Are online casino bonus offers important

There is no doubt that most of us are attracted by a bargain, whether it is a discount or the much maligned two-for-one offers. The big retailer’s high street sales still manage to have some of us queuing at the door well before the store opens, and some retailers seem to concentrate all their marketing effort on advertising sales almost all year round. In view of this it should be no surprise that the gambling sector also uses a variety of what appear to be bargain offers to attract new customers. For online sports gambling sites this is usually a free bet or money back offer, whereas it is the online casino bonus offers which dominate the online casino games sector. Almost all the online casinos we list on our recommended list offer some form of welcome bonus to attract new customers, and many also run loyalty bonus schemes to reward their regular casino games players. The one exception to this is fairly obviously the No Bonus casino, which as the name suggests does not offer an online casino bonus at all, preferring to concentrate on an interesting cash-back approach which we will examine later.

As far as the other online casinos on our recommended list are concerned the most common form of online casino bonus takes the form of a promise to match a new player’s initial deposit with a 100% bonus, effectively doubling the stake money available for the player to enjoy playing casino games. On the face of it that seems like a great deal and one which you’d be a fool to turn down, but these online casino bonus offers all come with a range of terms and conditions some of which can severely change the appeal of the offer. Generally speaking a Free Bet offer at an online sports gambling site is simple and easy to understand, but a 100% welcome bonus offer is usually not quite so simple. The most significant of the terms and conditions associated with most of these online casino bonus offers is the play through requirement. This specifies how much money a player needs to stake on playing casino games before any money can be withdrawn from their account. Most of these play through requirements are defined as at least twenty and sometimes thirty times the total of the initial deposit plus the bonus. Putting this in simple terms therefore it means that a player who opens their online casino account with a 50 euro deposit, and accepts a 50 euro bonus has 100 euros to stake on playing casino games. However before they can withdraw any money from their online casino account they would need to stake at least 2000 euros on playing casino games and possibly even 3000 euros on some online casino sites. For many of us that sort of figure far exceeds what we had in mind in terms of setting a budget for playing casino games and should raise serious doubts in our minds as to whether to accept the offer. Some new online casino games players who have accepted one of these online casino bonus offers have also been caught out by other conditions applied by some online casinos. The first of these is a time limit on how long the casino games player has to satisfy the play through conditions, which can be as little as a month. That means that not only do some players end up staking more money than they intended in order to satisfy the bonus conditions, but they need a much bigger capital pot to stake that sort of money in one month. Another condition that appears regularly in the terms of these online casino bonus offers is a restriction on which casino games qualify for the play through requirements. It is not unusual for some online casinos to discount any money staked on roulette for example, because roulette is a casino game which statistically provides the player with the best chance of winning because the house edge is small.

Some of our readers may by now have the impression that here at onlinecasino.ie we disapprove of these online casino bonus offers, but that is not true. For a new online casino games player with the budget and the time to satisfy the terms and conditions associated with one of these welcome bonus offers, it is indeed a very good deal. All we are pointing out is that these bonuses are not a good deal for everybody, and can even encourage irresponsible gambling if the terms and conditions are not fully understood before the bonus is accepted.

If you are one of those prospective casino games players who are not really in a position to take advantage of the standard online casino bonus offer but would still like to see some sort of incentive to play your casino games at a particular online casino, perhaps you should take a look at the No Bonus casino. As we mentioned earlier in this article the No Bonus casino does not offer any welcome bonuses to new players but they do have an interesting cash-back deal for new and existing players who have a poor run of luck. If a registered player makes a deposit today and then suffers a run of bad luck during which he or she loses that whole deposit on the same day, a 10% cash-back sum will be credited to their account the following morning. There are no strings attached to this cash-back and the money can be used to play more casino games or it can simply be withdrawn from the account. There are no penalties or hidden conditions.

As we have said most online casinos currently use welcome bonus offers to attract new customers to their site, but this was partly due to the fact that many of the online casinos operated by the big bookmakers used the same casino software suppliers and the casino games were therefore very similar from site to site. We have now seen a number of new specialist online casinos introduced with new exclusive casino games. Perhaps the quality and freshness of the casino games is a better reason to select a particular online casino than any bonus offer.