How to Clear Full Tilt Poker Bonus
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By Jack Sawyer
Full Tilt Poker is known around the world as one of the biggest online poker sites. It has one of the nicest and most effective interfaces of any site. Full Tilt also has an excellent sign up bonus to entice new players to play at the site all the time. It’s a 100% match up to $600, which means Full Tilt will match the money you deposit and add it to your account. Please take note that this bonus is released in $20 or 10% increments, whichever occurs first.
However, Full Tilt Poker will not simply hand $600 to you because they like you. They do like you for being their customer and preferring their site, but you will need to earn the bonus.
How is this done? As all things that are good and worth it, it can be done in a variety of ways. You will have to note a few things first. The bonus expires in 120 days, be sure to earn all your extra bonus cash before the expiration date. And also, you will have to get intimately familiar with Full Tilt Points, which are points you get from playing real cash games at FTP. The bonus is released at a rate of $0.06 per FTP. This means that in order to release a full $20 increment, you’d have to earn 333 1/3 FTPs (20 / 0.06 = 333 1/3). With a little extra math, we’d see that the max amount would take us 10,000 FTPs (600/20 * 333 1/3= 10000).
Now, how do you go about to collect FTPs? How many points you receive depends on the rake and tournament fees you pay. You will earn 1 point for every dollar in rake that is collected from a pot if you play in a cash game, and 7 points for every dollar you pay in tournament fees. In cash games, it is important to stress that the amount of FTPs is the same for everyone that was dealt into that hand.
Next to clearing up your awesome bonus, there are a ton of extremely cool prizes you can claim for the FTPs you collect. Among these you can find iPods, Plasma TVs, Nintendo Wii’s and even a Harley Davidson Softail Night-Train motorcycle.
Now the most important question, what is the fastest way to collect your required points? The answer to this question varies, of course, depending on how high you play and how much you play. Let’s start with tourneys, which include SNGs. If you’re 4-tabling and play, on average, two games per hour per table, this would equate to 8 games in a single hour of play. If you are playing at the $10+1 level, which is certainly within bankroll requirements for a $600 deposit, you’d get 56 points (8*7 = 56) per hour of play. 10K/56 is about 178.6 hours, but lets round it upwards to make it easier to calculate. Let's then say it will take you about 180 hours of grinding. Since you have 120 days to clear the bonus, you would just need to grind for 1.5 hours per day (180/120 = 1.5).
The average grind is about twice as long as what we calculated, so playing at the stated volume for 3 hours per day would clear of your bonus in just 60 days! To keep things simple, we avoided including all variables, such as running bad and having to drop down or running good and having to move up. Turbos might be even quicker than this in the points accumulation. Of course, you have to adapt the equation to suit your particular situation, since we know no two players play the same way. More tables = quicker and also higher = quicker!
With cash games, you also get partial points depending on how much is raked in the pot. Here follows the average of number of hands required to reach 10,000 FTPs at a few popular cash game levels:
200NL = 12,500 hands
100NL = 25,000 hands
50NL = 50,000 hands
25NL = 100,000 hands
The averages don’t lie. The higher you play, the quicker it clears, and very significantly so. A very hardcore grinder might get in about 2.5K hands in a 4 hour session of about 12 tables at 100NL Full Ring, which means he would be able to clear this bonus in just about 10 sessions. At 6max you will also see more hands than at full ring. On full ring tables, the amount of hands per hour can vary wildly, but a good estimate would be between 60 to 95 hands per hour per table. 6max tables will have averages around the 75 to 110 range.
Let us make a quick example to show how you would calculate how long it will take you to cash. We have already provided you with an estimate as to the amount of hands you might need to play to get to the 10,000 FTP mark. Now, at your chosen stake, let’s assume that you are playing about 75 hands per hour per table on average. 4-tabling yields 300 hands per hour, and a 3 hour session yields 900 hands.
If you are playing at 50NL, averaging 900 hands per session, it would take you approximately 56 sessions (50,000/900 = 56) to get to your mark. Not bad actually.
But remember, if you are depositing $600, 50NL should be outside of your bankroll requirements. Let’s take the same equation to 25NL, which requires on average about 100,000 hands. At 25NL you would need to play an average of 111 sessions (100,000/900 = 111), which is significantly more. At the chosen volume it is no good to play 10NL, which would require 250,000 hands to clear and the bonus would expire before you did.
If we up the number of tables to just 6, it would take 1350 hands per session ( 75 hands/hr * 6 tables * 3 hr sessions = 1350 hands/ session). At 50NL, 50,000 hands would take just 37 sessions to clear (50,000/1350 = 37). That is how you must calculate it, but you have to find out how many hands you are getting in per hour.
I hoped this guide helped clear some of the mysticism and mystery associated with the Full Tilt Poker Sign-up Bonus. Now all you have to do is sign up and get on the grind!
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