Casino Bonus may appear to be a great thing, but quite often casinos use them to make it hard for players to see a return on their initial deposit. Before ever taking a bonus from an online casino there are 3 main things you should take into consideration.
Play Through Requirements – This is one of the biggest risks to taking the “free money” from a casino. When you take a bonus you are typically required to wager your bonus amount a certain number of times. This can range from 15x (times) all the way up to and some times more than 60x! So, if you took a $100 bonus at 60x, you would need to place over $6000 in bets (or turnover) before you were able to get your original deposit back! To put this in perspective if you were playing $5 hands of blackjack you would need to play 1200 hands to clear the bonus. The average player can play between 100-200 hands per hour, which means between 6-12 hours of playing time. When signing-up at a casino and taking a bonus try to find one with a play through requirement between 15-30 times max.
Clearing Time – As mentioned in the previous example there are play through requirements on bonuses, but sometimes casinos will go one step further to create a very small window for you to clear the bonus. This can be from 1 week to a few months, but in higher quality casinos you will have a much longer to indefinite time to clear the bonus. If you only have a week to clear a bonus and do not play very much, this can often be a very difficult task, if not impossible. Be sure to stick to casinos that give you a long grace period to clear your bonus.
Game Restrictions – This is one of the ways that several rogue casinos will really try to screw players. They will say that bonuses can only be cleared on games where the casino has a distinct advantage. So, if you got your bonus then decided to hit the blackjack tables you might later find out that blackjack is excluded from clearing a bonus forcing you to play games that you wouldn’t normally play. Be sure to read the fine print about what games can be played to clear a bonus.