinders at the lower limits. Games in off-peak times can be pretty terrible and it’s not uncommon to load up 3 or 4 tables and have 3 or 4 of the same players in each of those games.

Most of the games are Texas Hold’em or games of that ilk. You can play full ring, 6 max, bonus tables and speed tables as well. Twister is one of the latest games, which is essentially speed poker. This is a really good way to avoid the grinders at peak times.

Sit and Go games run around the clock, although traffic can be slow for these games. Buy-ins range from as little at £0.10 per game up to £50. Again, higher games can be accessed here as well, but they take ages to fill, even at peak times.

Tournaments

Tournaments at Boyle are realty good. The iPoker network has a strong range which you’re able to access, but there are plenty of exclusive games on there that only Boyle Poker players can enter.

These games offer great value because they don’t get the number of players that the main tournaments do. Twister Poker is one of the best and this is where the prize pool is determined just before the tournament starts. They are winner takes all jackpots and are usually 1,000x the buy-in, meaning you can get in for just €1 with €1,000 up top.

Other additions to the Boyle exclusive tournament sector is Wild Twister (all in every hand), Age of Gods and Progressive KO. The latter is great fun with bounties on peoples head, meaning that games can get incredibly aggressive.

Rake

Rake is a little higher than we would like to see, to be honest. Cash games will be charged 6.67% per hand for games up to NL20. From here they will be charged at a more user-friendly 5% for the remainder of the games.

Numbers are high, but they do have caps on the amount they take, starting with €0.5 for lower stakes games and then maxing out at €4 per pot for the higher stakes’ offerings.

Tournaments are usually around the 10% mark, which is about where we would expect. Boyle Poker does run a few games per month where they charge less rake, but they are pretty rare.

VIP Club

The VIP Club is one of the most lucrative sections of the poker room. Here you can work through four levels (Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum) by earning points as you play.

The more points you earn, the higher the ranking. The higher the ranking, the more you can claim in rakeback. Rankings will reset for each month, so the quicker you get to the next tier, the more rakeback you can claim.

 Payment Methods

You get a great range of banking options to choose from at Boylesports. Deposits and withdrawals will start as low as €10 per transaction. Here is a full list of the payment methods you can access for the poker room.

• Cash at betting shops
• Debit card
• Bank Transfer
• Skrill
• Neteller
• PayPal
• Paysafecard
• EU Teller
• InstantBank
• SoFort
• Boku
• Google Pay
• Apple Pay

Verdict

It’s easy to see why Boyle Poker has been as popular as it has over the last decade or so. Linking up with the iPoker network, they offer a product that is tough to fault.

They’re able to include a great range of games to choose from, plenty of tournaments and a brilliant welcome package. The only niggle is that the standard of games out of peak times can be quite tough, with many regulars on the network.

Aside from that, we’d have little hesitation in adding our recommendation to the Boyle Poker room.

100% upto €1000 + 30% Rakeback

Play now Play now