Bodog Poker Review

Bodog Is One Of The Most Trusted Names In Online Gaming

Bodog has been offering online gambling since 1994, well before online poker became popular. They have been one of the biggest names in the business ever since, and offer not only poker but sports betting, casino, and horse racing. The poker end of the business is actually only a small part of the overall operation, even though it’s one of the fastest growing poker rooms on the internet.

One of the things that really stands out at Bodog is the effort they have spent in building up the value of their brand. In fact, the owner of the brand, Calvin Ayre, has since franchised out the various components of the operation and all he owns now is the Bodog brand, although that is a very valuable property indeed.

It’s only as valuable as the company’s reputation though and there’s probably no online gaming company that goes to the lengths they do in order to preserve it, which means only offering the finest online gaming experiences around and ensuring their players are always satisfied and well taken care of. With over 1000 employees worldwide, this is definitely their primary focus.

Poker, Casino, And Sports Betting All From The Same Account

For those players who not only enjoy poker but other forms of online betting as well will appreciate the fact that at Bodog, you can take advantage of all these different forms of betting all from the same bankroll. I’m not a fan of casino games personally as I like to have an edge when I bet, but I do appreciate that a lot of people find this entertaining, and who knows, you might get lucky and hit a real big score.

I’m a serious sports bettor though and really like being able to play poker with my sports betting bankrolls. That way I can have the advantage of being able to play at another poker room without having to maintain a separate bankroll for it. This is especially nice if the poker room has the kind of real juicy and profitable poker tables that they have at Bodog. If you have a mid size or smaller bankroll and you like to bet on more than one thing this becomes even more important, as you may not even have the money to do both effectively. Most players in fact don’t.

The idea here, at least in terms of sports betting and poker, is that you never have your sports betting bankroll all in play, and only have a certain percentage of it wagered at any one time. So for instance you may look to only wager a quarter of it. You need the other three quarters there as if you didn’t you’d be putting yourself at too much risk. So if you can use it to play poker, that’s definitely a big advantage, as it’s money that’s just sitting there idle and you can use it to make extra profit at the poker tables.

Bodog Poker Is Populated With Mostly Sports Bettors And Casino Gamblers

As poker players, we know what sort of commitment and dedication that it takes to be a good poker player. Even if we’re newer poker players, we’re still poker players as opposed to something else. So it only makes sense that, given the choice, we’d much prefer to play against non poker players, who are simply looking for a little diversion from their normal game, and are looking for action and to gamble it up. We do have this choice and one of the best choices here for this is at Bodog Poker.

The overwhelming majority of players at Bodog are not poker players in any sense of the word, as this site caters to mostly other forms of gambling. Some of these other players do mess around with poker though, which is the great thing for us. So they will be playing way too many hands and paying you off time and again with your better cards. This is like old time poker before most players really knew what they were doing. For the most part, they still don’t at Bodog Poker.

There are some other poker rooms out there like this, where it’s a network full of sports betting and casino sites along with a few smaller poker sites mixed in. At Bodog, this mixture is as pure as it gets.

Now your success at poker will ultimately come down to one thing, which is how good or bad the people you play against are. Money is made from fish, it is not made against good players. Over time, you’ll come out even against other good players if you’re a good player, win a little if you’re a great player, and lose various amounts if you’re not good enough. Against fish, you’ll do much better, even if you’re a brand new player, since they are so much easier to beat.

Traffic At Bodog Poker

Like a lot of the best places to play poker online, the traffic levels at Bodog Poker, at least at the present time, isn’t going to blow you away. However, one of the biggest mistakes that most players make is not understanding properly what role a poker site’s traffic plays. While you do need at least a decent amount of traffic, as long as there is enough, then more isn’t desirable, it’s an excess and really isn’t meaningful at all.

For instance, if you play one table at a certain game, and there are only three tables running of your game at a given poker site, well you only need one, and three is fine. However some people think you should have 50 or 100. That’s just plain ridiculous. They might think, well you need the selection, but at the site that has only 3, all are probably good tables. At the site which has 50 or 100 running, all three of the tables at the smaller site might be more profitable than any of them at the bigger site. In fact, this is almost always true.

In fact, one of the things I really look for when choosing a poker site is their not having a ton of traffic. I know that all the big grinders will be staying away, the kind that play 12 or 16 tables, and play super tight, and while they can be beat, I’d rather play against people who will part with their whole stacks on a whim. So Bodog’s traffic is on the lighter side, but that’s actually a good thing, and it’s quality that matters here not quantity. Bodog Poker has the quality you need.

Bodog Poker Game Variety And Tournament Fun

Bodog Poker offers a wide variety of different forms of poker, including limit and no limit Texas Hold’em, 7 card stud, 7 card stud hi, 7 card stud lo, 5 card stud, Omaha, Omaha hi, and Omaha hi/lo. They offer both cash games and tournaments, with the tournaments being particularly popular.

They offer a weekly $100K guaranteed tournament which is well populated with weak players, and it’s definitely among the fishiest big money tournaments you’ll find anywhere on the internet. You can buy in directly for $150 + $12, or earn your seat through one of the many qualifiers, starting for as little as $1.

They also offer you a chance to compete in their week long Bodog Poker Open. The latest championship offered a total prize pool of $200,000, with $50,000 going to the winner, along with a $5000 watch, and all the glory that comes with winning this prestigious event.

Another popular tournament event is the King of the Felt competition, which rewards successful sit and go players with weekly prizes, and it’s very easy to qualify. The winner gets to play the reigning king heads up for $1000, and you remain king until you get beaten in one of these matches. You can even win a seat at the 2013 WSOP if you’re good enough and can keep your title for enough weeks in a row.

They also offer other ways to win a seat to the World Series of Poker, with many qualifiers running throughout the year. For as little as a dollar, you can take a shot at going to the world’s biggest poker event. They have qualifiers designed to suit every budget, and the bigger the entry fee, the better your chances of winning the ultimate prize.

Aside from this, there is a very good selection of both cash and tournament tables running day and night at Bodog Poker, and even more importantly, your chances of doing well at them are enhanced by the softer competition that you generally find here, from the sheer amount of non-poker specialists that play at Bodog. Once again, it’s quality and not quantity that counts, and the quantity at Bodog is decent, while the quality is first rate, which is a nice combination.

Bodog Poker Bonuses And Bonus Code

Bodog offers an instant bonus of 10% along with a matching bonus of 100% of your first deposit up to an additional $1000 in bonus money. So this deal is a little better than most, since you don’t have to wait at all to get your hands on some bonus money to play with. Immediately upon making your first deposit, your 10% initial bonus becomes added to your account. Then, as you try out their site, more and more gets added until you have cashed in on the entire amount.

Every hand where you contribute to the rake and every tournament where you pay an entry fee collects you poker points, and 10 poker points works out to $1 in bonus money. They also give you extra player points just for time spent playing, something other poker sites don’t do. They pay out the bonus in stages, rather than having you wait until you earn enough to get the whole thing, as they don’t want to make you wait, and you don’t want to wait either. Whenever you hit a new level, you get paid the corresponding bonus amount the next day. They give you 60 days to earn enough poker points to collect the whole thing.

There’s no need to enter a bonus code to get this deal as we’ve arranged for you to get it automatically just by visiting them through our special link and signing up. Even if you don’t have money to put in immediately, it’s a good idea to go to their site and register to make sure you don’t miss out on this offer. However, if you can deposit right away, you definitely should, as the sooner you get started the sooner you will get paid.

Bodog Poker Promotions

After you’ve finished freeing up your initial deposit bonus, you continue to collect poker points as you continue to play there, and these points can be redeemed for free entries into some nice tournaments. They give away $15,000 at these free tournaments every month, and while that might not blow you away, it will when you see how few people play at them compared to similar offers at most other poker sites.

With these premium freerolls, their value is the total prize money divided by the number of entrants, which gives you your expected value of playing. One of the beauties of playing at a mid size poker site like this is that you don’t have to compete with a ton of other players for these prizes, and to make things even better, if you’re a decent player or better you can expect to do much better than the average here. So this adds up to a nice bonus every month just for playing there.

Bodog Poker also offers a bad beat bonus which, in contrast to most other sites, doesn’t require you to have a ridiculously strong hand like quad aces or kings to qualify. At Bodog the cut off is a full house, aces over kings, meaning that this will happen much more often than the usual bad beat payoffs. They also have a royal flush bonus where you can really cash in whenever you get the king of poker hands. I’ve had several of them over the years but didn’t collect since it wasn’t at Bodog. If it was, I would have gotten paid extra, which would have been nice.

Instead of redeeming your poker points for free tournament seats, you can redeem them for cash instead. Just about every poker room offers frequent player points, but not a lot of them let you trade them for cash. As I always say, nothing beats cash, and you can then use the money to play whatever you want, or even pocket it as extra profit.

Bodog Poker Software

One of the things that some players don’t like about the software at Bodog Poker is that it only supports four tables at once. There are very few poker rooms around these days where you can only play four tables. This is actually a benefit though as it scares off the big grinders, players you don’t want playing at your poker site anyway. If someone really needs to play more tables than that, they can play four at Bodog Poker, and then play as many as they want or need to at other poker sites at the same time. So this complaint is a rather dumb one, although it’s fortunate for us that they are dumb.

Other than that, the software at Bodog is quite good, and while it’s not the cutting edge by any means, it’s pleasant, workable, fairly customizable, and most importantly, very fast. As a matter of fact, more bells and whistles means bigger files and slower performance. The software at Bodog is a very nice combination of speed and playability in fact, and is well liked among the players there.

Bodog Poker Deposits And Withdrawals

Bodog is definitely good at processing financial transactions, as they have been doing business online for several years before online poker was invented. Due to the sheer size of their operation and their considerable experience in online gambing, you can count on then to take care of you well in this regard.

Popular deposit and withdrawal options include Visa and Mastercard, eWalleteXpress, MyPayLinQ, Click2pay, Moneybookers, Neteller, Paysafecard, and Speed Card. So all you do is pick whichever option suits you the best, and you are on your way.

Bodog Reputation And Customer Service

Bodog is definitely one of the most trusted names in online gaming, and one of the real benefits of playing poker there is that the same attention and concern for their players that goes into their much larger sports betting and casino operations goes into the poker side of the operation as well. They have been doing all of this very successfully for many more years than other poker rooms have been in existence. In such times of relative uncertainty and doubt, with all that has gone on in the online poker industry lately, it’s very nice to know that your money is held by such a solid and respected company.

Bodog’s customer service is also top notch, offering prompt and friendly answers to all of your questions. I’d like to see a live chat feature added, but they do offer excellent telephone support in addition to the standard email support. I give them top marks for their customer service overall.

My Recommendation

Bodog Poker has a lot going for it. First of all, there’s the fact that it’s run by Bodog, which is an extremely well set up and well run operation. Their poker site is among the fishiest around, especially at the lower stakes where most players should start out at. The higher stakes are also fishier than you normally see, and all of this is made possible by having a high percentage of their poker traffic being players whose main game is something else other than poker. They give you a nice bonus for trying them out, and it’s all about you discovering for yourself the benefits of our recommended sites, and that’s exactly what I suggest you do.