Prepaid Visa and MasterCards for Online Poker

While it is virtually impossible for US players to use major credit cards to make deposits to their bankrolls at online poker sites, and other forms of cash transfer can take up to 10 days to go through, perhaps the simplest and fastest way to deposit funds into your online poker site of your choice is via a prepaid VISA. Most any reputable poker site accepts major credit cards, prepaid cards included, and it’s instant.These cards can be purchased at gas stations, grocery stores, super stores like Super Wal-Mart, etc. There is at times a ±$1 charge for the card, but if you just refill the same card, you won’t incur this charge every time. You can put any amount of money on the card, at the place of purchase, and then go home and empty the card into the cashier.

Prepaid VISA cards pretty much eliminate all deposit problems and most of the popular poker sites accept them. For example, all of the following sites accept prepaid VISA cards:

Use prepaid cards at 

Rooms Accepting PrePaid Cards

• Full Tilt Poker
• Poker Stars
• Bodog
• Doyle’s Room
• Ultimate Bet

If you happen to run into a roadblock with this method (like for instance, if you purchase a Green Dot prepaid VISA, you will be declined at Poker Stars. However, you can use the card to immediately deposit funds into an ePassporte account, which then will immediately transfer into Poker Stars. It is a lot quicker than waiting out the bank transfer into ePassporte, which could take days or weeks.

The catch is, in order to receive cash out deposits back onto your prepaid VISA card, it must be “CFT eligible” or “Credit Funds Transfer eligible.” If the card you are using is not, and this is usually the case, you will have to find another means of cashing out, which is often more difficult than depositing (which isn’t surprising!).

Using prepaid VISA cards as a method of deposit into your online poker site account is ideal if you are just a recreational player and just want to play with any money you make, not if you are trying to make a career out of online poker.

If you are looking for another way to transfer funds, there are instant ways and all sites are different, so just do some research. Some sites list the transaction time next to their deposit options. Others don’t, but if you can find one option that you are comfortable with, you can use sites that offer that option. For US players, BetUs has instant deposit options, but the cash out process is a bit more and charges a $50 fee, which makes cashing out anything but a large amount not even worth it.