Take care with online casino bonus deals

These are tough times for retailers, particularly those on our high streets with the high overheads that go with trading from a shop. Consumer confidence is a fickle thing and can rise or fall for any number of reasons, so successful retailers need to respond quickly and stay on top of their game to survive. In any competitive market there are two main elements which effect consumer choice, namely quality and price. Here at onlinecasino.ie we would argue that exactly the same criteria apply when we are looking at the online casino sector. In terms of quality we are looking at site management and of course the casino games on offer, and as far as price is concerned would any of the online casino bonus offers attract us to a particular site. In the retail sector it is debatable which of these two elements is more important, because whilst most of us are prepared to pay more for exceptional quality there is also a minimum level of quality below which we will pay nothing. If we take this analogy back into the online casino sector the minimum acceptable quality would be an online casino site which is well managed and offers good financial and personal security. When it comes to price comparisons between online casinos however, there is no obvious difference because we set our own price on what we pay to play their casino games when we decide how much to stake on each game. Where there is sometimes a difference is in the online casino bonus offers available at different online casinos. These bonus offers are the nearest the online casino operators can come to offering a discount or sale price to attract new customers. The fact that the online casinos on our recommended list are on the list at all indicates that they have satisfied our defined quality standards, and almost all of them also offer a variety of online casino bonus offers. The one exception is the No Bonus casino which as the name suggests does not offer any bonuses, preferring to offer an innovative cash-back scheme instead, which we will return to later.

The bonus and cash-back offers we see at the online sports gambling sites are usually fairly straightforward and easy to understand with very few terms and conditions. Unfortunately that does not apply to most of the online casino bonus offers we see. The most common form of online casino bonus used to attract new customers is a welcome bonus, and all the online casinos on our recommended list, except of course the No Bonus casino offer this sort of bonus to new customers. These welcome bonuses almost always take the form of a promise to match the customer’s first deposit with a 100% bonus up to a fixed maximum sum. Some online casinos also offer a reduced bonus on the second and third deposits as well, but all these offers come with a number of significant terms and conditions which need to be clearly understood. At first glance and taken at face value any offer to double our available stake money to play our favourite casino games looks very appealing, but may become less so when you understand the terms and conditions associated with the bonuses. The most significant of these conditions is what is generally referred to as the play-through requirements. The online casino operators are offering what is effectively free money to play their casino games, so they clearly want us to play on their site for as long as possible and to stake as much money as possible to get a return on their investment. This is why they stipulate a play-through requirement on anyone accepting the welcome bonus offer. The play-through condition defines how much money we need to stake on playing casino games before we can withdraw any money from our account, and is usually expressed as a multiple of the total of the initial deposit plus the bonus. Most online casinos set this multiple at 20, but it can be as high as 30 in a few cases. For those of us who may not be that good at maths, put simply that means that an initial deposit of say 25 euros would attract a bonus of a further 25 euros making a total of 50 euros available to play casino games. However if the play-through multiple was 20, the player would need to stake at least 1000 euros on playing casino games before being allowed to withdraw any money. Some online casinos also impose a time limit on the play-through requirement and some also restrict which games qualify because some games provide us with better odds of winning than others.

The online casino sector is a very competitive market and we understand why the online casino operators need to attract new customers by offering attractive deals. We also understand why they feel it is necessary to apply conditions to these bonus offers, but we also feel that it is vitally important that no one accepts one of these offers without understanding the full implications of that decision in terms of how much money they would be expected to gamble. For some people a welcome bonus offer like these is a great deal, but for others it can lead to problems because they are tempted to exceed their budget.

Time to return to the approach taken by the No Bonus casino. They have decided to offer an interesting cash-back deal to all their players, both new and existing customers. The theory is that we need the most help when we are having a run of bad luck, so that is when their cash-back deal kicks in. Suppose a registered player makes a deposit today and starts to play casino games with that money. Unfortunately his luck is out and he loses all of that deposit on the same day, in which case a 10% cash-back will be paid into his account the following morning with no strings attached. The money can be used to play casino games or it can be withdrawn with no penalty.