How To Evaluate Casino Bonuses
Following on from the Casino Bankroll Guide, we thought it might be useful to show you how to work out for yourselves the value of any casino bonus you might find. This can help you to concentrate your efforts on the most profitable bonuses, and avoid those that might look good at first glance, but have little or no value thanks to the small print!
Once you have found your bonus, you need to check the T&C for the offer. What you are looking for is the wagering requirement, usually shown as either a multiple of either the bonus amount, deposit, or both.
Examples of this would be 20x Bonus, 20x deposit, 10x Bonus and deposit.
We don’t really care how it’s expressed, what we want is the dollar value of the action we need to give the casino in order to be able to cash out.
Next we need to know the “House Advantage” of the game you intend to play. Our house advantage article lists the stats for some of the more popular games with bonus hunters.
Once we have these figures it’s time for some math!
Multiply the total wagering required by the house advantage. This is how much on average you will loose playing out the bonus. If this is less than the bonus amount, then the bonus has a positive expectation, and should be played. If the average loss is higher than the bonus amount, then walk away and find a new bonus!
Here’s a quick example…
Bonus – 100% match up to $200
Wagering Requirement – 20x bonus
Game to Play – Blackjack (0.5% house advantage)
So our wagering requirement is 20 x $200, which is $4000
Our average loss will be 0.5% x $4000 which is $20
Bonus ($200), minus the average loss ($20) … means this bonus has an expected value of $180. We should be putting this one high on our list of casinos to play!
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