DavidC
10-04-2005, 08:19 AM
A guy recently PM'ed me with a few questions on bonus whoring, so I figured I'd make a post about it.
www.bonuswhores.com (http://www.bonuswhores.com) is a site dedicated to pursuing poker bonuses, and has its own forums for bonus discussion... we also recently have a sponsored forum (by bonuswhores), the Internet Bonuses Forum, on 2+2.
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Bonus whoring can bring people a ton of money, like, a lot. I think either Wookie or Greg said that you can make over 1k/month doing it. This is a very realistic outlook, obviously depending on how much time you put into it and what game format you're playing. You can generally whore at all games, including LHE, NLHE, draw, LO8, PLO8, etc. Bonus whoring is SO lucrative that it generally gives a microlimit player a bankroll that is way beyond his statistical requirements and would permit him to play in games that are beyond his ability, if he were to be a winning player at that limit.
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However, it's not necessarily 100% easy to bonus whore properly.
---
Firstly, you have to have enough of a poker roll to make bonus deposits without crippling your ability to keep playing in the meantime: If you have to take a day off work to get in a bonus, it may not be worth it (depending on what limits you play normally). Ironically, as a microlimit player, this bankroll size generally occurs after you've been bonus whoring for a while. I mean, back in the days when there were 20% reloads to $200 on Empire, and you could clear it in maybe 26 hours of 4-tabling 0.5/1, your bankroll requirement was only $300, but to get that bonus you had to be able to deposit $1000 into your account. That gives you some perspective.
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Second, you have to know and understand the terms of the bonus. Sometimes they have time requirements. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes you can only have one at a time, sometimes you can "stack" them on top of eachother so that you finish one, then another, then another. Sometimes your hands from failed bonuses carry forwards to other bonuses in progress. Somemtimes they disappear. Sometimes you try to get a bonus, but it fails and you have to contact customer service, sometimes they tell you you're SOL.
Some sites say that you have been attributed rake whenever you're dealt cards in a hand that's raked. Sometimes they say that you stayed to the end of a street on which there was rake (but a max of once per hand).
Sometimes they attribute an amount of rake paid by a player as: players dealt in / total gross rake paid in the hand.
Sometimes they do it by: whenever there's rake on a street, the number of players still involved in that street / rake paid on that street .
---
When determining true mathematical rake paid, that you should be aware of as a poker player, the true, but damn near impossible way of calculating it, is:
total rake going in on a given street * your equity in the hand on that street.
(equity here does not necessarily mean chance of winning in a showdown, but rather chance of winning the pot, which includes folding equity)
An example: You flopped quad Kings, you're betting into a guy with a pair of deuces unimproved, he's calling you to the river. Out of the total rake paid in the hand, how much of it came out of your pocket? 100%. That's right, 100%... this isn't the way poker sites look at it, though, as it's way too costly to calculate it that way, and way too confusing for the casual players to understand, and if you tracked it, you could tell roughly what a player had in a hand where you folded the river too. /images/graemlins/smile.gif
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I'll focus on party, since this is the site that many of you play, they define a raked hand as any hand with any rake (on Paradise I think it's any hand with a rake of $0.25 or greater).
Let's look at Multipoker's current 20x raked hands bonuses for a moment.
Deposit $100, get $100 in bonus after 2000 raked hands.
In order to figure out how many hands you need to play, you need to figure out how many hands are raked, as a % of total hands. This will obviously vary depending on the time of week, and the number of bonus whore rocks that are out there trying to get in their raked hands.
Luckily the bonus whores that you guys will run into at the 0.5/1 level on party are predominantly the weak-tight type, as opposed to the tight-aggressive-I'm-gunna-shag-yer-wife-and-there's-nothing-you-can-do-about-it type.
For this example, we're going to assume that roughly 50% of hands are being raked, that you're playing 2 tables of 0.5/1 LHE for approximately 100 hands per hour.
Definitions:
RM = Raked Multiple, set out by the site
HM = The number of hands that you have to play for every bonus dollar ("hand multiple")
PR = percent raked hands
X = The inverse of PR
B = Bonus dollars
HR = Total Hands Required
PR/100 = 1 / X
Therefore X = 100/PR
HM = RM * X
HR = B * HM
---
X in this case is 100/50 = 2
HR is therefore 20x 2 = 40.
B is 100.
Therefore HR is 4000. (You must play 4000 hands.)
---
To figure out your hourly rate, you do the following:
HPH = Hands per hour
HC = Hours to Complete Bonus
HRT = Hourly Rate
HC = HR/HPH
HRT = B/HC
---
HPH is 100, therefore HC is 40, therefore HRT is $2.50 per hour.
.............
This post will be continued when I have a chance. It will include stuff like:
-How your bb/100 works into the value of a bonus
-How rakeback works into the value of a bonus
-How your tradeoffs work at various limits and rakebacks
Edit: Please let me know if there's any mistakes here.
Edit: It's tuesday morning, and I woke up WAY before my day is supposed to start... can you tell?
www.bonuswhores.com (http://www.bonuswhores.com) is a site dedicated to pursuing poker bonuses, and has its own forums for bonus discussion... we also recently have a sponsored forum (by bonuswhores), the Internet Bonuses Forum, on 2+2.
---
Bonus whoring can bring people a ton of money, like, a lot. I think either Wookie or Greg said that you can make over 1k/month doing it. This is a very realistic outlook, obviously depending on how much time you put into it and what game format you're playing. You can generally whore at all games, including LHE, NLHE, draw, LO8, PLO8, etc. Bonus whoring is SO lucrative that it generally gives a microlimit player a bankroll that is way beyond his statistical requirements and would permit him to play in games that are beyond his ability, if he were to be a winning player at that limit.
---
However, it's not necessarily 100% easy to bonus whore properly.
---
Firstly, you have to have enough of a poker roll to make bonus deposits without crippling your ability to keep playing in the meantime: If you have to take a day off work to get in a bonus, it may not be worth it (depending on what limits you play normally). Ironically, as a microlimit player, this bankroll size generally occurs after you've been bonus whoring for a while. I mean, back in the days when there were 20% reloads to $200 on Empire, and you could clear it in maybe 26 hours of 4-tabling 0.5/1, your bankroll requirement was only $300, but to get that bonus you had to be able to deposit $1000 into your account. That gives you some perspective.
---
Second, you have to know and understand the terms of the bonus. Sometimes they have time requirements. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes you can only have one at a time, sometimes you can "stack" them on top of eachother so that you finish one, then another, then another. Sometimes your hands from failed bonuses carry forwards to other bonuses in progress. Somemtimes they disappear. Sometimes you try to get a bonus, but it fails and you have to contact customer service, sometimes they tell you you're SOL.
Some sites say that you have been attributed rake whenever you're dealt cards in a hand that's raked. Sometimes they say that you stayed to the end of a street on which there was rake (but a max of once per hand).
Sometimes they attribute an amount of rake paid by a player as: players dealt in / total gross rake paid in the hand.
Sometimes they do it by: whenever there's rake on a street, the number of players still involved in that street / rake paid on that street .
---
When determining true mathematical rake paid, that you should be aware of as a poker player, the true, but damn near impossible way of calculating it, is:
total rake going in on a given street * your equity in the hand on that street.
(equity here does not necessarily mean chance of winning in a showdown, but rather chance of winning the pot, which includes folding equity)
An example: You flopped quad Kings, you're betting into a guy with a pair of deuces unimproved, he's calling you to the river. Out of the total rake paid in the hand, how much of it came out of your pocket? 100%. That's right, 100%... this isn't the way poker sites look at it, though, as it's way too costly to calculate it that way, and way too confusing for the casual players to understand, and if you tracked it, you could tell roughly what a player had in a hand where you folded the river too. /images/graemlins/smile.gif
---
I'll focus on party, since this is the site that many of you play, they define a raked hand as any hand with any rake (on Paradise I think it's any hand with a rake of $0.25 or greater).
Let's look at Multipoker's current 20x raked hands bonuses for a moment.
Deposit $100, get $100 in bonus after 2000 raked hands.
In order to figure out how many hands you need to play, you need to figure out how many hands are raked, as a % of total hands. This will obviously vary depending on the time of week, and the number of bonus whore rocks that are out there trying to get in their raked hands.
Luckily the bonus whores that you guys will run into at the 0.5/1 level on party are predominantly the weak-tight type, as opposed to the tight-aggressive-I'm-gunna-shag-yer-wife-and-there's-nothing-you-can-do-about-it type.
For this example, we're going to assume that roughly 50% of hands are being raked, that you're playing 2 tables of 0.5/1 LHE for approximately 100 hands per hour.
Definitions:
RM = Raked Multiple, set out by the site
HM = The number of hands that you have to play for every bonus dollar ("hand multiple")
PR = percent raked hands
X = The inverse of PR
B = Bonus dollars
HR = Total Hands Required
PR/100 = 1 / X
Therefore X = 100/PR
HM = RM * X
HR = B * HM
---
X in this case is 100/50 = 2
HR is therefore 20x 2 = 40.
B is 100.
Therefore HR is 4000. (You must play 4000 hands.)
---
To figure out your hourly rate, you do the following:
HPH = Hands per hour
HC = Hours to Complete Bonus
HRT = Hourly Rate
HC = HR/HPH
HRT = B/HC
---
HPH is 100, therefore HC is 40, therefore HRT is $2.50 per hour.
.............
This post will be continued when I have a chance. It will include stuff like:
-How your bb/100 works into the value of a bonus
-How rakeback works into the value of a bonus
-How your tradeoffs work at various limits and rakebacks
Edit: Please let me know if there's any mistakes here.
Edit: It's tuesday morning, and I woke up WAY before my day is supposed to start... can you tell?