ShareIf there’s one thing casino players love, it’s a good bonus. Bonuses are an excellent way for operators to boost their presence online and attract customers. For customers, they are a way to boost their bank balance and get a taste of what a casino offers. What’s not to like, right? While the best casino bonuses manage this, some fail to deliver, and others that appear too good to be true. So, what is the truth about high-stakes casino bonuses? Are they worth it? Let’s take a look and find out.
Why Do Casinos Offer Bonuses?
To figure out if casino bonuses are worth it, we first need to map out exactly why casinos offer players generous bonuses in the first place. If you visit a casino and it is offering you £500 in bonus funds, then you might wonder how this benefits them. Surely, giving away money isn’t good for business?
Offering bonuses to customers has a ton of advantages for players. Firstly, it helps to bring new players to your site. While some will take the funds and leave the site, others will stick around and then spend their own money at the casino. They are also likely to share information with their friends about these bonuses and, in turn, make the casino even more money.
From the casino’s perspective, it’s a short-term loss for a long-term gain. In many cases, as we will discover throughout this article, it doesn’t even end up being a short-term loss for the casino, with many players losing the bonus funds when they play anyway.
Checking a Casino’s Legitimacy
One of the biggest concerns players have when they see a higher-stakes casino bonus is the legitimacy of the casino. No one wants to deposit £100 to get a bonus only to discover that the site is not legitimate and that you have no chance of seeing any of the bonus or your stake returned to you.
There are plenty of steps that you can take to ensure that this is not the case. Firstly, you will want to check the licensing information. This is the most important thing you can do when you sign-up with a new casino. The licensing information should be clearly displayed on the website. If this isn’t the case, then you should leave and head elsewhere. There are thousands of top online casinos out there, you don’t have to be restricted to one, no matter how good its bonuses may appear to be. An unlicensed casino is never worth using. As a player, you will have nothing to protect yourself if something goes wrong, and there is a good chance that some parts of the site won’t be legitimate.
There are other things you can check if you are still uncertain about whether to use a site. User reviews and feedback can be good indicators. Of course, you will want to get good at spotting a genuinely negative review and just a disgruntled player on a bad streak. It is better to get an overall feeling from the reviews as opposed to looking at individual ones, as some feedback can be quite emotional if players have lost.
Wagering Requirements
The wagering requirements are key in determining whether a casino bonus will be worth it. Wagering requirements indicate the number of times you will need to work through a bonus before you can withdraw any winnings related to it.
These are often displayed as a multiple. For example, a £100 bonus with 35x wagering requirements means that you will need to wager £3,500 in order to be able to withdraw any winnings from it. Sometimes, the casino will have wagering requirements that feature both the bonus and deposit amount, which can make things trickier.
In many ways, wagering requirements are insurance for the casino. They ensure that players don’t just deposit, take the bonus money, and run. However, in some cases, they also make life extremely difficult for the players. Some operators will have extremely high wagering requirements, and they might even tie this in with a time limit on how long you’ve got to use them.
For example, if you’ve got 24 hours to work through a 50x wagering requirement, then the bonus will probably not be worth it. Generally, the smaller the wagering requirement, the better for you. Some operators now offer bonuses with no wagering requirements, though these are often small.
A Mixed Bag
On the whole, the question as to whether an online casino bonus is worth it will come down to the individual bonus. Some bonuses are definitely worth exploring and can be a great way to boost your balance and explore a casino, while others are almost definitely not worth your time.
