IMO, it kinda depends on the volume that you will put in and what stakes you play. If your a high volume player that will play High Stakes and Rake a ton of money then Carbon is the best option(if you can hit Ether). If thats not the case then there are others that you should consider. RPM has some nice monthly Promo's. They usually do a different promo each day of the month. For Example: Monday=Double VIP Points(equals and extra 6.5% RB) Tuesdays= play 2,500 Real Money Cash Game hands and receive an $11 Tournament Ticket. For the micro grinders these are often tough to beat. In fact on some days I would think some micro grinders are hitting 100%+ effective RB with the free Tournament Ticket. If they are playing NL4 then I would think the 35% RB+VIP Points + Tournament Ticket would give them more back then they pay in.

In the end it kinda depends on your style, games, stakes, and volume. Some good skins to look at are RPM, Carbon, and Lock. I checked out a few others but for me it was best to go with RPM. They also offer the best support I've ever had on an online Poker Site. They have their own Sub-forum here on 2p2 and they offer Live VIP Chat for all RPM players. This is seperate from the basic Merge support and is 10x better. Also with RPMSeth on here, if you PM him he is super quick with his responses and extremely helpful.

Once you decide which skin you are going to go with then you need to determine which affiliates offer the best deal for that skin. You need to make sure that they offer a RakeChase/RakeRace. That will add 10%+ effective RB. Also, keep an eye on the various sign up bonus's. They all clear slow, but most of the 200% First Deposit bonus's clear even slower. I wouldn't select a Merge deal only for the First Deposit Bonus. Also, with skins like RPM its pretty easy to be clearing a bonus all the time. There are other Networks that offer faster clearing Deposit Bonus's if thats all your looking for.

Hope this helps.

3 months

i deposited thru the casino, then transferred to poker and emailed support to have them apply my 200% bonus, seems good to me

i used western union phone transfer, i had the money within minutes

Whats the Bonus Code?

Yes Lock has great bonus but I still think RPM poker owns all MERGE and Players ONly comes close when they have great promotions going on.

What is the release amount (incremental)? For example, if I deposit $200, i will get a reload bonus $400, what is the release interval? very $100 or $10?

Thanks

was also wondering about this. and the clearing rate. ty

If you signed up before June 1st, it is a great promo, because you get 35% rakeback daily, but toward your 200% bonus to unlock it, you only earn 65% out of 100% on the 1 VIP per $.06 so it isn't worth it if you sign up after June 1st. But if you are one of the lucky player like myself who read up about the promos before they ended or expire. Then yes its good stuff.

And Considering you can use your VIP points to register for tournaments at a rate of 1 VIP per cent, which would be 330 points for a $3.30 on top of rake back and the 200% bonus, it is actually the best deal out there online. Other then the 40% rakeback that 888poker and minted poker and pokerview are offering, I haven't really looked into all those sites basic bonuses and such, but I assume they are better.

Hope this helps

Still nothing beats Supernova or Supernova Elite on the Don of all sites, Pokerstars!!!

is there a way to see how much of your bonus code already cleared? been putting in some work and dont see an option in the stats section. wrong area?

Player Admin -> Reports -> Bonuses

From what I see the bonus is now 150% up to $750. As I understand from post #6 by wilco 666 you would need to play 5625 11sngs to clear this... Assuming they have these...

Assuming 75 vip points to clear 1 dollar, 10 points per 1 game. And more with rakeback. I've seen 60% rakeback offered which sounds too good to be true to me.

Random place for this question, but hopefully someone knows: if I am on a Merge skin now (Lock) w/o an affiliate rakeback, can I sign up to another skin (for example, RPM) and do it through an affiliate to get rakeback?

Considering Merge hasn't offered rakeback for several months, I'm going to say no.