Almost every online poker room offers an initial deposit or sign up bonus in order to entice new players to sign up at their poker room. These bonuses vary in matching percentage and size, but a typical bonus would be Full Tilt’s 100% up to $600 bonus. The bonus is meant to be seen as free money for the player, but in fact the money is not usually given directly to the player, but is instead kept in a pending bonus account. That being said online poker bonuses should still be taken advantage of when possible because they effectively reduce the amount of money you pay to the poker room for the duration of the bonus clearing requirements. Just make sure you read up on some poker site reviews in order to understand each bonus thoroughly before depositing.
How Do You Clear the Pending Bonus?
In order to release the bonus from your pending bonus section of your online poker account you will usually have to earn some form of frequent player points. For example, at Full Tilt Poker you must earn Full Tilt Points. Your bonus is then released either in increments such as $10 or $20, or as a lump sum after you have cleared the entire bonus. Full Tilt, for example, releases your bonus in increments of 10% of the total bonus or $20 increments. To earn the frequent player points that are needed to clear the bonus you simply have to play in cash games or tournaments at the poker room. For example, at Full Tilt you earn seven points for every dollar that you pay in tourney fees and each point you earn clears $0.06 of the bonus. Most poker rooms will also make you clear the entire bonus within a certain amount of time. For example, at Full Tilt you get 120 days to clear as much of your bonus as possible, but at PKR you have 60 days and if you don’t clear the entire bonus in this time the whole amount is lost. In simple terms clearing a poker bonus is easy. All you have to do is play at the site and the bonus will clear itself.
What to Look for in an Online Poker Bonus?
Apart from the obvious size of the bonus the most important thing you can look at when it comes to an online poker bonus is the clearing conditions. A bonus with player friendly clearing conditions will clear much faster and you will have your bonus money much quicker than at a poker room that offers a difficult to clear bonus. In order to figure out if the clearing conditions are good you should find out how much of the bonus each frequent player point earns and then see how many points you earn from tournaments and cash games. For example, at Cake Poker a point is worth $0.06 and you earn 7 for every dollar you pay in tournament fees. This means that for every $1 you pay to the room you clear $0.42 of the bonus. This is a good ratio and if you can find a poker room with a ratio of $0.40 and up the clearing conditions are friendly, but if the ratio is below $0.30 the clearing conditions are bad.
Conclusion
Poker bonuses are great for players because they reduce the amount of money lost to the poker room. The size of the bonus matters slightly, but the main criteria for determining if a poker bonus is solid is the clearing conditions. The better the clearing conditions the more money you save.