Online Casino Bonus Exploitation Strategies

Everywhere you look in the online casino world, you’ll see tons of bonus opportunities. While sites obviously run these promotions to take on new players, they sometimes offer a real value for players who can spot exploitation opportunities. Here we break down the best strategies for getting the most from these offers.


An Introduction to Online Casino Bonus Strategy

Every single player has seen online casino bonuses that promise to give your bankroll a significant boost. Most of them have also found out that the terms and conditions attached to these deals can be extensive. Because of that, it can sometimes seem difficult or impossible to actually get some serious value from some of these deals, especially if you don’t play online slots.

Casino sites have put a lot of effort into making sure that they can’t be exploited with their promotions. However, some bonus strategies can still be used to great length in the modern environment.

It’s not as simple as just loading up a bonus, playing blackjack on auto-pilot for a few hours and cashing out. That worked really well in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, it’s just not the case anymore. If you want to get a serious, measurable edge from bonuses and promotions, you have to do a bit of work.

This is why certain strategies work better than others. It’s also why having a strong strategy around your promotions is just as important as having good strategy in games like blackjack and video poker. Ultimately, the entire point is to increase the payout rate that you get on average. That’s exactly what we’re going to show you how to do here.

The Fundamental Premise of Casino Bonus Strategy

Before we get into the details and a little bit of math, we need to establish our fundamental premise. This is the idea that you are shooting for more than anything else:

Your goal is for the bonus to give you more money back than what you spent to get it.

This may seem like a really basic idea that’s too simplistic to be of any use. However, it’s precisely this rule that players forget about so often when selecting promotions. That’s why it’s so critical to keep in the forefront of your mind when learning about these strategies. If we make it clear what we’re aiming at, then it’s more difficult to get lost in the details.

With that said, let’s hop into some actual strategies that we can use to achieve this ideal.

Key Strategy: How to Handle Cashable Bonus Opportunities

A cashable bonus is one that you can withdraw like cash once you clear the wagering requirements. This is the easiest type of bonus to quantify and figure out, and that’s why we’re starting with it. The way we handle other, non-cashable bonuses (and other types of promotions) will be based on the ideas we look at here.

To achieve our fundamental premise, we need two pieces of information. First, we need to know how much we’re getting from the bonus. Additionally, we need to know how much we’re going to spend on average to get it. The amount we’re getting from the bonus is really simple to figure out since it’s told to us directly. However, the amount we’re going to spend requires a little bit of math.

Overall, the basic idea behind how much we spend is to figure out how much we stand to lose on average while clearing the wagering requirements. To solve this, we need to know a few pieces of information:

  1. How much we need to wager to clear the requirements
  2. Any modifications to that amount based on the type of game we’re playing
  3. The average house advantage we will see in that game

In the following, we’ll look at how to use this information to find the amount we will put in. On average, this is essentially the amount we stand to lose before being granted the bonus.

Including Game Restrictions and Requirement Changes

Suppose we have a base wagering requirement of 20 times the bonus and deposit on a 100 percent match. Additionally, let’s suppose we are depositing €100 for the sake of even numbers. This means we’ll need to wager 20 * €200 for a total of €4,000 to clear the play-through requirement.

Some sets of terms and conditions will change this value based on the game we’re playing. For example, a specific bonus on Let It Ride might multiply the wagering requirements by a factor of two. That would move it from €4,000 to €8,000 total.

In any event, we need to know the total amount we will have to wager to clear the requirement. However this works out is fine; we just need to know the concrete currency amount for the next step.

Finding the Total Amount We Lose on Average

Once we have the total amount we will wager to clear the wagering requirements, we need one more thing. We need to know the house advantage (on average) of the game(s) we intend to play to clear those requirements. From there, we apply that advantage as a percentage to the total amount wagered.

The math can seem complex at first, but it’s really not. Here’s a simple example. Suppose we have a situation where we need to wager €5,000 total with a house edge of 2.5 percent. All we have to do is take 2.5 percent of €5,000 to get the total amount we’ll lose on average. That works out to be €125.

As a result of finding this amount, we know that cashable bonuses of more than €125 would be profitable here. However, the exact end result will vary a bit because of the volatility of the games involved. On average, this is what the amount will be though.

Applying This Strategy to Non-cashable Casino Bonuses

The idea of a non-cashable bonus is pretty straightforward. You can have the bonus released to your account, but it can’t be cashed out itself. Instead, it can be wagered to receive funds worth more than what you started with. Additionally, you can typically request a withdrawal for any funds worth more than the bonus itself.

However, converting this into direct value is a little tricky to figure out. One simple way is to just bet that bonus on something like an even money wager on roulette. For example, if you had a €100 non-cashable bonus, and you wagered the entire thing on “red,” then you’d have just under a 50/50 chance of coming out with €100 that you could cash out. On average, you’d come out with about €48.64 as the average value of that spin (or 48.64 percent of the wagered amount).

Our big idea here is to use the cashable approach to find profitable options. From there, we convert them into value using the non-cashable method above.

This is the strategy in a general sense. It’s made easier by considering that we can often make our initial wager right away and worry about the play-through requirements afterward. However, this is a tricky idea until you see it in practice, so we’ll look at an instructive example.

An Example of the Non-cashable Method

Suppose we have a 400 percent match bonus on a deposit of €100. It’s non-cashable, but we can wager with it right away. Aside from that, we’ll need to wager through both of them combined 25x before we can cash out.

The very first wager we make can be a €500 bet on red on roulette. Of this wager, €400 of it is actually from the bonus itself. For the losing case, we’ll lose our €100 deposit about 51.36 percent of the time. This accounts for an average loss of €51.36 upfront.

However, the other 48.64 percent of the time, we win on our wager. This means our balance doubles to €1,000, and only €300 of that is bonus. Additionally, we’ll need to wager a total of €12,500 to clear the wagering requirements (really €12,000 at this stage due to our €500 initial bet). If we wager another €12,000 at a rate of a 2.5 percent house advantage, we’ll stand to lose an additional €300 on average. That’s in comparison to a €400 win from the roulette flip for a profit of €100.

If we subtract the €51.36 average loss from the flip itself, we end up in the green here. While this is a bit complicated, our point is to show that these types of bonuses can be taken advantage of in special cases.

The only real thing to look out for here is maximum bet restrictions. If you aren’t allowed to make that initial €500 wager, the whole process falls apart.

Overview

The strategies and ideas we have broken down here are critical for learning how to manipulate and exploit promotional terms. However, as long as you stay within the rules the casino puts forward, you’ll be in good shape. The idea here is to check out different options to see if you can find some that are profitable. From there, you push your edge as much as you can.