- Low wagering requirements: a wagering requirement refers to how many times you will need to play through your bonus winnings before you are able to cash out. Say you win $100, but the wagering requirement is 65x, this means you will need to play through $6500 before you can withdraw. Believe us when we say, that will take a long time!
Actual cash or hands to play with: the bonus might offer you cash or rounds of poker, but if you have not read the terms and conditions, you might find that the bonus was actually an offering of something like tournament tickets all along. Actual cash is definitely the way forward, as it is more flexible.
Red Flags
Most red flags with welcome bonuses for poker come in the form of terms and conditions that need to be met in order to claim any of your bonus funds. It might seem super simple to cash out at first glance, but once you get into the small print, things seem to get a little more tricky. Here are some things to avoid at all costs:
- A short time limit: it’s fairly common for a welcome bonus to be limited in terms of the time you are allowed to play through it and cash out. Just make sure that this time limit isn’t too constraining, as you’ll have to have those wagering requirements in mind.
- Retrospective deposits required: one of the sneakiest terms is to have to put down cash after you have played through your winnings.
Limited games to play through wagering requirements: this isn’t too much of a problem with poker when compared to the likes of slot games, however, it is still worth bearing in mind. Some poker games might be left off of the wagering requirements playthrough, which means that any money you spend on them will not count towards that. Keep an eye out for this, as well as the rest of these points, in the terms and conditions.
It’s important to distinguish that there are, in fact, two categories of welcome bonus for poker: those that require a deposit to unlock and those that are credited as soon as you sign up. We call the latter of these a poker no deposit bonus, and that is what we are focusing on today.
Poker free money (no deposit) can come in a few forms, believe it or not. The two most popular of these are free cash and free hands, which aren’t too dissimilar from one another, but are still worth distinguishing from one another so that you know what you’re dealing with when you sign up for your first no deposit poker bonus:
- Free cash: this is probably the most common form of poker signup bonus (no deposit) simply because it is the least complicated. Here, you’ll be given a fixed amount of cash to play poker with just for signing up! You might see this written as ‘$100 free poker cash to play with when you sign up’.
Free bets or hands: this type of welcome offer is not too different, it’s just communicated in a slightly different way. Here, you’ll get a fixed amount of hands or bets on poker that are worth a certain amount. For example, you might get 10x $5 to play with.
Other Things to Note
The two things to note when considering these poker sign up bonuses are a) the terms and conditions that we mentioned before (namely the wagering requirements) and b) the fact that you might need to enter a promo code when you sign up.