Available to players in New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the $150+ bonus at PokerStars Casino is our #1 recommended bonus for new online casino players. After wagering just $1, you can claim over $150 worth of casino and poker perks — that’s incredible value for very little commitment.

This bonus is a combination of casino credits and various poker tournament tickets. On top of what you get inside the $150 package, you’ll also receive 50 Spin & Go tickets worth $1 each.

How it works, in a nutshell: Sign up to PokerStars US (no bonus code needed!), deposit, and opt-in to the $150 bonus in your account. Bet $1, and the bonus is issued as a mix of casino credits and tournament entries over a six-day period.

While you don’t get to use the full amount at once, the upside is that you’re guaranteed to have some fun for the next few days and experience different parts of the casino and the poker room — and the whole time you’re playing with the casino’s money, not yours.

The PokerStars Casino $150+ bonus provides an amazing opportunity to win some money using house credits. But it can be confusing how it works — and how to make the most of it. That’s where this guide comes in.

We’ll explain how to sign up and opt-in, the mechanics of the promotion, the best games and slots to play, and highlight common player mistakes and pitfalls. And while there is no foolproof strategy to turn your bonus into actual cash, we’ll provide some tips that let you take full advantage of this generous offer and give you the best chances of winning money.

PokerStars Casino $150+ Bonus: How to Claim

Here are seven things you first need to know before jumping in.

1. All new players that sign up to PokerStars Casino with this link can claim $150+ worth of bonus perks.
2. The offer is open to anyone living in — or visiting — Michigan, Pennsylvania or New Jersey — the three states PokerStars offers its online casino.
3. Once signed up, make a deposit of any amount.
4. Opt-in for the offer from your account.
5. Place a wager of $1 on any casino game of your choosing.
6. This will immediately trigger the bonus package, and the first of six days starts immediately.
7. Each day, you will find your bonus reward inside a Chest

You will need to place a qualifying wager within five days from opening your account. This is an important thing to keep in mind, as if you don’t claim the bonus within this time, the offer will expire. So, if you’re interested in this offer, you should open an account when you’re ready to make a deposit.

The wager will trigger the bonus package, which is distributed over the course of six days, starting with the day you place the qualifying bet. Every day, you will receive a new chest containing a different reward, namely:

• Day 0 – 50x $1 Spin & Go Tickets & 2x $5 Spin & Go tickets
• Day 1 — $10 casino bonus
• Day 2 — 2x $5 Spin & Go ticket and one $10 tournament ticket
• Day 3 — $10 casino bonus
• Day 4 — 2x $10 tournament ticket
• Day 5 — $30 casino bonus

PokerStars Casino Credits: How it Works

You will get a total of $50 in casino credits (two lots of $10 and one lot of $30 on the final day). The Bonus Credits are yours to enjoy on any game. You can sit down and try out table games, video poker, slots — anything you like. The bonus amount will be used as you place bets.

The only “catch” here is that you can’t just immediately withdraw bonus money or any money you win when playing with it — bonuses cannot be cashed out. However, you can “convert” the bonus into cash, and that can be withdrawn. To do that, you need to earn enough redemption points by playing games.

The rule to remember here is that you need to earn 2 redemption points (RPs) for every $1 in casino bonus. So, unlocking the $10 bonus credits requires 20 redemption points. For the entire bonus, you’ll be getting $50 in bonus credits, so you need to generate 100 RPs.

So, how do you earn redemption points, you’re probably asking? That’s where things get a little complicated. The simple answer is that you earn points by playing casino games. Almost all games count, except live dealer games. However, not all games generate RPs at the same rate.

How to Use PokerStars Bonus Tournament Tickets

A large portion of your PokerStars welcome bonus will be issued as tickets for poker tournaments. If you enjoy playing poker as is, this is good news, as getting a fair bit of money out of these tickets shouldn’t be too hard.

There are two types of tickets you’ll be picking up:

• Spin & Go tickets
• Regular tournament tickets

You can use Spin & Go tickets to enter Spins of the appropriate buy-in. The 50 tickets you’ll receive on the first day are for $1 Spin & Goes, while the rest of the package is a mix of $5 and $10 tickets.

These tournaments feature a random prize that can be as high as 12,000 times the buy-in and only last a few minutes, so even if you are very new to poker, with a bit of luck, you can get a fair bit of value.

The rest of the tickets are for MTTs (multi-table tournaments), which do take longer to complete, so you’ll need to set some time aside to be able to realize their full potential.

The good news is that all the winnings go straight to your balance, so you can use cash them out, use them to play more poker, or head back to the casino.

PokerStars USA $150+ Welcome Bonus: Best Games to Clear the Casino Bonus

Unlike poker winnings, before you can withdraw any of the money issued as a casino bonus, you need to earn two Redemption Points for every $1 in Casino Credits received. If you aren’t too bothered about this — just enjoy the casino, play the games you want to play, and watch as you accrue redemption points. Once you have enough, you can withdraw.

However, if you’re reading this guide, you probably want to apply a bit of strategy to give yourself the best shot at turning those bonus credits into real money. Here are our recommendations.

Start with Spin & Goes

We recommend you start with your Spin & Go tickets. You’ll receive 50 of these right off the bat, allowing you to enter 50 $1 Spin and Go tournaments.

As mentioned, these only last a few minutes and you can play a few at the time, so it shouldn’t take you more than a couple of hours to play through the tickets.

With this, you’ll get some cash straight into your balance. Depends on what you prefer, you can keep doing this with other tickets and building your balance for one big session or you can use the winnings to play some more immediately. Or, of course, if you’re happy with what you win, you can even cash it out.

Slots: The Smart Choice for Clearing the Casino Bonus Quickly

Let’s look at an average slot with a RTP of 96% – 97%, You will earn one redemption point for every $3 to $3.50 you wager (the exact amount varies for each slot). To release your $10 in casino credits, you need 20 points, so you’ll need to wager around $65 in total.

At 97% RTP, on average when you bet $65 you’ll get back $63 — a loss of about $2 (and the math is the same regardless of whether you do that in one big spin or lots of little ones). So you’ll keep $8 of your $10.

However, that’s just an average — slots have very high variance. Most of the time, you lose a lot more than 97% — and then, when you’re lucky, you’ll win many tens of hundreds of times your bet.

So keep that in mind. But from a straight “expected value” perspective, slots can be a great choice. It’s also quick to wager $65 on a slot, even when you bet the minimum, so it won’t take you a long time to clear the bonus daily.

Tables Games — A Lot More Play Through

If slots are not your cup of tea, you can also use your bonus to play electronic table games like blackjack, baccarat and roulette. Your Casino Credits are valid for pretty much all games on the site except for live dealer tables – these you can only play with real money.

The challenge with this is that table games have much lower wagering contributions, so it will take you much longer to turn Casino Credits into cash. In the table below, you can find Redemption Point rates for some of the most popular table games:

So lets take Blackjack. The house edge on this is typically around 0.5% if you play optimal strategy, the equivalent of a 99.5% RTP. However, you need to wager $600 — so you will expect to lose around $3.

That still means on average you’ll get to keep $7 of your $10 bonus. That’s actually a bit less than playing a 97% RTP slot. It will also take you a lot longer to wager $600 at Blackjack — especially if you bet a low amount like 25 cents a hand.

And that’s a good thing, if you enjoy playing Blackjack! And the upside is that the variance of Blackjack is much lower than slots, so you have a higher chance of completing the wagering requirement without busting — especially if you bet small every hand.

Video Poker Also Has High RTP — But Worse Value than Slots

The situation is similar for video poker. These are games with a very low house edge, resulting in much lower wagering contributions. To earn one point, you need to wager $21 on a game like All American, and all the way up to $70 on Jacks or Better!

Perfect strategy on good Jacks or Better games can have an RTP as high as Blackjack — 99.5%. But with $1400 to wager to clear a $10 bonus, you will lose $7 of that amount. So we only recommend this choice if you’re a big fan of playing a lot of video poker.

Picking something like Deuces Wild might look more appealing — the requirement for that is only $600. However, perfect strategy at Deuces Wild has an RTP of around 99%, but with a $850 wagering requirement, that’s still a loss of $5.80, and this game has very high variance.

In summary, if video poker is your game of choice, you can definitely clear the $10 bonus on a variety of games — just keep in mind that its a very high wagering requirement, a high risk of ruin, and your expected value is lower than slots or some table games.

Best Strategy to Clear the PokerStars Bonus

We recommend one of two strategies to clear the casino bonus each of the three days — slow and steady, if you want to get the most play on the bonus and your best chance of finishing with bonus in your account; or high-volatility, if you want to try and run up a big win each day.

Let’s break it down.

Slow & Steady Wins the Race

If your goal is to have some fun and beat the wagering with little something left in the end, the best way to go is to find a low volatility slot and play at very low stakes.

For example, if you have $15 to work with ($10 Casino Credits and $5 won from tournament tickets), you can play at $0.05 to $0.20 a spin on a game that doesn’t have a huge maximum win.

This usually means the slot is not very volatile and offers many smaller wins along the way. Two picks we like here are Tomb of Ra Classic or Royal Rush.

The upside of this approach is that you’ll get a fair amount of playtime no matter what, and with a bit of luck, you can still get a decent win, which will help ensure you get through the wagering.

The downside is that you’ll rarely end up with much more than the original $15. In most cases, if you do manage to gather the required points, you’ll have an amount close to what you’d started with.

You can also try this strategy at table games. With Blackjack, you can bet as low as 10 cents and if you play correct strategy, there’s a good chance you walk away with most of your $10 (and if you’re lucky, you can of course win more). Of course, as detailed you do have to wager a lot at the table games, so just be aware of the number of hands you’ll have to play.

High-Volatility

Another way you can go about tackling the $100 PokerStars Casino bonus is by playing a high-volatility game at higher stakes.

So, with $15, you can find a slot with a big maximum win (10,000x or more) and start wagering at $0.50 a spin. If you manage to trigger the bonus round or land a big win in the base game, you can easily go up to $100 or more.

At this point, you can up the bet once again, making it $1 a spin, and continue at it until you reach the required number of points, which, at this bet size, won’t take a long time.

The advantages of this approach are quite obvious. You’re giving yourself a shot at a big win, and when things go your way, you’ll complete the wagering in no time.

On the other hand, because of the nature of high-volatility games, you’re not giving yourself too much time to get lucky. So, quite often, you’ll end up just losing the starting balance in a few minutes.

PokerStars Casino Alternative Bonuses

The $150+ bonus is an excellent deal, giving you the chance to explore a lot of the casino across five days of play, and giving you the chance to win big playing with house money.

However, it’s not the only bonus PokerStars offers. If you play poker, you might also want to consider the operator’s 100% deposit match offer.

Poker Deposit Match Bonus up to $600

There’s a second bonus available — a pure poker bonus that will match your deposit up to $600.

That’s a lot of bonus money: But it’s for serious poker players only. You need to clear the bonus through poker play, and to release the full $600 you’lll need to deposit $600 yourself, and then pay over $1500 in rake at poker tables to clear the bonus. That can be many weeks of playing poker to release that bonus as cash.

This option is really only for players who are confident in their poker ability (or want to put the time in to learn) and already have a decent bankroll. If you’re interested, check out our review of PokerStars USA to understand this bonus in more detail.

Make Your PokerStars Casino Welcome Bonus Count and Sign Up

Whatever approach you decide to take, there is a lot of value to be had with the $150+ PokerStars Casino Bonus. For a mere investment of $1, you’ll get plenty of playtime and several shots at winning some real cash that you can take to the bank or try to run up further.

So, if you don’t have an account yet, register today, opt-in for the bonus, and get started. There are hundreds of slots you can choose from on the site, so whether you want to play it safe or go for the big win, you’ll have no problems finding a game that fits your particular taste and preferences.