How Much Do You Really Get?

Anybody who is on the fence about playing online poker is usually pushed over by the generous deposit bonuses that poker sites offer. Some of the deposit bonuses offered are worth 100% up to $400 or more. But as you might’ve guessed, these deposit bonuses aren’t just handed to players; they are earned instead. Seeing as how you have to earn these big deposit bonuses, it’s always useful to know how long it will be before you see the money.

Size Matters

As mentioned before, poker sites are willing to offer bonuses as big as 100% up to $400 just for signing up. Of course, you don’t have to deposit the full $400 because you can also deposit less money such as $300, $250, $200, etc. The smart idea would be to deposit the full $400, but the problem with this is that poker rooms only give you so long to clear the bonus. In a lot of cases, you have 90 days to clear the full bonus so keep this in mind when depositing.

Clearing the Bonus

The barometer for measuring how much of a deposit bonus someone has cleared is always rewards points. As you play poker at a certain room, you will earn rewards points for your frequent play. The amount of points you earn varies depending on how much rake must be contributed for a point, but for the sake of this example, we’ll say that 5 rewards points are given for every $0.10 contributed in rake.

As you keep contributing rake and collecting points, the money will be unlocked from your pending bonus amount. In this article, we’ll assume $1 is released from your account as soon as you collect 75 rewards points. If your money is earned in $10 increments, you would need to get 750 rewards points to unlock the first chuck of money.

How long until the Bonus is yours?

The amount of time it will take to unlock your bonus obviously depends on how much online poker you play. But other factors such whether you mostly play tournaments or cash games will also be a factor in how quickly the money is released. That being said, let’s look at how long it takes to earn a deposit bonus for both tournament and cash game players.

Tournament Players

Estimating the amount of time it will take to earn your deposit bonus as a tournament player is not extremely difficult. Let’s assume you play a combined five $20 + $2 multi-table tournaments/sit and go’s every day. This adds up to a total of $10 in contributed rake every day ($2 X 5 tournament), or 500 rewards points.

At a rate of 500 rewards points a day, it would take 3 days to unlock $20 from the deposit bonus ([500 points X 3 days] /75 points). If you kept up at this rate, you could earn the full amount of a $400 deposit bonus in just 60 days ([500 points X 60 days] /75 points).

Cash Game Players

Ring game players have a little tougher road ahead of them when calculating deposit bonuses because there is more involved. However, you can still come up with an accurate number on how long it will take to get your bonus.

The first things to look at are the stakes you play, the average pot size, and how much rake the poker room takes. We’ll just say that you play $2/$4 No-Limit Hold’em with the house taking 5% of the average pot, which is $36 ($1.80 a hand). Assuming you are on full tables (10 players) and contributing 1/10 of the rake, you would be giving the house $0.18 in rake a hand.

If your table played an average of 150 hands an hour, you would be contributing $27 in rake an hour. Since this is enough to earn 13,500 rewards points an hour, you would unlock $18 of your deposit bonus each hour. At this rate, you’d earn a full $400 deposit bonus in just over 22 hours of play, and have thousands of rewards points as well.

Do your own Calculations

Perhaps none of the numbers above applies to your particular online poker room. However, the concepts remain the same, and you can use the aforementioned formulas to figure out how long it will take you to earn the full amount of your deposit bonus before making an initial deposit.