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Online Poker Deposit Bonuses: Do The Math

The deposit bonus is a staple of the online poker industry. The premise seems pretty basic – deposit a certain amount and rooms will match said deposit to some degree. Seems simple, but determining the real value of a deposit bonus can be tougher than it looks.

In this article we’re going to break down the three factors that will help you identify the real value of a deposit bonus, whether it be a first-time deposit bonus or a reload. Doing just a little bit of math can help you to find significantly better value for your online poker deposit dollar.

If you’re familiar with deposit bonuses, skip down a bit.

If you’ve never gotten a deposit bonus before, here’s how they work: Let’s take Full Tilt Poker as an example – they offer a 100% deposit bonus with a maximum of $600. So, if you deposit $600, FTP will give you a $600 bonus.

The fine print: You can’t access that bonus money right away. Instead, you have to “earn” it by playing some amount of real money poker at the room. Rooms generally release your bonus in small increments, and bonuses often have a shelf life, expiring after some amount of time if they are not completely earned.

Factor 1: Bonus Clearance Rate

The rate at which a bonus clears is a massive factor in determining the true value of that bonus. When you break it down, a deposit bonus is really nothing more than a form of temporary rakeback. As you play, you pay the room rake. As you pay the room rake, you earn points that allow you to clear your bonus. Note that some people will refer to “clearing” a bonus, while others use terms such as “earn” or “release.” They all mean the same thing – the bonus moves from your “bonus” account to your actual account where it can be used however you like.

Let’s return to Full Tilt Poker to illustrate. We’ll say you deposit $600 to get the full $600 matching bonus. How do you earn that bonus? FTP gives you .04 of the bonus every time you earn 1 Full Tilt Point. How do you earn points? By playing in real money cash games or tournaments.

Almost all deposit bonuses work in a similar fashion. That means you as a player need to answer two simple questions to figure out how quickly a deposit bonus clears:

1) How many points do I need to earn the total bonus?
2) How much rake do I need to pay to earn that amount of points?

The information needed to answer both of these questions is always located somewhere on the website of the poker room. If it isn’t, ask support (or try another room). Once you have these two numbers, you can figure out the value of the bonus in terms of the rake it returns to you. Let’s go back to Full Tilt Poker again, and answer the two questions above with information available on their website:

1) How many points do I need to earn the $600 bonus?
At Full Tilt the bonus clears at .04 for every 1 point earned, so you need to accumulate 15,000 points to earn the whole bonus.

2) How much rake do I need to pay to earn that amount of points?
Full Tilt gives you 10 points for every dollar you pay in tournament rake, so we’ll use that as our guideline. It’s not perfect, but it gets us close enough. If you need 15,000 points, and you get 10 points for every dollar you pay in rake, that means you need to pay $1,500 in rake to clear the whole bonus.

With those two pieces of information, we can now determine the rakeback value of Full Tilt’s bonus: You pay $1,500 to get $600 refunded, or 40%.

Why does this matter? Some rooms have clearance rates as low as 13%. Some rooms have clearance rates as high as 65%. That’s a big spread that has a real impact on the value of your bonus.

The basic point: The static amount of a bonus is not the true indicator of its actual value. If Room A offers a $600 bonus that clears at 50% of rake paid and Room B offers a $1000 bonus that clears at 20% of rake paid, Room A’s bonus is a much better value.

This math is also useful even if you only play at one room, as rooms will often have multiple deposit bonuses running different amounts and clearance rates simultaneously.

Factor 2: Rakeback Deductions

Here’s where bonuses start to get really sticky. If you get rakeback at a room (learn more about rakeback), there’s a chance the value of your bonus could be diminished.

How? Some rooms count promotions that you participate in (VIP rewards, deposit bonuses, and so on) against your total rake paid as a way of recouping the cost of those promotions. I know that’s a bit of a confusing sentence, so we’ll return to Full Tilt to illustrate.

Let’s say you’ve got the full bonus to earn and you’ve also signed up for rakeback at Full Tilt, meaning you’re getting 27% of all the rake you pay refunded. Let’s also say that you have earned all the points needed to clear your bonus, so you’ve paid $1,500 in rake.

You’d think you’d be getting both the 27% rakeback and also the 40% the deposit bonus is worth, right? Wrong.

Sort of. You still get the value of both, but what Full Tilt (and some other rooms) do is deduct your promotional cost from your total rake before they calculate your rakeback payment.

Here’s how it works from Full Tilt’s perspective. You rake $1,500 and earn your $600 bonus. They pay you your bonus, but then subtract the cost of the bonus from your rake. Now your total rake is Total Rake (1500) – Promotional Expenses (600), or $900. Your rakeback is calculated on that adjusted rake number, so you get 27% of $900 instead of 27% of 1500.

Note that the total value of the bonus and the adjusted rakeback is still greater than if you would have just had rakeback and not earned the bonus. Let’s do the math:

Player A has rakeback, rakes $1500 and clears the $600 bonus. They get $600 for the bonus and then $243 (.27*$900) for their rakeback payment for a total of $843 back.

Player B has rakeback, rakes $1500 but is not clearing a bonus. They get $405 (.27*$1500) for their rakeback payment and have no bonus, so get $405 total back from their $1500 paid in rake.

That’s a big gap. If you cleared the same bonus at a parallel version of Full Tilt that didn’t deduct bonuses from your rake, you’d be walking away with a total of $1005 rebated from the $1500 you paid.

The good news is that not all rooms deduct bonuses, etc, from your rake. You definitely want to be aware of a room’s policy on this issue before you decide to start playing there, because it can obviously undercut the value you think you’re getting from bonuses the room offers.

We let you know upfront which sites do this – on our sign up form, you’ll see this information listed (as highlighted below) for all the rooms we offer:

Factor 3: Pragmatics and Logistics

This is a bit of a catch-all factor meant to remind you that there’s more (and fuzzier) math to be done besides that basic calculations listed above to determine the value a bonus can have to you personally.

For example: Let’s say you primarily play SNGs. A small room might have an awesome bonus, but if it doesn’t have an active SNG lobby, your actual clearance time might be much longer than you’d normally expect.

Or perhaps you’re a very streaky player, prone to taking long breaks without much warning – in that case, the value of a bonus with a short shelf life needs to be discounted, as there’s a decent chance you’ll step away before earning it. That’s especially true if the bonus releases all in one stroke, or in large chunks, as there’s a good chance you’ll leave some money on the table.

The basic lesson is this: A bonus doesn’t have much value, perhaps none at all, if some feature or fact of the room makes it a place you don’t want to play poker.

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Hopefully this article has given you the basic tools you need to evaluate the real value of online poker deposit bonuses. Now that you’re equipped, check out our list of the top poker bonuses, broken down by a variety of criteria

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