A Guide to Clearing Online Poker Bonuses
I’m sure you’ve heard the expression that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”. It turns out that it’s not just lunches that aren’t available gratis – online poker bonuses are also rarely free. Much like the dreaded time share presentation you might sit through for a free vacation, you’ll pay for online poker bonuses not with money, but with something just as valuable: Your time.
Almost every standard online poker bonus, including no deposit bonuses, first deposit bonuses and reload bonuses, have to be earned before you can actually access the bonus funds. This fact has disappointed many a first-time bonus hunter who thought they’d pull one over on the poker room by depositing a few bucks and then immediately withdrawing both their deposit and the deposit bonus.
So how do you earn an online poker bonus? In the online poker industry, earning a bonus is generally referred to as “clearing” and the terms of earning the bonus as a “clearance rate”. While those terms might seem slightly confusing, a quick example will help to clarify things.
What it Means to Clear a Bonus
Most online poker bonuses are in the form of what is know as an incremental bonus. That simply means the room releases your bonuses in small parts as you clear it, rather than forcing you to earn the entire bonus before you can access any of it.
Let’s take arguably the most popular first deposit bonus online, the PokerStars deposit bonus that offers a 100% bonus up to $600 for new players. PokerStars doesn’t just hand you the $600 after you deposit. Instead, they place it in a bonus account. As you clear the bonus, money moves from the bonus account into your actual account. PokerStars, along with most other rooms, does not allow you to do anything with money in your bonus account – you can’t play with it or withdraw it.
Determining Clearance Rate for an Online Poker Bonus
With $600 now sitting in your bonus account, the pressing question is how to move said funds into your actual account where you can utilize them. The answer is simple: Pay rake. As you pay rake in cash games and pay rake via tournament fees, you earn VIP Player Points (VPPs). As you earn VPPs, you get parts of your bonus released.
That’s the general formula for almost all poker bonuses. I’ll keep going with the PokerStars example just so you can get a better feel for the actual value of a bonus. Doing the simple math I’m about to do will help you compare bonuses.
Figuring out a bonus value essentially involves determining how much rake you have to pay to earn the bonus. PokerStars releases $10 of your bonus for every 170 VPPs you earn. That means each VPP you earn is worth ($10/170) or right about .06 each (.058 if you want to be precise).
The only question left is how much you pay in rake to get those VPPs. Paying rake in cash games or tournaments is the only way to earn VPPs, and at PokerStars, and the rate is roughly 5.5 to 8 VPPs per dollar in rake (depending on what limits and types of games you’re playing). So each 170 VPPs you earn cost you (170/6.25) right around $27 in rake.
That leaves us with the critical number when it comes to evaluating the actual value of an online poker bonus: The clearance rate. As you’ve no doubt already ascertained, the clearance rate is simple the ratio of the amount you pay in rake to clear the bonus to the amount of the bonus. In the case of our example, the clearance rate is roughly 37%, which is to say that for every dollar in rake you pay, you’ve earned .37 in bonus money.
I want to be sure to note that clearance rates are not absolute numbers; some people will clear bonuses at a higher or lower rate depending on what they play. However, they are still a useful way of comparing bonuses at different rooms. All of the information referred to above should be on the poker room websites and accessible with a few clicks. If you don’t see the information, contact support or consider a different room.
If you don’t want to do the work yourself, we’ve assembled a guide to bonus clearance rates at different rooms.