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Exploiting the Online Poker Room Bonuses
by Arnold Snyder
(Excerpted from How to Beat the Internet Casinos and Poker Rooms, Cardoza Publishing, 2006. 269 pages)
© 2005-2006 Arnold Snyder
This focus of this article is calculating the value of online poker bonus offers. See our online poker bonus offers page for listings of the current bonuses available.
Although the Poker Tournament Formula Web site focuses on poker tournaments rather than ring games (our site on how to profit from online ring games is coming) I’m going to provide a discussion of the online poker bonuses for both ring games and tournaments, since many players play both. Calculating the value of online poker room bonuses turns out to be quite complex, and you can't use the same methods to analyze them that you use to analyze online casino bonus values .
Online poker players in ring games should always try to play on a poker bonus that will pay a good portion of the blinds. This is not a strategy I’ve seen discussed per se in the poker literature, but I believe it is a huge factor for new players who are learning the game. Playing poker online, even at low stakes, can cost you thousands of dollars while you're learning. When you are not yet a winning player strategically, this makes the game very tough on a tight budget—unless you let an online poker room pay a good portion of those blind costs for you.
On the Internet, there has been quite a bit of discussion about the value of the poker room bonuses on the various poker discussion forums. In fact, there are entire Web sites dedicated to exploiting these bonuses. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any other decent analysis of the bonus values based on the various types of poker bonuses available.
If you are already a winning online poker player, then the bonus values can be analyzed much more easily. You simply look at the total dollar value of the bonus and estimate the amount of time it will take you to meet the play requirements for extracting that dollar value. This article will discuss how to do that, below. A poker bonus may be worth a lot or a little (and its actual value may have very little to do with its face value), but almost any bonus will add at least a little to your profits.
If you are new to poker, however, and have not yet built up a winning record, then you have to look at the online poker bonuses from a different perspective. You have to be much more concerned with how long it will take you to extract the bonus value because the longer it takes, the more you stand to lose while collecting it.
Online poker rooms offer sign-up bonuses for the same reason that online casinos do—to entice new players into their games, or to bring current customers back. Technically, the poker rooms do not want you flitting from one bonus offer to another. They want to keep you as a loyal customer. In most cases, their bonus offers accomplish this purpose. Poker players get comfortable with a poker room’s software and crowd, and they end up staying there.
Because of this, the poker rooms are not as concerned with bonus hustlers as the Internet casinos are. Unlike players who make a living exploiting the best online casino bonus offers, nobody can extract enough of a profit from the online poker room bonuses to make poker bonus hustling a viable way of earning a lot of fast money. So, most of the online poker rooms offer sign-up bonuses for new players, similar to the way online casinos offer sign-up bonuses. You deposit $XXX, you then play XXX amount, and you receive a bonus (money added to your account) of $XXX amount.
Unlike the online casino bonuses, online poker room bonuses are always traditional, cashable bonuses. Some online poker rooms will add the full bonus amount to a separate account, which you have no access to for playing or withdrawal until you have “earned” these funds by meeting your play requirement, when the funds are added to your account as fully cashable funds. Other poker rooms will add bonus funds to your account in small increments as you earn them. For example, a $100 bonus may be added $10 at a time as you fulfill your play requirement.
The not-uncommon type of online casino bonuses that allow us to gamble with the bonus money—prior to having met our wagering requirement—do not exist in the poker rooms. There is a good reason for this. In a poker game, you are playing and betting against other players, not against the house. If you lose bonus money to another player, the poker room cannot tell that player that the money he won from you was not cashable, or that he must now meet your play requirement before cashing in the funds. Any online poker room that tried a stunt like this would not have many players for long. Cash is cash in an online poker room, and when you get bonus money added to your account, it’s cash. You may cash it in immediately, or use it to buy into games, and it is always considered fully your money.
The Five Common Types of Online Poker Room Bonuses
There are many differences between bonuses that are unique to the online poker rooms. Let’s look at the five different types of common poker bonus offers:
1) # Hands Dealt in Raked Pots
2) Hands Dealt in Raked Pots by $$ Raked
3) # Hands Bet in Raked Pots
4) Total $$ Amount Bet
5) Tournament Bonus Structures
Most of these types of poker bonuses are available as both initial deposit bonuses and as “reload” (or follow-up) bonuses. The bonus terms for these reload bonuses are often similar or identical to the initial sign-up poker bonus terms.
Also, most of the poker room bonuses are “stackable.” This means that you may take advantage of a second bonus offer for a poker room even if you have not completed the play requirement for a bonus offer you are currently working on. You simply deposit more funds into your account and the new poker bonus is stacked behind the first one. You definitely want to make sure of this prior to making a new deposit because not all of the poker rooms allow bonuses to be stacked. Some poker rooms require your account to be empty of funds prior to depositing funds for any bonus.
Let’s look at each of the different types of bonuses commonly offered by online poker rooms to see how they work and how we can estimate their value to us.
1) # Hands Dealt in Raked Pots Online Poker Bonuses
This type of poker bonus gives you credit for having cards dealt to you in any raked pot, even if you do not play the hand or contribute to that pot. These tend to be excellent poker bonuses.
One excellent bonus currently available at one of the most popular online poker rooms (Party Poker—no U.S. players for now) is offering a bonus of 120% up to $200, starting with a 20% match up to $100, then a 100% match for the second $100. Party Poker's bonus terms specify that you earn one bonus dollar for every seven raked hands that you are dealt cards in, even if you do not contribute to the pot on that round.
Let’s analyze the value of part one of this poker bonus for a limit game.
The first thing we need to know is what are the minimum blind levels available for limit hold’em games at this site where the pot is raked and you get bonus credit for each hand. We find that you get bonus credit playing games with blinds as small as 50 cents/$1.00.
Next we have to figure out what would happen to our bankroll if we simply sat through all hands, never played, and simply forfeited our blinds when the blinds came around to us. At a ten-spot table, every ten hands we would lose $1.50. This means that the cost of sitting at this table is about 15 cents per hand.
The next thing we need to know to figure out the value of this bonus is how many hands out of every 10 dealt are actually raked by the house, thus counting toward the bonus? I kept data on this at Party Poker and found that approximately 7 out of 10 hands are raked in these low-limit games.
So, for every 10 hands dealt, with 7 hands raked, we are getting credited, on average, for $1 of bonus money. $1 per 10 hands dealt is worth:
$1 / 10 = 10 cents per hand
So, the actual cost of sitting at the table for this time period is only 15 cents - 10 cents = 5 cents per hand, as opposed to 15 cents per hand without the bonus. That makes a big difference to a new player who is just learning the game. If you consider that it takes 1000 hands to collect your $100 bonus, the cost of the blinds alone would come to $150 if you were paying the average full 15 cents/hand cost of the going through the blinds for these 1000 hands. So, with this bonus, the cost of playing these hands has been reduced from $150 to only $50.
This is the best type of bonus for beginning players, wherever you find it. To extract the maximum value of the bonus, you should always join full 10-player ring games at the minimum blind level allowed. Note that you will not actually make money from this bonus. If you make money, it will have to be from playing your hands profitably. The reason I specify that you should join full 10-player games is that you will go through the blinds more rapidly in short-handed play. At full tables, you will pay the least to complete your bonus requirement the fastest.
One nice thing about this particular bonus program is that at Party Poker the first part of the offer is usually repeated (with what’s called a “reload” bonus) about once every four or five weeks. You can get a lot of real money experience— mostly paid for by the bonuses—at this one online poker room. So, this is the type of bonus that I recommend most highly for beginning players. If you seek out only this type of bonus in choosing the poker rooms where you play, and you only play when you are on a bonus play, you will not be making money, but you will essentially be playing in games where the house is paying a good portion of your blind costs. That is a good deal for a beginner.
2) Hands Dealt in Raked Pots by $$ Raked Online Poker Bonuses
This type of poker bonus credits you for having cards dealt to you in any raked pot, even if you do not play the hand or contribute to that pot. Ultimate Bet is offering a 100% match bonus up to $500 right now with these terms, and Full Tilt Poker is offering a 100% match up to $600 with these terms.
The only difference between this type of bonus and the one above is that the amount of the bonus credit is based on the actual $ amount raked from that pot. Let me show you how this type of poker bonus is described in Full Tilt Poker’s Terms and Conditions:
Full Tilt Poker is pleased to continue offering deposit bonuses to new players. New sign-ups will receive a 100% matching bonus up to $600 on your initial deposit to XXX Poker Room.
For each dollar raked from a pot, every player who was dealt cards for that hand will earn one point. You can earn partial points if less than one dollar is raked, and you can earn up to three points per hand.
Each point is worth $.06, so you can earn up to $18 per hundred hands.
For every dollar paid in tournament fees, you will receive 7 Full Tilt Points. There is no cap on the number of points you can receive.
The bonus amount will be automatically credited to your Bonus Account where it will be held and released to your cash account in increments of 10% of your initial deposit, or $20, whichever you earn first. So if you do a one-time deposit of $100, each $10 (10%) earned will be instantly released into your account. Deposit the full $600 and your account will get credited for each $20 of bonus earned. At three points per hand, each $20 increment can be earned in fewer than two hours of play at only one table.
You can see your cash total and bonus cash amounts in the Cashier window. You will continue to collect cash until you have received 100% of your bonus money. You have 120 days to earn your deposit bonus.
This offer is available to players making their FIRST deposit at Full Tilt Poker. |
In order to estimate the value of this type of bonus, whether at Full Tilt Poker or elsewhere, we need to know one more piece of information. Since at Full Tilt Poker we receive, essentially, 6 cents for every dollar raked from the pot, we need to know what the rake is. In order to find this out, we basically have to click around on the various poker sites' information buttons (and it’s never easy to find this technical information, but it’s always there if you look), until we find a link to their rake structure page. What we find for Full Tilt Poker is that for limit games, the lowest blind level available for earning our bonus points is $1/$2. However, the max rake on these games is only $1, no matter how big the pot. The rake is taken out at the rate of 25 cents for every $5 in the pot, so there must be $20 in the pot to earn the maximum 6 cents per hand.
If you do the math, you'll find the value of Ultimate Bet's bonus is roughly equivalent to Full Tilt's. Absolute Poker allows you to earn 1 point (worth 10¢) for every raked hand down to a 50¢ rake, but doesn't scale up the points you earn for higher raked hands. So, Absolute Poker's bonus will have more value for lower-stakes players than for higher-stakes players, although higher-stakes players will appreciate the total dollar amount.
Notice that although the terms and conditions for this type of bonus sound similar to the Party Poker type, the value doesn't begin to compare with the value of the Party Poker bonus offer for a beginning player. Consider: If we go through the blinds at Full Tilt once every ten hands, we pay $1 + $2 = $3, or 30 cents per hand (or $3.00 for ten hands). But the maximum bonus we can earn in ten hands is only 60 cents (or 20% of the blind costs), and that’s only if all ten hands played on that round had a pot of $20 or greater. Meanwhile, at Party Poker, the bonus can pay 2/3 of a beginner's blind costs.
Again, these bonuses are not as good as Party Poker's for beginners trying to learn the game. Experienced players, however, who are playing in bigger games where the rake will frequently hit $3 on a $60 pot, will likely find the Ultimate Bet and Full Tilt Poker bonuses more attractive than Party Poker's, assuming these players are already playing a winning game. These players will like that $500 or $600 total available, and find it quite earnable, especially if they play multiple simultaneous tables.
The reason I chose these bonuses as examples of bonus type #2 is precisely because of the contrast to bonus #1. Many online players who look for valuable bonuses are more attracted to the total dollar amounts available than any other bonus feature. This is fine if you’re already playing a winning game, but those who are still learning to play should use other criteria.
No-limit players may also find Full Tilt Poker’s no-limit bonus structure attractive (Ultimate Bet's are again roughly equivalent). You can play no-limit hold’em here with blinds as low as 5-cents/10-cents, and the pot is raked at the rate of 5 cents for every $1 in the pot (the same rate of rake as at the limit games, actually, though it starts lower). Thus, even in a 5-cents/10-cent game, you can theoretically earn up to the full 18 cents on a $3 rake for a pot size of $60 or more.
Of course, it’s unlikely for a 5-cents/10-cent no-limit game to have many $60 pots (if any, ever), but this size pot would not be so unusual in higher-limit no-limit games. With 50-cent/$1 blinds, and the cost of going through the blinds $1.50 per ten hands, we’d need an average pot size of $50 to fully pay our blind costs. The actual average pot size in a no-limit game with these blinds is generally in the $10-$15 neighborhood. So, with this bonus in a no-limit game, you could get about a third of your blinds costs paid. (Note that many poker rooms do provide the average pot size at all of the tables they have in action.)
3) # Hands Bet in Raked Pots Online Poker Bonuses
This type of bonus credits you only for hands in raked pots to which you have contributed money. If you fold pre-flop without calling the blind, that hand does not count toward earning the bonus.
It is very important when you read the bonus terms that you note if they specify the number of hands bet in a raked pot, as opposed to the number of hands dealt in a raked pot, which makes the bonus more valuable.
Poker bonuses based only on hands where you actually put money into the pot have very little real $$ value for beginners. In addition, one popular poker room that used this bonus structure did not allow bonus points to be converted to cash. Bonus points at this online poker room could only be used for tournament entries. As tournament players, does this interest us? Let’s look more closely at the details…
Basically, the bonus provided for players to earn 1 bonus point for each rake of $1 or more, with smaller bonus point increments for smaller rake amounts. But consider the difficulty of actually estimating the $ value. First, you were only awarded bonus points if you had contributed to the pot on any given round. So, you first had to figure out approximately what percentage of pots you would play. Then, you had to figure out the approximate size of the average pot you would play, so you could estimate what the rake would be and how many bonus points you would have earned for playing.
Finally, the points at this poker room could only be used to buy into special tournaments. For example, the site offered one tournament that you could enter if you had earned 200 bonus points, and the prize pool for this tournament totaled $1,000. Unfortunately, the site did not specify what the total number of tournament entries would be, so how could you start to estimate the value of this freeroll buy-in?
The most “amusing” thing about this bonus program was that the Terms and Conditions warned players that “Professional players or players considered to be abusing the bonus system by any means may have bonuses revoked and be subject to further sanctions... ” In fact, there was no way I could see to “abuse” this bonus program. It was just not worth much.
This online poker room's seemingly inexplicable attitude toward “professional players” and potential bonus “abusers” is reflected in many of the poker rooms that are sponsored by the online casinos that offer casino games, and that have bonus programs for the casino games. Bonuses for the casino games really can be legally hustled for a good chunk of change by smart players. (See the “Win in Online Casinos” section of Blackjack Forum Online for more info on this.) But I have not found any poker room bonuses that offer much in the way of dollar profits to anyone who’s not actually a pretty decent poker player.
A lot of players did like this poker room, however, which also had one of the biggest and most reputable online sports books on the Web. And I’m sure many players appreciate getting into freeroll tournaments when they earn the bonus points to qualify. But this site would not be a good poker room choice for a beginner trying to reduce his costs of learning the game.
Any time your bonus is based only on the hands where you put money into the pot, assume the value is pretty low until you are an expert player. And even then, the value will probably be lower than you can get from the bonuses of the types listed above.
4) Total $$ Amount Bet Online Poker Bonuses
This type of poker bonus—the worst of the types—again credits you only for hands in raked pots to which you personally have contributed money. But with this poker bonus, the amount of bonus points earned depends on the actual $ amount that you personally bet in that hand.
I've saw this type of poker bonus at another online casino sponsored poker room, and like most of the others sponsored by online casinos, their bonus program is less than generous. Online casino sites all seem to be afraid of bonus “abusers,” so they offer pretty terrible poker bonuses that couldn’t possibly be abused. They clearly don't know how to figure out the value of any bonus offer themselves.
This particular site announced in their bonus offer that players would get a “deposit bonus of 25% up to $100 max.” Okay, so for a $400 deposit, I could get a $100 bonus. So what did I have to do to collect it? They continued: “125 Points must be accumulated for every $1 in bonus money.” Understood, so how could I accumulate these 125 Points? According to their bonus offer: “You get 100 action points for each dollar you contribute to the rake.”
Now, try and figure that one out! Let’s say the pot has $20 in it, so that the rake is $1 (the rake here is the online poker standard 25 cents for every $5, with a cap). My bonus would be based on how much I personally contributed to that $1 rake. So, if $4 in that pot was mine, then I would have contributed 20% of the $1 rake, and I would be awarded 20% of 100 Points, which is 20 Points. Since 125 Points were worth $1, then 20 Points would have been worth 16 cents.
Now we’re cookin’! I can actually figure out the percentage value of my bonus. With this particular bonus, I would basically be getting back 4 cents for every dollar I bet. Not bad, assuming you are a good poker player and can make money on the games. But again, this is not a bonus that should be sought out by beginners. In order to extract the full $100 value of this bonus, in pots as described above, I’d have to wager $2,500. That could take a beginner a hell of a long time in a $1/$2 game, and unless you have a lot of past data on your play, it’s impossible to figure out the blind costs on this one.
Still More Types of Online oker Bonus
There have been almost as many variations on poker bonus programs as there are online poker rooms. You may have noticed in the above descriptions that a single bonus point in one poker room is worth 3 points in another, and 6 points in another, and more than 100 in yet another.
Here is one of the more ridiculous poker bonus programs I've found. And again, I’ll quote verbatim from the text (removing the name of the online poker room). I have no idea who could have dreamed up this nonsense:
To enter the *** VIP Club, first you have to be a real money player on ***. Then, you need to accumulate Points and reach a minimum of 5000 Points by playing for real as often as possible. As soon as you reach 5000 Points, we'll notify you via e-mail that you're in the Club...
Points will be calculated on a daily basis, and accumulated according to the following set of rules:
RAKED HANDS: Square Root of the number of raked hands.
For Example
Number of raked hands: 121
Points for player: 11 |
What? My bonus is based on the “square root of the number of raked hands”? Now that’s downright devious!
This is one of those poker bonus programs where you know that anyone who signs up for it has no concept of the way square roots work. Essentially, the bigger a number gets, the smaller (as a percentage of that number) the square root is. As per the explanation in this online poker room’s Terms and Conditions, in order to accumulate 11 Points per day, the player must play 121 raked hands. The square root of 121 is 11. The average person who knows little about math might think that by playing twice as many hands—242 raked hands per day—he could earn 22 points toward his 5000 Point requirement in order to get into the VIP club. Not so. The square root of 242 provides the player with only 15.5 Points. If he wants to earn 22 Points per day, he will have to play 484 hands per day. He earned his first 11 Points with only 121 hands, but the second 11 Points will take three times as many hands to accumulate—363 hands!
An aggressive multi-table player might think that at the rate of 11 Points for every 121 raked hands played, he could earn 100 Points per day by playing nine times 121 raked hands, or 1089 raked hands per day. Actually, 1089 raked hands per day will not earn you 99 Points, but only 33 Points. In fact, the more hands you play per day, the less valuable the bonus is, and the more you are penalized! This bonus program is the opposite of a “customer loyalty” award. And even if you played 484 raked hands per day here, five days per week, to earn you 22 Points per day, it would take you about 45 weeks to earn 5,000 Points to become a VIP! All of this before you get a single buck of actual bonus value! Anyway, you can also earn bonus points here by participating in tournaments, but that 5000-Point qualification for the VIP program will probably not be worth many beginners’ time or money.
As I say, always read the Terms and Conditions. Pull out a calculator if necessary and figure out what the actual offer amounts to.
Many of the online casino sponsored online poker rooms use “wagering requirement” type bonuses in their poker rooms, just as they do with their online casino game bonuses. That is, you must wager the total bonus amount XX times before the bonus is applied to your account.
My general advice to beginners is to avoid online poker bonus programs like these. In a casino game like blackjack, where we can figure out the cost of our wagers based on the house advantage, we can easily judge when a bonus has enough $ value to make it worth our time. (To learn how, see How to Win in Online Casinos and Traditional vs. Sticky Online Casino Bonuses.) But beginners cannot do this in poker. If you are a winning player, and you find a low wagering requirement to acquire a bonus, go for it. Definitely shop around for the best deals, however. Some online poker room wagering requirements are as low as 2X the bonus amount, and some are as high as 40X. Big difference.
5) Online Poker Tournament Bonus Structures
Online poker rooms let you earn bonus points for poker tournament play based on the amount you contribute to the tournament in entry fees. So freeroll (no entry fee) tournaments do not generally qualify for earning bonus points. Some online poker sites ignore tournaments completely for bonus awards. So, if you intend to play tournaments, you should always read what the Terms and Conditions state about tournament play eligibility for bonus qualifying before you deposit funds.
Typically, an online poker room that awards bonus points for tournament play will state something like this in their T & C:
| For every dollar paid in tournament fees, you will receive 7 Poker Room Points. There is no cap on the number of points you can receive. Each point is worth $.06. |
The value of this bonus is fairly easy to calculate. Since “for every dollar paid in tournament fees,” you will receive 7 points, and each point is worth exactly 6 cents, then during the bonus period, the house is covering 42% of your tournament entry fees. In other words, if the buy-in is $20, and you must pay a $2 entry fee, you’ll get 14 bonus points worth 84 cents. That makes your actual entry fee only $1.16.
So, if it’s poker tournaments that primarily interest you, don’t expect the poker bonus dollars to ever do anything but lower your entry fee costs. And remember that skillful poker tournament play can earn such a high edge that it's well worth it to play even without a bonus.
In any case, to compare the various poker rooms’ tournament bonus values to each other, simply use the method illustrated above to compare what proportion of your entry fees each poker room will pay. ♠
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