Ignition poker review

The site is the largest in the US in terms of overall traffic. Ignition is crypto-friendly and also features a fully loaded casino on its platform. The selection of poker games and tournaments is well-curated, with a plethora of game variations. The payment speed has always been fantastic, but with Bitcoin, it now takes less than four hours to receive a withdrawal. To top it off, Ignition is one of the only US-facing real money poker sites to offer mobile gameplay (although no app yet). Ignition should be a name instantly recognizable to American online players. The site launched in 2016 and, since its inception, has been one of the best options for American players.

As one of the marquee poker brands in America, and with an already established player base (courtesy of Bovada), it could be easy for Ignition to sit back, let standards slip, and still laugh all the way to the bank. So I decided to see for myself if their rep was legit. I created my own account, tossed on a few hundred bucks, and started playing. I tested every game type they had going to just make sure I could get a complete overview of what their games are like to play.

As well as checking out the quality of the games, I also looked at other areas that are important to poker players. Things like welcome bonuses, tournament guarantees, customer support, and UI are considered. Once I gathered all the information I could from the site, I brought it together and did this review. This is a comprehensive look at Ignition Poker from top to bottom, so if you’re in the market for a new poker site, read on.

PROS AND CONS

While there are a lot of reasons why players choose to play on Ignition, there has yet to be a poker site that is without sin. So, in the interest of transparency, I’ve collected a list of pros and cons I found while playing on the site for you to consider before deciding whether or not to create an account with Ignition Poker.

BONUS AND PROMOTIONS

One of the ways a poker site will convince players to choose them over their competitors is by offering generous welcome offers and promotions that get the customers through the door and get them to stick around once they start playing. An online poker site lives and dies on its customer base so these companies are very motivated to be as generous as possible – and Ignition Poker is no exception.

POKER GAME SELECTION

Due to the large amount of traffic it gets, Ignition Poker is one of the best American sites for game selection, with a wide range of cash games, tournaments, and sit & gos to play. The site offers three poker variants for its players – Texas Hold’em, Omaha, and Omaha Hi-Lo.

This may not seem like a lot of choices compared to other sites, but the quality of their games more than makes up for it, having some of the softest games in all of online poker. This focus on three games also allows Ignition to perfect its software, giving a fast, smooth interface for its users. Ignition is one of the very few sites that offer fully anonymous tables, which stops professional players from tracking and exploiting the weaker plays, which in turn is what makes the games so good at Ignition.

CASH GAMES

While there are three different game variants on offer, Ignition offers different betting limits within these games for its cash games. They offer two types of Hold’em – No Limit and Limit, Pot Limit Omaha Hi-Lo, and Pot Limit Omaha. There are games for all bankrolls as the games run from as low as $0.02/$0.05 up to $10/$20 for big-bet games like No Limit Hold’em and PLO.

There is an even larger range for the Limit games as they start as low as $0.05/$0.10 but go all the way up to $30/$60. If you prefer to play shorthanded, Ignition Poker offers a lot of 6max tables for its cash games as well as the classic 9-handed tables. I found there was much more traffic at the 6max tables, as shorter-handed games have become more popular in recent years.

In an effort to stop “bum hunting”, Ignition Poker has a “quick seat” feature for its cash games, where instead of browsing a lobby and looking at the table before you decide to join, you input the parameters of the game you’d like to play and Ignition will take you directly to a table that matches your request. You can choose your stake level, your buy-in, and your table size with this quick seat function and save yourself the trouble of trawling through a poker lobby, trying to join the same table as 10 other people.

ZONE POKER

Ignition likes to keep up with the latest poker trends, so like all the biggest sites out there right now, it has its own version of fast-fold poker called “Zone”. For those who are unaware, when you join a Zone poker table, you are actually put into a pool of players who all want to play the same game. 6-handed tables are then created with a random group of players to play a hand.

However, when you fold a hand or when the hand is over, you’re taken from that table and immediately seated at another table where you’re dealt a new hand. It’s a way of maximizing the number of hands you play per hour by cutting out the waiting around once your participation in the hand is complete. You can over triple the number of hands you play per hour by playing Zone Poker, and it always has plenty of players in its micro-mid stakes player pools.

At Ignition, Zone Poker stakes start at $0.02/$0.05 and go as high as $2.50/$5. The traffic for each stake level will vary depending on the time of day you play, but I found during my time at the site that $0.10/$25, $0.25/$0.50, and $1/$2 were the games with the most traffic over the course of the day.

SIT AND GOS

Ignition offers its sit-and-go players a variety of different game types to choose from, with Regular, Turbo, 6-man, 18-man, Heads Up, Double Up, and Triple Up formats available. Don’t worry if you don’t have a massive bankroll; there are SNGs that run from as little as $1 all the way up to $200 for the high rollers. There are options for both No Limit Hold’em and Pot Limit Omaha players, though the majority of the games that run are the No Limit Hold’em SNGs.

As well as the conventional sit and gos that you might be used to, Ignition Poker has a special kind of SNG called a Jackpot SNG. These games start once three players have registered to one, and instead of a fixed prize pool, the prize pool is selected at random before the game starts. In fact, you can watch the prize multiplier spin around like a slot machine – hence the name Jackpot SNG. The multiplier ranges from as low as 2x your money all the way up to 1200x! There are jackpot sit & gos for players of all bankroll levels, and the current offerings I found at Igntion are $0.50, $2, $7, $20, $60, and $100.

POKER TOURNAMENTS

One of the great things about Ignition Poker is the range of tournament series that they host over the course of the year. As well as a fantastic weekly poker schedule, they have a new tournament series taking place seemingly every month with millions of dollars in guarantees! Even as someone who’s a self-professed cash game addict, the schedule at Ignition has convinced me to dip my toe in the tournament waters. After all, $2 million in guarantees every week is not to be sniffed at!

Sunday is always the biggest day for any tournament player, and Sundays on Ignition are packed with great value tournaments, including a $162 buy-in, $150,000 guaranteed tournament that runs every Sunday. Even the weekdays at Igntion are full of great tournaments, so anyone who’s on the MTT grind should seriously consider adding Ignition tournaments to their schedule – even I’ll be playing some of their biggest tournaments after I’ve finished this review!

WHAT’S IT LIKE TO PLAY?

One of the most important aspects of any poker site is what it’s like to play. After all, many of us put in sessions that last hours – we want to play somewhere that’s nice to look at and easy to use. In that department, Ignition Poker is a mixed bag.

The table looks great – everything is super clear and easy to read, the buttons are responsive, and there was little to no lag when playing, even when playing multiple tables. You have a range of customizable options that allow you to change the card design, table color, and card color, so you can pick the style that you think looks best.

While there are plenty of options that allow you to customize the appearance of the table, unfortunately, there aren’t as many options when it comes to gameplay. The preset buttons for preflop and postflop betting are fixed, which means you can’t tailor them to match your most common bet size like you can on other sites. This is particularly annoying if you like better ⅓ pot or 140% pot, as it means you actually have to do the math to enter the bet – this isn’t live poker; we shouldn’t have to do that!

Another issue is that there is no option for auto-top-ups when playing cash games, so if you want to play with 100bb, you have to manually top up every single time. As you can imagine, this gets repetitive very quickly, and if you’re trying to multi-table, it can distract you from the actual game.

WEB VERSION VS POKER CLIENT

One of the selling points of Ignition Poker is that you don’t need to download the poker client to play. You can log into your Igintion account from your web browser and play up to four tables at once, with full access to the range of cash games, tournaments, and sit & gos that you get on the poker client.

The web lobby itself is fairly basic – it doesn’t really grab your attention and could definitely benefit from having a dark mode option. However, that being said, everything is very easy to find, and it didn’t take me long to load up the game I wanted and start playing. The four table icons at the top were particularly helpful, as they alerted me when it was my turn to act if I ever left the table to look at opening another game or changing the settings.

MULTI-TABLE

One thing that I wasn’t as much of a fan of is how the web browser handles multitabling. You’d expect that with the four table icons at the top, you’d have to click between them to change tables. However, Ignition automatically loads each new table next to the one you currently have, which can somewhat distort the size of the tables and make it harder to see what’s going on. Even on my decently sized monitor, when I opened up a third table, it compressed everything down to a point that became difficult to see. Having the option of each table filling the screen and switching between them would certainly be welcomed!

THE POKER CLIENT

The poker client, on the other hand, looks much nicer than the web lobby. It benefits from using a darker theme, and it certainly makes the most of its space. However, the poker client comes with issues of its own.

For reasons unknown to us, there is no way to make the poker lobby go full screen – which isn’t ideal if your eyesight isn’t as good as it once was. Plus, the game selection tabs aren’t laid out in what you’d call an intuitive manner. Having all gaming options on top of one other, then the filters on the right-hand side and the game list underneath seems a little strange. In my opinion, it would look much nicer to have individual tabs that worked their way down the page.

However, all of these issues are essentially nitpicks, as I never found it hard to find the games I wanted once I got used to the layout of the client.

When it came to playing games on the poker client, again, the overall experience was good, but there were a few quality-of-life issues that hopefully will get picked up by the team. The layout of the tables looked great, everything was clearly laid out, and all the buttons were fast and responsive.

However, the poker client still suffers from the issues of the web browser in that you cannot adjust the betting buttons, and you cannot enable auto-top-up. There are also some issues around multi-tabling, as tiling more than two tables would cause them to overlap in the middle of your screen rather than arrange evenly in a tile pattern. Plus, there is no way to make the software remember your table set-up, which means you have to arrange them each time you start a new session.

Another slight annoyance is the process of registering for a tournament. There is no way to automatically register from the lobby screen; you have to load up the individual lobby for the tournament and click the small “Register” button at the bottom of the box. Again, it’s a minor nitpick, but they may start to annoy you during a particularly long MTT session.

Truth be told, these are all superficial issues that won’t be “make or break” for anyone except the most hardcore grinders. If you just like playing for fun or play semi-seriously, you likely won’t notice these minor issues at all!

FEATURES OF THE SITE

So, what makes Ignition such a cool site to play on? Well, in my opinion, there are many features that set it apart from the competition and make it well worth checking out. Let’s take a closer look at what those features are:

WHAT IT’S MISSING

While there are certainly some great features available at Ignition, the site isn’t perfect, and I believe there are several things that could be done better in the future.

DEPOSIT AND WITHDRAWAL OPTIONS

Ignition is one of many online poker sites that’s bringing depositing and withdrawing into the modern era by having a range of cryptocurrency options available to its players. There are five different cryptocurrencies to choose from at the moment: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Bitcoin SV, with the potential for more to be added in the future. For those who are more conservatively minded and haven’t bought into the idea of cryptocurrencies yet, there is a range of conventional payment methods, including bank transfers, credit/debit cards, and MatchPay.

When I deposited to Ignition, my funds were available almost instantly, so there’s no waiting around before you get to play. Unfortunately, the story isn’t the same when it comes time to withdraw, as the time it took a while to receive my money varied greatly depending on your withdrawal method. Sometimes it was as fast as a couple of hours, and other times it took over two weeks to get my money! Below is a breakdown of the min and max deposits for each available deposit method:

DEPOSITS

When depositing, it’s important to check out if any fees will be applied to your deposit to see which method is the most cost-effective for you. Ignition Poker does not apply any fees to its cryptocurrency transactions, though the same cannot be said for credit card deposits, as Ignition takes a fee of at least 15.9%, depending on the card provider. There are also fees that can be imposed by your bank when depositing to Ignition, such as International Service Fees and Currency Conversion Fees – so if you’re looking for a guaranteed fee-free way to deposit, I’d highly recommend using cryptocurrency.

WITHDRAWALS

As well as deposit fees, you may incur withdrawal fees when taking your money off of Ignition Poker. Cryptocurrency transactions remain free of charge to use for withdrawals and deposits, and there is no charge for voucher withdrawals. For all other withdrawal methods, Ignition will cover your first withdrawal fee every 90 days, though every additional withdrawal made within that 90-day period will incur a $100 processing fee.

MOBILE GAMING

Although Ignition Poker does not have a dedicated mobile app, the poker platform has been through rounds of development to deliver a first-class mobile site. You can access all the poker gaming directly through your iOS or Android browser, so there’s no need for software downloads. In my opinion, the mobile site upholds a high standard of gaming, similar to the desktop client. It also provides access to all the games and tournaments without compromise, which isn’t always the case for a mobile site. In addition, you can enter various cash games, sit & goes and other top tournaments directly from your phone or tablet.

The mobile site also allows you to access all the gaming content across the platform, including the fully-loaded online casino and e-sports. The mobile site has been constructed for ease of use; I enjoyed having a place that was easy to navigate and an interface that left no guesswork. It’s worth noting that you should be connected to high-quality wi-fi to get the best performance from the mobile poker platform.

CUSTOMER SERVICE OPTIONS

You don’t get to be one of the biggest sites in the US market by having terrible customer service, and Ignition Poker is no exception to that. Their support team has always been extremely helpful when dealing with any game/account queries I have had, and they always responded within a reasonable time frame. There are two options for contacting support; you can email them by filling out a form on their support website, or you can chat with a live support representative 24/7. While the wait times to speak to one of these customer service reps aren’t very long, I would advise emailing the support team if your query isn’t urgent. There is also an extensive FAQ section that should be able to answer the majority of your queries.

Email: Complete the online form found on Ignition Poker’s support page.

Live Chat: Chat 24/7 with a customer service rep by using the Live Chat open on the Ignition support page.

WHAT MAKES THIS POKER SITE UNIQUE?

In a market as competitive as the online poker industry, a poker site has to do a lot to stand out from its competitors. Ignition Poker is a site that has been able to achieve this due to the variety of features it’s implemented to protect the quality of its games – with the stand-out feature being its anonymous tables. The prevention of bum hunting and data mining that was achieved by the implementation of anonymous tables has been a game-changer for Ignition Poker, and it’s hard to see why other sites aren’t following suit.

It’s measures such as this that create such a rec-friendly environment at Ignition Poker, which makes it a great place to play if you’re looking for soft games. It also brings poker back to its roots as it’s no longer a case of collecting a load of data on your competitors and exploiting them based on that information; you need to figure things out for yourself without any third-party tools to help you. It’s this prevention of third-party software that keeps the professionals from cleaning out the site, despite the number of recreational players that play on it. You need to work a bit harder for it, but there is plenty of money to be won on Ignition.

Another way Ignition Poker stands out from its contemporaries is its modern attitude towards running a poker site. The push towards cryptocurrencies as a deposit/withdrawal method, the mobile-optimized website, and the web-based customer service options all indicate a company that has its eyes firmly on the future and isn’t going to get left behind by its competitors any time soon.

MY FINAL THOUGHTS

We’ve reached the end of our Ignition Poker Review, and there was a lot to cover! There are so many wonderful features this site has to offer that it’s hard to mention them all in one review. From its anonymous tables and quick seat feature that gear the site towards recreational players to its fantastic-looking software that works just as well on a mobile device as it does on a desktop – it’s clear to see why Ignition Poker is so popular amongst its players.

Not only that, it has a range of cash games and tournaments to play with a variety of deposit and withdrawal options that make it easy to get your money on and off the site.

There are always new and exciting bonuses on offer to new and continuing players and helpful customer support that’s always around if you need it.

With all of that combined, Ignition Poker definitely sits near the top of our list of recommendations.

Is Ignition Poker not for you? Check out how other poker sites compare: