Accessing an online poker room will not only allow you to play various poker options, but experience several other appealing factors. One of these is the ability to claim special offers, including welcome bonuses and other rewards.
While these rewards are highly appealing for several reasons, there is one part about receiving bonuses that may come as a bit of a shock to you if you’re not aware of it beforehand – wagering requirements. That’s why we’re here to inform you on everything relating to these. This way, you won’t come across any surprises while you’re enjoying your poker experience.
So, let’s take a look at everything surrounding wagering requirements in this full guide to them.
What Are Wagering Requirements?
It’s not uncommon for online platforms to tempt new players to their sites with welcome offers, which often feature bonus funds. Additionally, these poker rooms will sometimes provide regular gamers with extra bonus rewards further down the line. Wagering requirements are a part of the terms and conditions that are attached to these bonuses. If you’ve ever heard of the phrase, “always read the small print”, then this certainly applies to receiving bonuses.
That’s because the details of the wagering requirements should be explained to you in the terms and conditions of the bonus that you are intending to receive. Each poker site will come with different wagering requirements, so it’s important that you seek these conditions out before going ahead with accepting a bonus.
So, what exactly are the wagering requirements?
Well, you may have heard of these at casino platforms before, but they do differ in relation to poker sites. Usually, at a poker platform, you make your deposit and claim the bonus, but this isn’t released to you straight away. You need to buy in to poker games, effectively operating as a wager in this circumstance, to be able to release the bonus funds.
Every time that you reach a certain level with your bets/buy-ins, a set amount of the bonus is released to you.
How Do Wagering Requirements Work?
It’s probably easiest to explain this part of wagering requirements to you with an example. So, let’s say that you join a poker platform and make a deposit of €100. The site’s welcome bonus provides you with 100% on top, up to €500. In this instance, you’ve deposited €100 and have a bonus of €100 available.
The bonus offer then provides you with information that you need to earn something known as “redemption points”, which come from playing real-money poker games. Let’s say that this particular poker room allows you to receive 5.5 redemption points for every €1 you pay in rake or tournament fees. Then, each time you reach a total of 230 redemption points, the site will credit your account with €10 in bonus money. So, with 5.5 points coming your way with every €1 bet, you need to buy in a total of about €42 to earn 230 points.
Naturally, in this instance, you’d need to amass a total of 2,300 redemption points (230 x 10) to receive the full €100 bonus. And this amount has to be reached within a set time period, too. Again, each poker room has its own specific time periods for players to buy into games and earn points.
How Do I Complete the Wagering Requirements?
So, taking the example mentioned earlier, you would need to amass the 2,300 points from wagering €420 in buy-ins in total on poker games at the site.
All you need to do is just continue to buy-in and play the poker games, and you’ll start to see your points mounting up. And the bonus should automatically be released to you once you reach the relevant amount of points for your deposit and poker site.
Something else to keep a note of, is that some poker sites also allow you to make more than one deposit so as to receive the maximum reward from such an offer. So, in our example, you could make a first deposit of €100 to receive €100 on top and then make a secondary deposit of €150 to receive the same amount as that on top, meaning that you would garner €250 in total across two deposits. The redemption of these bonus funds would work in the same way as already mentioned.
Other Things to Remember About Poker Wagering
Obviously, the details of receiving a bonus from an online poker site are very different to online casinos, which release the bonus straight away and require players to place bets afterwards to equal a certain amount.
While this is quite different, some details remain the same. For example, the fact that there is a specific time period for you to redeem all of your points in and receive the bonus funds is very much like the wagering requirement completion time period of a bonus from an online casino.
However, unlike casino bonus funds, you’re not usually restricted to playing certain types of poker. Any buy-in will usually contribute towards the release of the bonus funds, so you’re not quite as restricted when it comes to receiving poker rewards.
