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Reload Bonus, what is it?

Online Pokerrooms are aware that poker players have a choice where they want to play poker. They want you to play at their site, not at the competition. To lure you in to their site the Reload Bonus was introduced.

What’s in it for you?

Is this a good thing for you as a poker player? Yes it sure is! Most pokerrooms were already using the First Time Deposit Bonus. When you register as a new user and make a deposit, the pokerroom would add a percentage of your deposit on top of it. 20% is quite normal for a First Time Deposit Bonus. If you make a $200 deposit, you would receive an extra $40 for free. All you need to do to release this bonus is to play enough pokerhands, normally 10 times the bonus amount. In the previous example that would be 400 hands. But many pokerrooms realised that with so much competition, it is not easy to keep the players to play at their site. This is the reason why they introduced the Reload Bonus. Players who already have an account are now able to get a bonus up to a certain maximum (normally about $200) when they make a new deposit. Again, you will have to play a certain amount of hands before the bonus is released. Some sites release the full bonus amount only after you have played the required number of hands. Others release the bonus in phases i.e. for every 100 hands you play, $10 will be credited to your player account. What does this mean for you? Simply that you earn money just for playing real money poker online.

An example.

Absolute Poker is an example of an online pokerroom that uses a phased bonus release. A quick calculation: if you play 10 hours a week, you will make $400 a Month extra if your bankroll is big enough to make the deposit needed to get the maximum bonus. How do I get that figure of $400 when playing 10 hours a week? As follows. At the time of this writing my favourite reload bonus is offered by Absolute Poker . This might change in time, because it looks like there is a reload bonus war going on out there. But at the moment there are 2 major reasons, and a few minor ones, why I favour Absolute Poker . Reason 1: They offer a lot of Reload Bonusses. It seems that they offer a reload bonus 2 or 3 times a week, where other sites only do this once a Month, or just twice a year. Their reload bonus is always 20% of your deposit, with a maximum of $200. So if I make a $1000 deposit, my bonus account will be credited with $200. Every 100 hands I play $10 is transferred from my pending bonus account to my real money players account. They offer a reload bonus so often, my bonus account is always full. Reason 2: Absolute Poker allows me to play 2 tables at the same time, which means that I reach every 100 hands twice as quick. Other sites do allow me to play 2 or more tables at the same time as well, but only the first table qualifies for your required number of hands to release the bonus. I can do 50 hands per hour per table at Absolute Poker . With 2 tables on the go at the same time, I will play 100 hands every hour, releasing $10 bonus every hour. In effect, they are paying me $10 per hour to play at their site! And they will pay you $10 per hour to play at their site if you reload. So in the previous example of playing 10 hours a week, which is about 40 hours per Month, you will receive $400 bonus a Month if you keep reloading. And 10 hours a week is not even that much. Imagine what would happen if you play 40 hours a week? And your bankroll does not need to be that big either. Absolute Poker allows you to withdraw your money even when you have a reload bonus going. So you can transfer the money back to your neteller (or any other account) so it is ready for deposit when a new reload bonus appears. If you have $1000 reload bonus money ready, plus 200 times the big blind of the limit you are playing at to play with, you are sorted. That is all you need. What’s in it for the pokerrooms? Pokerrooms want as many players as they can get. Players new to poker are always welcome. But there is an ongoing battle for ‘old’ players going on. The pokerrooms are trying to get the players from the other pokerrooms. And let’s face it, you should play where the bonus is. The better the bonus is they offer, the more players will play at their site. I don’t think that the smaller pokerrooms will be able to offer the same bonus and my guess is they will finally have to concede. An example of this is Zerorake. Their idea was good, playing with no rake but a Monthly fee instead. But they could not get enough players together to get a decent game going. Because another phenomenon in online poker is that players attract players. If you don’t have the critical mass, you don’t have a pokerroom. But does it work for the pokerrooms? Yes it does! There are no big online pokerrooms that do not offer a Reload Bonus. I believe the following statement to be true: if you don’t offer a reload bonus, your pokerroom will soon be gone. At time of writing I have $1025 in my Absolute Poker bonus account. Guess where I will be playing my next 10250 hands of poker?

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