After you’ve installed the PokerStars download, earning (releasing) your bonus shouldn’t be too difficult. What you have to do is participate in real money games, and you will be earning VIP Player Points (VPP) while you are at it. This is a 17x bonus, which means you have to earn 17 times the amount you deposited in VPPs in order to clear the PokerStars bonus. So, if for example you deposited $300, 17 x $300 = 5100 VPP will be needed to clear the bonus. If instead the amount deposited is the entire $600, 17 x $600 = 10,200 VPPs will be required to clear the whole thing. The bonus will be credited to your account in $10 increments, meaning that every time you earn 170 VPPs you will have earned a chunk of the bonus. Cash and tourney games count towards the sign up bonus, so no matter which you play, you will be earning VPPs while doing it. You have 180 days to earn the required amount of VPPs before the bonus expires.

Of course, the speed with which the PokerStars bonus clearing occurs depends entirely on what games you play, and at what stakes. Say you decide to play 25NL cash games (which, bankroll-wise, if you deposited only $600 you should not be playing), it will take you approximately 159,376 hands at Full Ring or about 110,870 hands at 6-Max to clear the whole bonus. Notice that these are the approximate maximum playing only the one or the other, and if you mix and match Full Ring and 6-Max games, you will need lower amounts. If you play higher, for example $50NL, the amounts drop yet again this time to an approximate of 77,273 poker hands for Full Ring and 56,667 hands for 6-Max.

Any other combination will also lead to clearing your bonus, such as playing both cash and tournaments, or playing exclusively MTT poker. A total of 5.50 VPPs will be earned for every $1 you pay in tournament fees. Let’s take for example that you play $15+$1 tourneys, you’d have to play 10,200/5.5 = about 1,855 tourneys to release your entire bonus. Raise the stakes to $25+$2, and it would take half as many to clear it. As already thoroughly explained, these are simply the extremes in any one category of games you could play; different combinations of game types and stakes will give you different results.

It’s important to remember that differing combinations of stakes and games will lead to amounts which are different than those extremes. But one thing should be clear to you, and that is that the amount of play required to release the bonus lowers if the stakes are increased, and goes up if the stakes are decreased. One possible scenario in which a player may clear the whole bonus, is to play 50% $10+$1 SNGs, 25% 25NL FR and 25% 50NL 6-max. In that scenario, you would need about 900 SNGs, about 36,000 poker hands 25NL FR and about 14,500 hands 50NL 6-max.