How do online poker bonuses influence your game-plan?

Or better yet, how do they influence your strategic approach? Every online poker player loves bonuses. It?s free money after all, right? (well, actually it isn?t, but more on that later) and we all like a freebie, don?t we? I wonder though, if someone were to ask all these players how exactly they reckon the bonus influences their play and through what ways, how many of them would actually know what to say? Let?s suppose we have a good first-deposit bonus on our hands. The reason I wrote there were no free bonuses is, that every bonus has to be unlocked, by real money rake-generating play. That can make you money ? if you play it right ? or cost you money - if you don?t. Anyway, it takes a certain time to have your bonus unlocked and transferred into your real money account. During that time, you?ll be basically enjoying a reduced-rake environment (just deduct the bonus from the rake you pay to the room) which is great. We know (or at least we should know) that core poker strategy is largely determined by mathematical expectation. Whenever someone plays with a positive expected value, he wins every single time if we look at his overall performance, even if he happens to lose every now and then being outdrawn by bad callers. If his/her bankroll is large enough to swallow the variance, he/she will go home a winner at the end of the day, guaranteed. Likewise, if a person plays on a negative EV call, he/she is losing a little money regardless of the actual outcome of the hand in question. Mathematical expectation is directly influenced by the odds on the given hand, and the sums the opponents bet into the pot (or even by the dead money left there by players who had folded). The bonuses do not directly influence the expected value, however they have a much bigger word to put in as far as hourly winning rate is concerned. The hourly winning rate can be just as critical as the expected value, since nobody really likes to struggle on for an entire hour for 10 cents in winnings (this is exactly why multi-tabling thrives at small and micro limits where the hourly earning is extremely meager). The hourly rate is largely influenced by the size of the positive EV on each of the hands played in an hour, the number of played hands, and the rake. The rake is something that will leak away some of the money won on every single hand, and since bonuses help to reduce the rake, they contribute to the increase of the hourly earning rate. In a word, you get a bigger bang for your efforts, when you?re working towards unlocking a bonus. The problem with bonuses is though, that after a while they are unlocked or in the worst case they expire. After that, the player will be left to deal with the negative effects of the rake on his own, unaided by the generosity of the poker room. This is why there?s far more value in a recurring bonus than in any first-deposit bonus there is. Rakeback is such a recurring bonus, which is often given together with a sign-up bonus (see Full Tilt rakeback) to double player benefits. Rakeback, which is also known as cashback in some poker rooms, will provide the player with a reduced rake and thus an increased hourly earning rate indefinitely. It will not only spur the player on by providing continuous motivation, it?ll also benefit the poker room by keeping players loyal. They may still move on when they happen upon a more generous rakeback offer, but overall, retention rates are much bigger than those of simple sign-up bonuses.