Should I accept casino sign up bonus?

Almost all casinos offer new players bonuses for signing up. However, you should stay away from, in not most, then at least half of these. Casinos try to offer new players as attractive-looking sign-up bonuses as possible. But that’s the thing – that’s all they often are, “attractive-looking”.

Let’s say X casino has a welcome offer that says you get 200% deposit bonus together with 300 free spins. It looks very good, doesn’t it? Yes, it does! Well, that is, before you actually go and read he details.

Reading the bonus details, bonus wagering requirements and all other terms might reveal that the bonus wagering requirement is 50x, wagering has to be completed within 3 days and the maximum spin value while wagering can be just 50 cents. Now, imagine you make a 100 euro deposit which would give you 200 euros bonus money. This means that you need to wager 50x200, so 10 000 euros on slots within 3 days. And considering the maximum bet during that period can be just 50 cents, it means that you need to do 20 000 spins.

To make things worse, the casino can also say that also your deposit, not just the bonus money you received, needs to be wagered. This would mean that you actually need to wager not 10 000 euros but 15 000 euros.

Yes, the details I brought out above are all quite extremes. Often the wagering requirement is smaller, the time to do it is longer, and the maximum bet per spin is higher. But I exaggerated just to give you an idea what would be a really, really bad sign up bonus.

So what is a sign-up bonus that might be worth taking? In general, wagering requirements of up to 30x *might* be okay enough. Although 20x or 25x maximum would be preferred.

Some offers just look good – in reality they are not. But how can you know? Sometimes, as in our sample offer, you can tell upfront that this is one offer I shouldn’t touch. But other times the decision is not so easy. In these cases you can use the simple estimated value calculation.

In order to calculate casino offer estimated value you need to have three details for the offer – offer size, wagering requirement, and game RTP. If we’re talking about bonus money offer, not free spins offer, then RTP is difficult to know. But you can get the RTP in this case from the game (s) you’ll be using to wager the bonus. So in this case, let’s image we chose a game with 96.5% RTP. And let’s use the bonus details for the previously mentioned bad offer.

EV= Bonus – (house edge*) x (wagering requirement in euros)
EV = 200 – (0.035) x 10000
EV = - 150

If the estimated value of the bonus is negative, especially if the value is as bad as in this case, this offer is not for you.


* House edge in this case is 3.5% and when we use the numeric version of the percentage we get 0.035
We can try the same details, but lower the wagering requirement to just 20x.

EV = 200 – (0.035) x 4000
EV = 60

A you can see, this time the offer has potentially positive outcome for you and as such, *might* be worth accepting.

Casinos have different welcome offers and sometimes it might be difficult to actually calculate the potential value of the offer. But whenever possible, we do suggest you do it.