Bovada Poker Review

Would you believe me if I told you the Bovada name is actually older than Satan himself? If you answered yes, well, we’ll save a spot for you down here because there’s no way you’re going to make it up the long, steep road to Heaven.

Bovada is old as dirt, but it’s not quite that old. Bovada has been around since 1995, which isn’t really as old as we made it sound but it’s still pretty damned old for the internet. It started out as a gambling and entertainment company and didn’t open its poker room until 2004. By then the poker boom was picking up speed and Bovada was able to get in at just the right time.

The poker room is still relatively small but the players at Bovada are some of the worst you’ll find anywhere. A big reason behind the fishiness of the poker room is that it attracts a lot of inexperienced players from the casino. Someone might be playing blackjack in the Bovada casino, notice the poker room and then decide to drop in and play a few hands of poker.

Bovada Poker Deposit Bonus

If you sign up at Bovada Poker today and use the bonus code 747722 when making your first deposit, Bovada will match it with a 110% bonus. So if you deposit $400, Bovada will add an additional $440 on top of that.

The devil in the details: 10% of the bonus is given to you up front in cash with no string attached. After that, you’ll have 30 days to earn as many poker points as you can in real money cash games and tournaments to get the rest of the bonus. You can earn up to 1 poker point per hand in cash games and you’ll get 3 points per $1 paid in tournament fees.

Every ten poker points is worth $1 in bonus money. This means that if you get a $400 bonus and earn all 4,000 poker points in the first month, you’ll get the full $400. If you fall short, you’ll get whatever money you managed to clear.

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Tournaments

Bovada has a nice tournament selection and guarantees more than $5,000,000 in prize money every month. The Bovada weekly $100,000 guaranteed tournament is the biggest regular tournament at Bovada and someone wins at least $25,000 from it every week. Some of the other poker sites have larger Sunday tournaments but the Bovada tournaments have way fewer opponents competing for the same prize. A recent guaranteed tournament only had 576 people join in so Bovada had to add nearly $50,000 to the prize pool to meet the guarantee.

That kind of an overlay is really hard to find these days and it represents an amazing value for tournament players. Besides that, the tournament selection at Bovada is nice and diverse. You’ll find tournaments that cost nothing to enter, some that just cost a few dollars to enter and others that cost more than $100 a pop. No matter where you’re at in your poker career, you’ll find the right tournaments at Bovada.

Cash Games

The cash games at Bovada are notoriously soft thanks to all the casual players that wander in from the casino. All forms of Texas Holdem are available along with Omaha, Omaha Hi-Lo, 7 Card Stud, 7 Card Stud Hi-Lo and 5 Card Stud.

You’ll find the most players at the no limit Holdem tables but the other games occasionally have action at the small and medium limits.

High stakes cash games don’t happen very often at Bovada so you’ll probably want to stick with the middle and small stakes games here. If you’re looking for ultra high stakes cash games, Full Tilt Poker is your best option.

Bovada Software

Bovada’s software has a dark, rich theme with bold colors and crisp graphics. The tables were designed in a minimalist fashion without a bunch of extra doodads hogging up screen space. You get the table, the cards and the players and that’s about it. The lobby is intuitive so you won’t have any problems finding the games you want or identifying the best tables.

The games can be sorted and filtered so that you only see the games you want instead of having to scroll up down a long list of tables.

Depositing and Withdrawing

As a US-friendly poker site, Bovada has a variety of options that are open to US players and non-US players alike. The most popular deposit methods at Bovada Poker include:

• Visa
• MasterCard
• eWalletXpress
• Click2Pay
• NETeller
• Moneybookers
• Paysafecard
• Speed Card

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Players from the US will have to get their withdrawals via Cashier’s check but players from the rest of the world can get their money out through whichever method they used to deposit.

Customer Support

Bovada is one of the few poker rooms that has a 24 hour hotline made just for answering questions and helping out the customers. They have been in the business long enough to know that top notch customer service is critical to succeeding in the poker world. You can also contact them with a message form at the Bovada website. If you have a question or comment that’s not urgent, this is the best way to contact them. The support team is professional and they’ve never given me any problems.