What are Wagering Requirements?
Online casinos need to stand out in a sea full of thousands of gambling websites and that’s exactly why there are so many casino bonuses on the market. They benefit both the player that gets extra cash to play longer and the casino operator who gets new customers.
However, an online casino can’t simply give you a welcome bonus just like that and here is where wagering requirements come in. You can see them as a safety measure to prevent money laundering activities and some players from abusing the system.
If there would be no rollover requirements in place, there would be nothing stopping a player from claiming a welcome bonus, withdrawing it and then repeating the same process at all casinos on the market.
With such practices going on, online casinos would fastly go bankrupt and we all know that without gambling websites there are no bonuses so no more extra cash to play around with for new players.
Wagering requirements or playthrough requirements as they are often called, represent the number of times you have to gamble the bonus in order to be able to withdraw the potential wins from playing real money slots.
They will be displayed next to the bonus or in the Terms and Conditions section of the promotion and will often be formulated as 15x, 20x, 30x and so on. This represents the number of times you will have to gamble the bonus and the initial deposit if one was mentioned before you can reap the benefits.
Let’s take for example a 100% match-up welcome bonus for an initial deposit of $100 with a wagering requirement of x20. This means you will have to gamble $2000 before you can claim the potential wins.
Even if annoying and challenging, wagering requirements are a necessary evil that keeps the bonus market open and thriving. The goal is to know when to claim a bonus and when to skip an offer.
You can do simple math where you deduct the house edge of the game you are willing to play from the total wagering requirements and that’s your potential loss. In our case, if you play a 98% RTP slot to complete the $2000 rollover requirement, the potential loss is $20, so the potential win out of the $200 bonus is $180 which is worth it.
On the market, you will find all kinds of wagering requirements, ranging from just 5x to 90x. Anything between 1x and 30x is considered low wagering and everything above 50x is considered high wagering. In the middle, there is just the market standard.
Very rarely, you will find on the market no wagering casinos which have no rollover requirements for a certain promotion, however, being so rare, it’s not actually reliable for a casual player or a beginner to hunt for one.
In this case, your best bet would be to find a low wagering casino and use the formula shown above to see if the bonus is actually worth it.
High-wagering casinos are marketed mostly towards high rollers because they are the only ones with enough resources to actually complete them, however, even there the calculation formula applies, because no matter how big a bonus is, it’s not actually worth claiming it if you risk too much.
Are wagering requirements avoidable?
No, at least not through any legal manner. If you want to avoid the pressure of rollover requirements, you can simply just not claim a bonus, play only games in demo mode like free slots or search until you find a no wagering casino.
Unfortunately, for a thriving market, the wagering requirements are the necessary evil and, in the end, they are the means through which both gamblers and casinos can benefit. The gambling operators continue getting more new customers to sign up and players continue to have better and better promotions to choose from and enjoy.