The question is a cinch to answer for most highly skilled online players, professionals and semi-professionals. For a beginner though, who doesn’t even know what the differences between the above listed three deals are, it may be a tricky one. Let’s see how each of these player rewards work, maybe then you’ll be able to make a decent, informed decision on what you should pick over the other two. Sign-up bonuses: these guys are positively the most frequent promotions. Every online poker room offers a sign-up bonus in one shape or another. Most of these bonuses are percentage match ones, which means that when you make your first deposit, its size will determine the size of the bonus you’ll get too. In order to redeem the bonus, you’ll have to play in real money games and to generate poker rake or to pay tournament fees. At the end of the day, the bonus that you unlock is a percentage of the rake you generate, which means it’s pretty much the same as rakeback. There’s one significant difference however: rakeback deals never expire, while bonus deals do. You either unlock them completely (they represent finite amounts of money after all) or they simply expire and you forfeit all of them or the part that you failed to redeem. Rakeback deals may be a tad slower to reward players than sign-up bonuses, but they never expire. Once a player signs up for he’ll continue to receive rakeback every month or every week for the rest of his life, or rather for as long as his account exists at the poker site where he got the deal. Remember, rakeback deals carry no obligations for players whatsoever. Rakeback-receiving players enjoy the same promotions and the same overall treatment as their regular rakeback-less peers.

Poker prop deals offer players outstanding rake rebate and in this respect they’re far more generous than square rakeback deals and sign-up bonuses put together. To secure such a deal, you need to become a poker prop. What’s a poker prop? A poker prop is a player hired by the poker room to provide action at the tables. As such, he obviously has a bunch of obligations, but he gets lavishly rewarded for his services. It is not uncommon for poker props to earn more than 100% rakeback, which means that these guys are basically paid to play poker. If that sounds like your dream job, you should also know that poker props are told where they can play, they will have to deal with lots of short-handed situations and they won’t be allowed to take part in some of the promotions made available for regular players.