Today we’re going to take a look at a pretty interesting online poker site; part of the 888.com online casino, Pacific Poker offers good online poker games with some great bonuses happening right now.

Their current promotion is a 100% deposit bonus (meaning they match your first deposit) up to $400, and from what I read, you only need to clear 75% of it, meaning that technically–if you wanted to, you could deposit $400, and you would have $500 available to you to play with (and possibly withdraw if you so chose) to get the rest of the bonus deposited, all you need to do is play.

Ultimatepokerbankroll will help me explain this a bit better: “Pacific has a 100% to 400 dollar bonus, but you only need to clear 75% of it. The first 25% is in your bankroll after deposit. So if you deposited for the full 400, you would have to earn 3000 points to clear the remaining 300. Bonus points are earned thusly, for every dollar in rake you contribute to the pot or pay in tournaments, you earn two bonus points and two of their normal points. Pacific calculates this based on the amount you wager in a hand. So if the pot is 10 dollars and you wagered 5, you’d earn half the rake in the hand.”

To me, any poker room that gives me a portion of my deposit bonus right away with no strings attached sounds like a good deal. Most of them make you jump through a bunch of hoops just to get the first dollar of your promised deposit match so that is pretty cool.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to try the cash games myself because they do not allow players with United States IP addresses to play. But the play environment is widely and clearly regarded as an above-average experience; and in the sea of mediocrity that is online poker rooms, that is saying a lot.

Another benefit to this is that you can play without actually having to download anything.  Just look for the small “Quick Play – No Download” button underneath the big green download button and it will launch a handy Flash interface for you. This is especially important since (probably due to the cash depositing features in the software) the downloadable may report a “Potentially Harmful Dialer” by some Anti-Virus applications, which may or may not actually do anything. But I have notified them of this and they are looking into it. 888.com is very proud of their reputation for having software that is free of adware and spyware releasing something that actually had a virus in it would be corporate suicide for them. It is probably harmless, but I just want you to be aware of it.

Edit [4/28/2009] : The wonderful folks at PacificPoker have been working on the ‘virus threat’ issue because of my recommendation and have now fixed the problem! It was, in fact, a false positive and it’s been fixed so now no anti-virus software should incorrectly report pacificpoker’s software as a potential threat anymore. Great customer service!

So if you’re a fan of Texas Hold’em, 7-card stud, Omaha, or Poker Tournaments give Pacfiic Poker a shot right HERE and try playing for free or give their deposit bonus a bash. You’ll have a blast.