Monday, June 09, 2008

No matter what your level of play, these online poker strategies will make you better.

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A Great Poker Article

Utilizing Promotions


We decided to outline a few of the poker promotions that often go overlooked by beginning poker players. Although some promotions are indeed too good to be true, if you go in with your eyes open it can be a great way to get more for your poker dollar. Lets start with deposit bonuses and freerolls.

Utilizing Promotions

Poker rooms often have promotions to increase traffic to their poker room. The most common type is a cash bonus, but there are other promotions poker rooms offer as well. It is sometimes difficult to discern the quality of the promotion, and many are just gimmicks that entice players to pay extra rake. This article will go over the common types of promotions, and how to evaluate and utilize these promotions.

Deposit Bonuses
Almost all online poker rooms offer deposit bonuses to their players. There are two types of deposit bonuses: signup bonuses and reload bonuses.

A signup bonus is a bonus for a new player at the poker room that makes his or her first deposit. The poker room's goal with the signup bonus is to entice new customers to try out their poker room.A reload bonus is intended for existing players at the poker room.

The poker room's aim is to keep its existing players loyal, or to encourage its dormant players to come back to the poker room. Certain poker sites, such as Party Poker, have reload bonuses monthly, whereas other poker rooms have deposit bonuses intermittently, such as Poker Room.

The quality of a bonus is judged primarily by three factors. The first is the maximum amount of the bonus. Obviously, the more money you can get the better. The second factor is how much money you need to deposit to get the bonus. For example, if you can only deposit $100, a 100% up to $100 is preferable to a 25% up to $100 bonus. In this case, you are able to max out the first bonus, but you are only able to receive $25 from the second bonus.

The third factor is how quickly the bonus clears. Even if you are awarded a $1,000 bonus, the bonus is useless if it takes 1 million hands to clear that bonus. The quicker and easier that you can work off your bonus, the sooner you will receive your extra money. Our bonus reviews give approximations as to how quickly one can expect to clear the varying signup bonuses at several online poker rooms.

Freerolls
A very common promotional method is the freeroll. For this type of tournament, there is no buy-in or entry fee. The poker room simply puts up a certain amount of money, and the invited players compete for it.

The quality of the freeroll is judged by how much of an overlay there is. Essentially, this means how much money the poker room is putting up per player. For example, if there is a $5,000 freeroll and 500 players enter, the overlay is $10. Assuming a player is of average skill, the EV of this freeroll is +$10.

Some freerolls are not truly "free"; poker rooms often limit freerolls to their more active players that play a lot of raked hands at the poker room. If someone was going to play this amount of poker at that poker room anyway, then this is not a big deal.

However, qualifying for this type of freeroll might mean playing at this poker room instead of at a different poker room. For example, you may choose to play a lot at a certain poker room in order to qualify for a freeroll but at the cost of not having the time to work off a bonus at another site. In this case, one would have to take into account the quality of the freeroll compared to the quality of the other bonus when making a decision of where to play.

Source: http://www.pokertips.org/strategy/utilizing-promotions.php (abbreviated)

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