What does it take to execute a proper bonus chase? 

Just money, talent, and time.  Or, is it money, luck, and time?   Perhaps just good advice from fellow ITH'ers. I guess we'll find out.

Hi. I have been anointed as the first "official" ITH bonus chaser. The selection process was grueling, but I'm a survivor. My job is to chase, chase, chase, and then talk about it. I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, I'm the prototypical recycler, so I'm going to reuse the best bonus chasing techniques I can extract from fellow ITH'ers. The poker bonus landscape is clearly changing, so I may find the what worked last year for someone else, may not be ideal this month for me.

I'm starting with a $200 bankroll and will soon have a shiny new copy of Internet Texas Hold'em just in case I need some actual poker skills. The first issue I had to face was bankroll management. A standard rule-of-thumb says that you should restrict your play to limits where your bankroll is greater than about 300 times the big bet. Since bonus clearing rates can compensate for poor poker play (or bad cards) I feel comfortable with that ratio. By this rule my starting limit was .25/.50, so I desired to find as big a bonus as possible, with reasonable clearance rates at .25/.50. As a general rule, most bonuses are based on participating in a certain number of “raked” hands.

A raked hand occurs when you are dealt cards and the pot subsequently reaches a large enough size that the house extracts enough money from the pot to pass it's minimum rake threshold. Some sites just count hands over a minimum, while others give more bonus credit for pots that produce more rake. A limit of .25/.50 is the minimum limit that produces raked hands (for bonus purposes) at most sites. Luckily for me, Paradise Poker was advertising a 50%, up to $100 bonus for deposits made via Neteller. I had an existing Paradise account, so now I could make my first Neteller deposit count for something. Since most first deposit bonuses are in the 20% range, this was a godsend. Paradise also has between 5 and 10 tables going at .25/.50- so there was going to be no problem at all finding enough tables to earn my bonus money on.. I was going to have to play 10 raked hands per dollar of bonus (10x). 1000 raked hands, here I come. I ran into my first reality check at this point- clearance rates can be abysmal at .25/.50. The average pot sizes were running between $3.50 and $4.50. Near the upper end of the range about 25% of hands dealt ended up being raked. But, I also had the misfortune of spending one session at a table where only 15% of the hands were raked.

It was looking like my 10x bonus was going to require more than 40x in dealt hands. I had cleared about a third of my bonus in 1300 hands at .25/.50 and decided to move up a limit to preserve my sanity. My original goal to finish this first bonus in one week looked pretty foolish. Was moving up wise? I had the proper bankroll for .25/.50 but I really needed about $300 for .5/1. I had already won $36 and received $30 of my bonus money (Paradise gives it to you in $10 increments)- not quite enough. However, the bottom line of my cashier account showed the full $100 bonus added into my total.

It was easy to pretend that I really had $336 in my bankroll at this point, which was enough to play .5/1 limit. After all, I was winning... this was going to be easy. Yeehah! The higher limit did the trick. Now, I was clearing 55% of the hands I was dealt. This was a rate I could deal with- almost exactly double the smaller limit. Coincidentally, I was wagering exactly double the previous amount with each bet, so the bankroll risk was identical for .25/.50 and .50/1. The real improvement was that I had cut the TIME required to finish the bonus in half. I broke even playing poker, so no worries at .5/1.

First bonus finished. I'm an official bonus chaser now. Stats: 6 days, 7 sessions, 22 hours, 2800 hands dealt (1300 at .25/.5, 1500 at .5/1). Collected $100 in bonus, $39 in poker winnings ($36 at .25/.50, $3 at .5/1). Win rate of 2.7BB/100. Bankroll now at $339. Cash out to Neteller. On to the next site. Next week, it's time to Party!