Bonuses?

[Walkerbayist]

Ok, so my question is how do bonuses work? They give you the bonus and you play it but what happens if you lose the bonus you were given. Do you have to pay back the poker site and how could the poker sites afford to give away money like that? I'm extremely new to the online poker world and before i get set to play i just need to understand a few things. Thank you in advance to anyone who can help out here.

[jspill]

Well they're not actually giving away free money - to release $X of bonus you have to rake $Y on the site (by playing poker cash games/SNGs/MTTs, and usually Y is two or more times bigger than X. For example a $500 deposit bonus, needing $2000 in rake paid to be 100% released (comes in incremental chunks), is like getting 25% rakeback just from the bonus. Then you add that to the normal rakeback/rewards % you get while playing/earning points

It's a win win situation, the site incentivizes you to play, and it brings in new sign ups by marketing it (a little sneakily) as 'free cash'. That's a good thing though, the wording of it attracts recreational players.

What it really is, is effectively higher rakeback (or lower rake, same result) for your first period of play (many welcome bonuses last 90 days for example, during which you release as much as you can, often in 10% increments). Same thing for reload bonuses, when sites offer those for existing players. Or bonuses bought from a points store as part of a VIP program which you then need to clear (e.g. partypoker).

You still pay rake to clear the bonus, but get a lot of it back, which means a higher winrate. Say you pay 8bb/100 in rake, get 40% rakeback normally, and beat the games for 7bb/100 pre-rake, your overall winrate post-rake is (-8)+(3.2)+(10) = 2.2bb/100. Add a bonus to that that offers 33% extra rakeback, and your winrate becomes ~5bb/100 while the bonus lasts.

You can't 'lose' a bonus, all you can do is fail to clear it all. But nothing happens if so. You just play on as normal without the bonus afterwards. No need to pay anything back.

There are some small 'instant' bonuses on some sites which are free money, but you can't cash it out until you play a little and rake a certain amount, so really it's the same thing as a bonus. Only difference being you can play with the funds immediately.

Rakeback.com's sister site pokerbonus.com has some info text on each type of bonus - http://www.pokerbonus.com/bonus-codes/signup/