GG Online Poker

If you are pondering over the idea of playing online poker, you can easily find yourself confused by a variety of sign-up offers and marketing hooks.

This understandable, considering that once you sign up to a poker room via a particular offer, you can’t just close your account and re-sign up, so you don’t want to make the wrong decision.

Hopefully I can share my experience with you, and make the decision much easier - it really isn’t that complicated. You can also ask me a question on this tumblr.

What’s up with the $600 bonus?

Many poker sites, including the two giants PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, advertise a matching bonus of up to $600. Some sites may offer a larger bonus, such as $1100 as offered by Ultimate Bet, but, to the best of my knowledge, you this bonuses is offered for a new account. In other words, there aren’t any special offers that can get you a bigger bonus. It doesn’t matter when you or though whom you sign up, you’ll still always get the same bonus.

About Rakeback

Here’s where ‘who should I sign up through?’ question has a much bigger impact on your decision. Rakeback is a weekly rebate paid to your account that is determined by the number of hands you played during that particular week and the stakes you play at.

How much rakeback can you get?

It really varies depending on the factors I mentioned, and it can range from something like a couple of bucks per week if you only play a little at micro stakes, to something much more substantial if you are a grinder and/or play higher. The point is, it’s essentially free money, and you need to be to properly sign up through a rakeback affiliate or else you will NOT be eligible for rakeback.

Where do I sign up to set up rakeback for my account?

The truth is that there are may reputable rakeback providers - rakeback.com, raketherake. rakerebate, etc. They all generally pay the same amount of rakeback, 27% in case of Full Tilt. Personally, I signed up through RakeTheRake and I’m very satisfied with the way they do business. Every Friday I get an e-mail Full Tilt telling me that I’ve received a transfer into my account; they have never missed or delayed a payment. Once in a while they’ll also hold a sizeable ($30,000 prize pool) freeroll tournament for their members. So far I’ve received $899.68 in rakeback from RakeTheRake. RakeTheRake also does rakeback for other major poker rooms, including Cake Poker and Ultimate Bet. PokerStars currently does not offer any rakeback.

More on bonuses poker room selection

So far I’ve played on Poker Stars, Full Tilt Poker and Cake Poker. I would rate them with Full Tilt being my favorite, Pokerstars being a solid second, and Cake Poker as not worth playing. One site I’d perhaps like to try in the future is Ultimate Bet.

If you choose to follow my lead, and do sign up for Full Tilt or PokerStars, you’ll have the chance to get a deposit bonus of up to $600. What that means is, whatever the the amount you deposit up to $600 gets credit with a matching bonus that you “release” by playing. What, you didn’t think there was going to be a catch? There is another condition - the bonus expires after a certain point in time. Because of this, I think I only cleared $300 of my $600 bonus at Full Tilt, but that was in part because I split my time between PokerStars and Full Tilt at the time. The good thing about Full Tilt’s bonus is that you get in increments of $20 at a time, which I’m not sure is the case with Pokerstars - they used to have it so that if you don’t clear the whole bonus by the expiration date, you miss out completely.

So to sum things up: if you decide to give real money poker a shot, definitely sign up through a rakeback offer, try to take advantage of the maximum possible bonus by depositing the full $600, but don’t lose sleep if you can’t clear it all, especially if you are a beginning player.