What Exactly Do We Mean By ‘Poker Promotions’?

Quite simply, promotions are events, activities or offers organised by the poker rooms that are designed to attract new players, make sure that current registered players are happy and keep coming back for more action, or simply to increase awareness of the brand that’s running them – and often a combination of all three.

Competition between poker operators is fierce – you may already have noted that there are dozens of different poker rooms to pick from from. Each operator has to work hard to promote their own games and software.

Some can differentiate themselves with focus on how many players they have on tables at any one time, many offer side games like blackjack and slots, and of course having a wide range of game types and tournaments is important.

But still behind all of this there is always a need for something extra. That’s where poker promotions come into their own.

What Types Of Promotions Are There?

Poker promotions can include anything from special bonuses to holiday prizes, tournament entries, draws, poker points races, VIP schemes etc. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular types…

Bonuses

Poker bonuses do also fall under the umbrella of promotions, clearly they’re also designed to entice new depositors and reward existing players. But to my mind bonuses are a little different than promotions – a bonus offer tends to be longer term (you’ll see the same bonus offered for many weeks or months even), whereas promotions tend to be shorter term in nature. They’re available until the poker promotions team think up a new clever offer or the promo hits its closing date.

Different types of bonuses are covered in depth on the betting bonuses page, however one perfect example is the long-running $88 free offer from 888Poker. 888 are one of the well known poker rooms who have been around and serving up high quality poker games for many years.

Their $88 promotion is focused on giving you $88 free just to play poker games.  It starts off with a free $8 in your account on registration, broken down into $2 worth of ring games cash and $6 of tournament tickets. You’ll then get 10 x $8 gifts as you collect 888 Status Points – released in the same $2/$6 split as for the initial offer – for every 250 points earned.

To me, this is a no lose offer. OK it’s not vast riches, but for anyone starting out it does at least give free cash to get practicing.

Tournaments

Tournaments are popular with regular players, and of course you can get online and land based tournaments. Playing in poker tournaments is a brilliant way of getting lots of playing time for your money, often for small entry fees.

So because of this popularity, you’ll find lots of promotions which revolve around poker tournaments. These can be free entry tickets, or tournaments where the prizes can give extremely valuable entries to major online or land tournaments.

Points Races

These will normally kick off and end on specific dates, but you can enter at any time within those dates. Players earn points for how many hands played. The person with the most at the end gets the prize.

Pros

It’s not too hard to find a bunch of positives around poker promos, just as you’d expect about anything that gives you either something for free,  or for a chance of winning valuable sums for reasonable outlays, or just plain gives you the opportunity to win something huge.

Each new promo released gives the chance for you to experience one of these and sometimes a lot more.

Just imagine being one of those lucky tournament winners who gets to play in a major land-based final after winning a satellite entry promotion!

Cons

Cons? Unlikely you might say!

And you’d be right. It’s hard to think of any.

Of course we know there are sometimes restrictive rules around the use of bonuses, but you just need to be careful with those and make sure you know what you’re getting.

When it comes to playing poker for cash, travel, or tournament entry prizes you could argue that seeing these offered in promotions may encourage you to play when and where you wouldn’t normally have (and consequently risk losing or spending money you might not have).

That last point is worth bearing in mind before you risk anything, but the fact is that most offers are only going to offer benefits. The normal rules around responsible gambling should always be firmly in your thoughts.