Play nowPlay now

BONUS

Various Promotions

LAST UPDATED

20/12/2024

2.5 / 5

BTCGOSU RATING

3.0 / 5

USER RATING (1)

SUMMARY

SwC Poker is an old and established Bitcoin Poker site featuring a nice loyalty/rakeback program for active players.

INFO

• Established 2011
• License(s) -
• Deposit Options BTC, BCH
• Minimum Deposit No Min Deposit
• Minimum Withdrawal 500 Chips
• Customer Support E-Mail, Bitcointalk
• Languages English, Spanish, German, Czech, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Malay, Arabic, Italian
• Restrictions None
• KYC No

POSITIVES

• Available anywhere in the world
• Good reputation
• Multiple promotions
• Mobile-friendly

NEGATIVES

• Outdated design
• Slow customer support

GALLERY

SwC Poker Review

The first version of SwC Poker, which stands for, Seals with Clubs, launched in August of 2011, four months after the infamous Black Friday happened, and all the top poker sites had to shut down. Thus, it opened its virtual doors as a new alternative. SwC Poker launched its third iteration in November of 2018, and it’s the site you see today. It has dedicated software for PC, Mac, and Android devices, has multiple promotions running, a loyalty scheme, and a loyal user base. Sadly, it only accepts Bitcoin.

First Impressions

SwC aims to touch on 80s nostalgia, as it features a retro, pixelated design reminiscent of old arcade games. While stylish, all those pixels grow tiresome fast, and they make looking at the website a chore. Once you get into the game lobby, the design changes, but it’s still outdated, as the interface looks like something from twelve to thirteen years ago.

To register, you’ll have to click the yellow Play Now button, which will take you to the game lobby. There, a pop-up will appear, and you’ll have to select the third option down – sign up. After this step, the site will ask you to enter a username, password, email, and referral code if you have one. That’s it.

Once you complete the sign-up process, you can browse through all the tables and tournaments, click on your username at the top of the page and set up 2FA, or hit the cashier button in the top right to deposit funds.

Games offered by SwC Poker

As the name suggests, this is a poker site, one that’s dedicated and focuses mainly on the Hold’em NL variation. If you look through the cash tab and browse through all of the poker variations, you should see about twenty. These include Pineapple Hold’em, Short Deck Hold’em, Omaha, 5 Card Omaha, Stud, Razz, 2-7 Triple Draw, Badugi, Badacey, Chinese, and more. However, players seem to neglect many of these, as some are rarely ever played here.

At the time of writing, there were 439 tournaments on SwC Poker, 130 tables, and 143 active players. In the main lobby, you have a menu that lets you go through the Cash Games, the Sit&Go, and other tournaments. You can further filter these by their game type and their buy-in limit.

The design of the poker games is pretty rudimentary. You get access to a straightforward interface, a table with player avatars and usernames, and some simple card animations. Nothing too fancy. It’s basic, but it works.

What’s notable: SwC Poker has supported the Bitcointalk community in a great way by hosting a Bitcointalk Poker Championship Series where they don’t charge rake, sponsor a guaranteed prize of 0.05 BTC for the Grand Final, a guaranteed 0.01 BTC for the Small Final as well as a free ticket for SwC Poker’s BIG BTC.

In addition to that, SwC Poker has recently hosted a series of events such as the Bitcoin Poker Series with great prizes.

Play at SwC PokerPlay at SwC Poker

Easy Access

Is there a SwC Poker mobile app? Yes. There’s a SwC Poker Android app, and you can download dedicated software for Mac and Windows devices as well, or choose to play via HTML5. We accessed the site through an Android phone, via Chrome, and selected the HTML5 option.

We noticed that the site took a little longer to load on a mobile device, but that the SwC Poker mobile version had a different and better interface than what you get when you resize your desktop browser. The site is responsive, on a desktop machine. However, the organizational pattern is not the same as compared to what you get on a mobile device. We prefer the mobile version, as it’s easier to navigate. The poker table is vertical, and the whole UX design seems more intuitive. The navigation bar at the bottom of the screen is quite useful.

A few drawbacks include that load times seem slower than what you get when you access the site through a desktop computer and that some of the animations seem choppy.

Deposits & Withdrawals

SwC Poker is a Bitcoin casino, or should we say a Bitcoin gambling site, as it features no casino games, only poker. This means, it only accepts Bitcoins and no other cryptocurrencies. There are no minimum deposits here. Everything you try to put in your account should appear in it, down to the smallest Bitcoin unit, or one satoshi expressed as 0.00000001 BTC, or 0.01 SwC Poker chips. Note that one chip on SwC Poker is worth 0.000001 BTC. One million chips are equal to one Bitcoin.

The site features no fees, but players should expect the usual network one. Deposits get credited after one confirmation on the blockchain, and the processing time varies, usually between ten and thirty minutes. The minimum withdrawal is 500 chips, and it takes, on average, about three to six hours for withdrawals to go through. On some rare occasions, it may take up to even twelve hours before you receive your funds.

SwC Poker will not ask you for any personal identification before you make a withdrawal. All transactions go through quickly and anonymously without any documentation. You only need an email address to play on the site.

SwC Poker Bonuses & Promotions

On the subject of SwC Poker promotions, we kick off the list with the Krill Leaderboard. It disappeared from the site for a while, but then it made a return, and each week it rewarded the top five Krill earners with an additional prize of up to 10,000 chips. You get 10,000 chips for the top spot, 6,000 chips for second place, 4,000 for third, 2,000 for fourth, and 1,000 chips for fifth place. If you can hold your top spot for a month, you’ll get a prize of 30,000 chips, and if you manage to hold on to the fifth place for thirty days, you’ll get 5,000 chips.

Every day, the site has Freerolls, which are tournaments with no entry fees that feature small prize pools. Everyone can join one of these tournaments instantly after registering with the site. There’s one every hour, and they are a terrific way for new players to test out the software.

Twitch bounties are twenty-six prizes that anyone can get if he or she achieves a specific goal while streaming SwC Poker on Twitch. At the time of writing, there are nine unclaimed bounties. The prizes consist of chips from 10,000 to 200,000 and BTC tickets. A few of these bounties have specific requirements, so you should go through the dedicated page to know what you are getting yourself into if you are aiming for one.

The platform also features a promotion titled the Bad Beat Jackpot that lets you win big when you lose with Aces full, or Kings or better in a specific scenario. You can win the jackpot at the BBJ Hold’em tables, which feature the same rake as the regular tables, but 20% of each drop contributes to the jackpot. If you manage to hit it, it plays out like this:

• 35% to the loser of the hand.
• 20% to the winner of the hand.
• 15% shared between the other players in the hand.
• 10% house fee.

What remains of the jackpot prize, seeds the next one. The initial prize started with 100,000 chips. Players should also check the Bitcointalk forum, from time to time, as management sometimes runs other promotions there.

Play at SwC PokerPlay at SwC Poker

VIP Program

Is there a SwC Poker VIP program? Well, yes. There’s a point system titled Krill. Krill is this site’s equivalent to what complementary or experience points are on other platforms. You receive Krill every time you get dealt a raked hand, based on this formula – √(rake) * 0.4 / (players dealt in). Everyone participating in the hand, regardless of their contribution to the pot, receives an equal amount of Krill. Every registered player in a tournament receives Krill based on this formula – √ (entry fee) * 0.4. If there is no entry fee, then there will be no Krill.

As players collect Krill, they earn new titles, and with new titles, new rewards become accessible. Krill never decreases or resets, and as you accumulate it, you get rakeback. You enter the program with one Krill and the title of New Seal, which gets you 5% rakeback and access to the chat. There are sixteen titles, and you need ten million Krill to become a Grandmaster Seal and earn a rakeback of 50%.

SwC Poker only accepts Bitcoin deposits with no extra fees. 1 BTC = 1,000,000 chips and deposits are credited after only 1 confirmation. The minimum withdrawal is 500 chips and can take up to 24 hours to process but carries no extra fees. You can also transfer chips to other players inside the poker room for free.

SwC Poker Customer Support

Well, is there a SwC Poker live chat? Nope. The best way to establish SwC Poker contact is to click the Support link in the site’s footer. It’s the site’s support email address, which is – support@swcpoker.eu.

It’s always disappointing when we see that a crypto gaming platform has no live support, but they’ve functioned well enough for years without one, so we do not believe that one will make its way onto the site any time soon. You can try to ask for assistance in the group chat (you need to earn one Krill to activate the chat), or on the forum Bitcointalk. Moderators are always lurking in these two places and are quite active in both.

That said, it’s a relief to see that there’s a SwC Poker FAQ section. You can find it in the footer under – House Rules. Once you click it, you’ll see a page that is home to sixteen FAQs that are divided into three categories – SwC Poker FAQ, Poker FAQ, and Cardroom Rules. There are also two other separate FAQ pages, one that explains what Bitcoin is and how it works, and others dedicated to explaining the rules of the many poker games on the site. You can access both in the footer, or you can open the promotions page or the update page, and you can find the same links there as well.

Security

It’s kind of difficult to talk about all the security measures on the site, as SwC Poker has no terms and conditions and no policies posted. As mentioned above, there’s no live chat, and email support is slow. So, you cannot read in detail what the safety precautions the site has in place, and you cannot get a swift response to your inquiry.

We can tell you that the platform doesn’t have any gaming license, and it uses advanced encryption with an RSA key (2048 Bits), with a certificate issued by Let’s Encrypt Authority X3, to protect all players’ data entered on the site. The site has been running for several years now, and according to player reviews, it’s reliable and safe.

Know that you can and should set up 2FA (two-factor authentication) inside your account page, under Security. The platform accepts players from every corner of the globe. It does not require you to present identification to play and withdraw, and it never uses player funds for operating expenses. Players’ Bitcoins get allocated in several wallets of varying accessibility for security reasons.

GOSU Conclusion

We rarely review sites that have been operating as long as SwC Poker. In all fairness, this is the third version of the site, so while this website, in particular, isn’t that old, it has a long linage. At the time it appeared on the scene, SwC was a pioneer, but now, almost all poker sites accept Bitcoin, and many provide crypto-specific bonuses. Thus, its novelty has worn off. That said, SwC Poker remains a trusted and old poker website that’s available on all kinds of devices. It holds regular tournaments and offers a good variety of prizes. Customer support is lacking, and management should look to improve the site’s design and better moderate the group chat. If you like playing poker and using Bitcoin, you may want to consider SwC, but over time, other more popular platforms have taken much of this site’s traffic, thanks to their more robust and modern offerings.

Play at SwC PokerPlay at SwC Poker