Take care when agreeing to an online casino bonus

We recently compared welcome bonuses offered by the two Irish based online casinos as part of our casino news features, so perhaps it’s a good time to look again at online casino bonuses in general. All the major online casinos offer a range of casino bonus deals aimed specifically at potential new casino games players to encourage them to register with their site, most of which follow the same sort of principle. These welcome casino bonus offers usually take the form of a promise to match the initial deposit with a 100% bonus, effectively doubling the stake money available to play their casino games. Some will also offer reduced bonuses for the second and even third deposit made by new customers, but all of these apparently extremely attractive casino bonus offers come with strict terms and conditions and it is absolutely essential that any new online casino customers understand those conditions before accepting the offer. The most commonly misunderstood of these conditions is the play-through requirement. This details the amount of money that needs to be staked on their casino games before any money can be withdrawn from the account, and is usually expressed as a multiple of the total of the deposit plus the bonus often as much as 30 times that total. That would mean for example that a deposit of 50 euros with a bonus of 50 euros would require the player to stake at least 3000 euros before any money can be withdrawn. There may also be a time limit imposed on how long the player has to satisfy the play-through requirement,  and many online casinos also impose restrictions on which casino games qualify for the play-through conditions. The welcome bonuses offered by the online casinos can be attractive for many new casino games players, but they can also be totally unsuitable for many other players in that they may encourage them to gamble far more than they originally intended just to get the bonus. Remember these casino bonuses are voluntary, you don’t have to agree to them.