Free Poker Bonus

In the world of online poker bonuses, there is no one-size-fits-all standard.

What may be a great bonus for one player may not suit another player at all.

So it is a very arbitrary thing to say that any particular bonus is ‘the best‘ bonus available. Some bonuses are more suitable to lower stakes players, and the opposite of that is also true – for example a fifty dollar bonus won’t be attractive to higher stakes players that may bet that amount on one hand.

It really is very difficult to compare bonuses – probably by intention – so the best way to determine the value of any particular bonus is to look at the ‘points per bonus dollar’ and the ‘points earned per dollar wagered’.

These two factors, more than the size of the bonus, will determine the actual value of any bonus on offer.

And of course this information is fairly well hidden in the terms and conditions and the small print. But it is available to you.

Even with these two pieces of vital information, it can still be difficult to actually compare bonuses across different rooms. Other factors, such as the percentage match, and the time frame allowed to claim the bonus, can be just as important if they are inordinately low.

So, to show an actual example of a bonus comparison, we are going to look at the current signup bonus of two rooms – Poker Stars and Poker Time.

Most people will have heard of Poker Stars already. They are the biggest online poker site by far, and a lot of players already have an account on there. Incidentally, for a long time Poker Stars did not offer a new player deposit bonus, and even when they did start offering one, it was only for a maximum of $50.

These days, their deposit bonus is to a maximum of $600, which is about the industry standard amount.

So when we go to the Stars site, we can easily find that the requirements are that the player must earn 17 VPPs per bonus dollar. Further into the terms we can see that the bonus is released in $10 increments (this is good) and so we will have to earn 170 VPPS to get our first $10 bonus.

So how do we earn VPPs at Poker Stars? Digging further into the terms we can find that you earn these points by paying tournament fees or rake in cash games. Cash games can be difficult to work out for the purposes of our comparison, so we are going to stick with the tournament points. This will make it easier to compare bonuses across different poker rooms.

On Stars you will earn 5.5 VPPs for each dollar that you pay in tournament fees. Note that this does not include the buy in amount, so on a $10 + $1 SNG, the player will earn 5.5 points for the $1 paid in entry fees.

So let’s do the math. We need 170 points to release our first $10, and we get 5.5 for every dollar paid in tourney fees, so divide 170 by 5.5 and we get 31 (rounded up). So on Stars we will need to play the equivalent of 31 ten dollar SNG’s to release $10 in bonus money.

Ok, so now we look at the Poker Time deal. Poker Time has been around for quite a while and is on the MicroGaming network. This means that while there are nowhere near as many players on here as there would be on Stars, there will still be enough for most players to get a game at their preferred stakes.

The current Poker Time bonus is to a maximum of $200 at 100% deposit match. That does not compare well to the $600 you can get from Stars, but to a player that is only going to deposit $100 anyway, it is exactly the same – both rooms offer a 100% bonus.

The requirements at Poker Time are a straight forward 1 point per bonus dollar, so to clear the full $200 bonus amount you need to make a $200 first deposit and earn 200 points.

In order to make an accurate comparison we check the points that are earned for tourney entry fees and see that you get 2.5 points for every dollar paid in entry fees. This bonus is also paid in increments – at $5 when you have earned 5 points – so we divide the number of points needed to earn $10 – which is 10 points – by the number of points earned for paying the entry fee to a $10 + $1 SNG – which is 2.5. So it would take us 4 $10 sngs to earn enough points to release $10 bonus money on Poker Time.

For a player making a first deposit of $100, they would have to play the equivalent of 310 x $10 SNGs to release $100 of bonus cash. On Poker Time, they would have to play the equivalent of 40 x $10 SNGs.

So the Poker Time bonus is almost eight times easier to clear than the Poker Stars bonus.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

You can get the Poker Time Bonus here

We’ll have a look at some other factors involved in clearing bonuses in the next post.

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