Every poker website offers cash bonuses to players as incentives. Nick Jacob explains who offers what and how you can turn $50 into thousands by ruthlessly playing the sites at their own game.
The more players a site has, the more games it can offer, and the more games it can offer, the more players it can sign-up. It is this virtuous circle that leads to aggressive marketing and some big bonus offers for players prepared to switch poker site. Some punters have turned it into an art form and for many learning players taking a lot of hits at the table, site bonuses can keep the game paying and the bankroll growing despite bad beats - and bad play.
Every poker site offers a bonus of some form for signing up a new account, and every site periodically offers ‘reload’ bonuses when you fund your account. To clear a bonus most sites require you play either a fixed number of raked hands so the key to making bonuses pay at an hourly rate worth your time is to find fast-paced games at low-limits. Short-handed (6-max) $1/$2 fixed limit is perfect, just so long as you can play lots of tables. As George Orwell didn’t say, two tables is good, four is better. With poker room add-on’s like Poker Tracker and Poker Ace Heads-Up Display available for less than #50, you can afford to take your attention off each opponent while you’re out of a pot and focus on the active table only. Meanwhile you’re quickly clearing another bonus.
Take Party Poker, for instance, the largest of the online poker rooms. Party offer a standard 20% up to $100 on your first deposit, which you receive after playing five hundred raked hands (for the full bonus). An average $1/$2 short-handed game will run at about 100 hands per hour, of which around 75 will be raked, clearing your bonus in less than seven hours table-time. Playing one table and breaking even will net $13 (#7) per hour, playing four will net a healthy #28 per hour.
But why bother bonus hunting in the first place? After all, you’ve seen Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson go all-in with a trash hand and a perfect read on his opponent, and walk away with the pot. Poker is a game, above all about experience. When Doyle Brunson says in his book, Super/System that sometimes he ‘knows’ what a player is holding, he is really saying that experience has taught him what an opponent is holding. And Doyle has played literally millions of hands of poker right through his life. And if you’re going to rack up the experience while learning to read players like Brunson does, you might as well be getting all the free money you can get at the same time.
It’s not all risk-free money though, for that you need to find a deal that allows you to play with the bonus after withdrawing your initial deposit. Step forward, Pacific Poker, where the 20% up to $100 deal allows just that. Deposit $500, withdraw $500, and start playing with $100. Lose and breakeven. Win and add the free $100, which should clear after around 1000 hands (Pacific require you wager 20 times the bonus amount).
Sign-up bonuses, available exclusively to new players at a site, tend to be far more lucrative than reload bonuses offered periodically to every player at a site. After all, the poker room is hoping that by getting you to go to the trouble of downloading their software you’ll never move to a competitor. Just take their money and move on. You’re a bonus whore, after all.
