How To Profit From A Casino Bonus

Sometimes we get a casino bonus that has wagering requirements.

This is money that we can't withdraw until we have wagered a certain amount.

Bonus wagering offers can have fantastic EV, and be really profitable. But, they are a little more complicated than the offers that you might have experienced so far.

This guide will cover the following topics, so that you're ready to profit from bonus wagering offers:

Wagering requirements are how much you have to play with a bonus before it becomes cash.

Let's say you get a £10 bonus with 10x wagering requirements.

You would need to wager £100 before the bonus became real money.

With some casinos, wagers come from your cash balance first, before it uses the bonus.

This would mean a strong chance of losing your cash when you go to attempt the wagering requirements on a bonus.

We will always tell you in our offer instructions if a casino uses cash first.

So don’t worry too much, but be mindful that not all casino bonuses that you see are risk-free.

You might be thinking… ‘if there is X times wagering requirements, how will I ever complete the wagering?'

Won’t I always bust out and never make a profit?

You won’t complete the wagering requirements every time.

In fact, you won’t complete the wagering requirements for most offers.

We can expect to only complete the wagering requirements about 20% of the time. For the majority of bonus wagering offers that you complete, you won’t make a profit.

Only completing wagering requirements 20% of the time might seem alarming.

We want to be making a regular profit. So you might be wondering whether these offers are worth doing.

But we can assure you that they are!

For every bonus wagering offer, Team Casino has used an EV Simulator Tool to estimate the EV. This tool runs thousands of simulations of an offer to understand the different possible outcomes.

The EV simulator factors in the times we bust out, and considers how much profit we make when we complete the wagering.

The EV of every offer you see on Team Casino completely factors in the chance of busting out.

EV is the amount of profit that we can expect to achieve on average by completing an offer.

Every bonus wagering offer on Team Casino is +EV, some with as much as £30-£50 of Expected Value!

These offers are an incredible way to build up your total EV, and this can have a big impact on your long term profits.

Over time, our EV and our profit should follow each quite closely.

So by completing lots of bonus wagering offers, and building up lots of EV, you have a fantastic chance of growing your profits.

You might be used to making small, consistent profits on most of the offers.

This is unlikely to be the case with the bonus wagering offers.

These offers work differently and so your mindset should be different.

You won’t make a profit every time. But they are still well worth doing.

If you smash through them, you will make a lot of EV and have a good chance of making a nice profit overall!

How you approach bonus wagering offers can vary.

Your chosen approach will have a significant impact on the EV and chance of making a profit.

When we get a bonus, there are two main factors that will impact our results: the game we use and the spin size we use.

With a bonus, a higher spin size will increase the EV, and reduce the time required. Likewise the EV increases when using a higher variance game.

But, whilst a big spin size or high variance game may increase our EV, they also increase the chance of busting out.

We have a trade-off when it comes to how we approach bonus wagering offers.

Do we take a high variance, high EV approach. Or do we take a low variance, slow and steady approach.

So, how significant is our approach on the outcome of bonus wagering offers?

The Team Casino EV Simulator allows you to compare an offer's EV, bust rate, and average time, based upon different spin sizes.

Let's imagine a casino gives us the following:

• £20 casino bonus
• 20x wagering requirements
• Eligible Slot: 96.5% RTP
• Spin Time: 3 seconds per spin

Inputting this information into our EV Simulator, and comparing low and high variance slots, we get the following:

Expected Value

Depending on how we approach the bonus, the EV could be as low as £9.58, or as high as £15.93.  That's a big difference!

Bust Out Rate

If we used a 20p spin size on a low variance slot, our bust rate is 80.8%, meaning we complete the wagering requirements about 20% of the time. In comparison, the bust out rate is almost 95% if using £1.50 spins on a high variance slot.

We make a profit almost 3x as often using 20p spins (on a low variance slot) compared with £1.50 spins (on a high variance slot). But, the wins would be significantly smaller.

Time

Wagering the bonus with 20p spins could take over 1 hour on average, versus 3-5 minutes when using a £1.50 spin size.

When wagering bonuses, we should normally use a larger spin size than when we're wagering cash.

This way we get lots of EV out of bonuses, and we don't have to spend too long wagering.

That doesn't mean we should always open a high variance slot, set it to a big spin size, and be done with a bonus in seconds.

We must strike a balance between making good EV, using our time efficiently and making a profit regularly.

These bonuses are a risk-free shot at making a profit.

We should prioritise maximising EV, and using our time well, over minimising the bust out rate.

Team Casino believes that the optimal strategy, for the majority of members, will be to use a large spin size on a low to medium variance slot.

Generally, a £1 spin size represents a good compromise between the EV and bust out rate when wagering most bonuses, so this is what we would recommend.

This guidance is only for wagering bonus money!

Changing the spin size has no impact on the EV when wagering your own cash. But it does increase the variance!

So you should still use a small spin size when playing with your own money. Only consider increasing the spin size when playing with bonus funds.