Probably you’ve already heard or seen at some point in your daily life a casino offer. Even more, if you are an experienced matched bettor, then for sure you know is a hot topic: profitability of casino offers.
So, maybe you are in this position, and you ask yourself: Are casino offers suitable for my matched betting goal? How can I profit from casino offers in matched betting? Are casino bonuses as profitable as matched betting? Are there any low risk or high risk casino offers? In the next couple of minutes, I will try to answer these questions.
Again, keep in mind, everything is written below is through the perspective of my own experience and before you go ahead ensure you’ve read the disclaimer.
[Disclaimer: Gamble Aware 18+]
Table of Contents
a) What Are Casino Offers?
Everybody knows that casino offers are coming in different forms such as welcome offers, deposit offers – you can even get a no-deposit casino bonus with some sites – or as reload offers. Reload offers are the offers that are sent to existing customers in order to tempt them back into re-using a casino/bookmaker.
As example, the main bookmakers such as Betwin, Coral, Betstars, tend to offer ranges from 10% all the way up to 500% bonuses. These casino bonuses are always coming with ‘wagering’ requirements.
What this means? Well, depending on the casino and the size of the bonus, you’ll have to rollover a certain quantity of money. For example, if an offer was a 100% deposit match up to £100 with 25x bonus wagering, you’d deposit £100, receive £100 extra on top, and you’d have to complete £2,500 (25 x £100) worth of spins on slots.
If the same deposit match had a 35x deposit + bonus rollover, you’d need to do £14,000 worth of spins. So, please read T&C for each offer before you decide to exploit it.
b) How Can You Exploit Casino Offers
First, we need to understand why casino offers are valuable to a bookmaker. As we know, a bookmaker/casino is still in business because of his profit edge, therefore a lot of bonuses out there are designed to make you lose money, either short-term or long-term, even with a no deposit bonus promotion.
The casinos treat the offers as a cost of acquiring you as a long-term customer, and they recoup their money either immediately if you lose, or long-term if you initially win. This can be seen as a losing strategy especially if they will lose money on the majority of the promotions they run, especially on their sign-up offers.
However, is actually a winning strategy because they know in long-term, as a customer if you play enough you will actually pay for the upfront their cost of acquiring you as a customer.
Fortunately, your job as matched bettor (with a bit of clever number work and some guidance) is to work out how much of a profit you can generate from that offer based on a casino’s terms; the type of bonus on offer, the value of the bonus, the eligible game types, the wagering requirements, and more.
So, let’s discuss a Casino EV Calculator.
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There are a few EV calculators out there, but the majority of them are having flaws because you don’t need just a simple calculator, instead you will need a simulator. A calculator cannot take crucial variables into account like your spin size and the variance of the slot, etc.
Calculators typically just allow you to input your bonus size, the slot’s RTP ( Return to Player) and will give you an output which in most cases is quite inaccurate. However, are specialized software which can compensate for this inaccuracy – a simulator.
I would have recommended a specialised tool such as Profit Maximiser which allows you to see the numbers behind all of the casino promotions that are running. However, in last year or two, Odds Monkey integrated their sister company Monkey Casino within their offer. So, now you can get it without extra cost with your membership.
c) What is Variance? Why Is it Important in Sports Betting?
These offers involve something called variance and Wikipedia is describing it as: ” In probability theory and statistics, variance is the expectation of the squared deviation of a random variable from its mean. Informally, it measures how far a set of (random) numbers are spread out from their average value” (source: Wikipedia)
What actually means in matched betting environment? This means, rather than building your bankroll slowly and steadily like you do with matched betting, you will have swings for your profit. Imagine a graph in which you have steady progression line and one which is going up and down.
First line is the matched betting – you have a constant increase from a small bankroll over a time because of low/no-risk, while the second line, the “wobbly line” represents the casino earning – you will see periods with losses as variance plays out. However, in long term this variance is compensated by your profit.
For the casino offers you need a bigger bankroll, a really good composure and a strict bankroll management. To exploit these casino offers you will need +EV (Positive Expected Value). In simple terms: this is the average amount of profit that you would receive if you completed the offer millions of times.
Let’s say for example, you deposit £100 and you get £200 casino bonus. What would be the offer EV? Using an EV calculator, you will find out that the Expected Value for this offer is +£88.
However, if you were to complete the offer a 1000 times you would have a profit level somewhere around £88 x 1000 = £88,000. Most people will complete hundreds or thousands of offers over a period of months or years which makes them to be less prone to variance.
Basically, to combat the variance you need volume. Smaller the sample is, the more variance can affect you either positively or negatively.
d) How Likely is For You to Bust Out?
At first glance, you will believe that is unlikely to complete wagering requirements. For example, you deposit £10 and get a bonus of £10, and you have to complete £250 worth of spins before you can withdraw. Is really unlikely that you will complete this offer before you can withdraw your earnings.
However, it’s not about how likely you are to complete that specific offer, it’s all about how much profit you should expect to make from the offer on average (known as EV, or Expected Value) after completing multiple offers. Again, for the sake of example, let’s say you were doing the offer above on £2 spins. You would expect to bust out around 81% of the time on a 96.5% RTP medium-variance slot, but you would take £12.60 in EV. With high expected bust rates, it’s is really common to lose.
You will find these offers and guides to help you maximise your casino offers profit by simply getting into the Casino Hub from Odds Monkey Dashboard (please see above)
e) Most Common Types of Casino Offers
As discussed earlier, the requirements of casino offers vary quite a lot from bookmaker to bookmaker. Usually, the wager amount is the one which will dictate the reward: free spins, bonus, golden chips or cashback if you lose. Now, every bookie offers a casino along with their sport betting platform and you will receive either free spins or a free bet.
Casino offers fit in four major categories, based upon the risk:
- Risk Free Offers – this is the most often used offer by a casino or a bookie to attract new customers. It will offer a free spin or a bonus without you needing to wager any of your own money. However, to claim any winnings you need to meet the wagering requirements which normally are quite high (30x – 40x times the amount of the bonus accrued). Despite the amount you need to wager are still a good place to start. You don’t risk nothing, and sometimes the winnings can meet the wagering requirements.
- Low Risk Offers – these are the most common type of casino offers out there and will require a small amount of your own money to receive a reward (typically the same amount for a free bet offer, like £5 to £20). Low-risk offers have lots of different formats.
- Medium Risk Offers – for this type of offer you will need to wager larger amounts (£30+) of your own money, the variance is higher and of course the probability of winning is lower, but the reward is significant and you can get impressive long run profits. The recommended bankroll for medium risk casino offers is between £800 – £2000 and you definitely should be comfortable with losing significant amounts of money for an extensive period of time.
- High risk offers – as you expected, these are those offers which can lose you a lot of money (over 80% chance of losing your entire deposited amount), but the rewards are proportional with the risk. These offers should be considered by those with a lot of experience with a bankroll over £10,000.
e) Most Common Types of Casino Offers
Casino offers guides are added all the time at Odds Monkey. They offer full access to their simple to follow casino offer guides, (40+ casino offers with an expected profit of £500) along with their daily casino reload offer list.
You will need to dedicate a little bit of time learning about how casino offers work and what is the best approach for each type of casino offer. If you are not already signed on Odds Monkey then you should trial at least and start earning from casino offers.
You will find two types of profit for the casino offers:
(1). Low-risk profits. You are virtually guaranteed to make a steady & consistent profit on these as long as you follow simple instructions.
(2). EV profits: an average profit value you should expect to receive from an offer over an extended period of time.
Casino offers are rarely guaranteed profit on one attempt and as an overall should be seen as a risk. However, if you continue completing the casino offers and have a good discipline and follow instructions carefully, you can make a significant tax-free income to boost your bank every month.