Casino bonus offers are one of the many methods online casino operators use to entice you into playing. While casino bonus offers can be a great way to experience a new casino, you need to proceed with caution.
What are bonus offers?
You’ve probably seen the bonus offers being put forward by casino sites to attract you to them. The most common kinds of bonus offers are free spin bonuses and bonus funds.
The trouble with these casino bonus offers is that sometimes, they can get confusing. For example, you might have trouble determining what you actually have to do to “unlock” your bonus balance for withdrawal.
Generally, you will have to fulfil a wagering requirement. This involves wagering a certain amount of your own money.
Read the terms
Many players find it difficult to tell the difference between their bonus balance and their deposit balance. Quite often, this is by design. Casinos deliberately make things difficult to understand how bonus offers work.
The key thing to keep in mind is that you should always read the terms and conditions carefully. If you can find the terms and conditions, you should find that it explains exactly how the bonus offers are structured. Once you understand how the bonus offers work, you should have an easier time telling the difference between the deposit balance and the bonus balance.
Can’t find the terms?
If you feel like the terms and conditions for these kinds of offers are being intentionally hidden, you’re not paranoid; it really does happen. It’s in a casino operator’s interest that a new player doesn’t understand how the bonuses work.
When a player doesn’t really understand the terms, they might end up losing out, meaning more profits for the casino. Because of this, many casinos have tried to hide their terms and conditions on obscure corners of the site, meaning you have to dig around to find them. Thankfully, there has been a crackdown on these kinds of practices.
The crackdown
During a joint operation with the Competition and Markets Authority, the UK Gambling Commission has taken a stand against unfair practices in connection with casino bonus offers. In the last few years, they have really cracked down on casinos that are hiding the terms and conditions from view and deliberately making things confusing for the consumer.
One aspect of bonus offers which the UK Gambling Commission was concerned about was the lack of clarity about your balances. Some sites made it unnecessarily difficult to determine how much was in your bonus balance and how much is in your deposit balance.
These kinds of practices are now less common in the UK thanks to threats of fines from the UK Gambling Commission. In fact, many casino sites have simply stopped having bonus offers since they don’t want to risk being fined.
If you think you are seeing fewer bonus offers being advertised out there, it’s not just your imagination. While many casinos have stopped offering bonuses, plenty of others have changed their policies to be fairer. While this move might have reduced the number of bonus offers that are available, it has certainly served to make the ones that are available a lot fairer.
Play the right games
Another big mistake that players often make when using bonus offers is that they play the wrong games. With bonus offers, certain games don’t build towards the wagering requirement at all and some games only contribute at a reduced rate.
Your site of choice should have a list somewhere that tells you exactly what each game is worth. If you start to play without checking out this information first, you are only setting yourself up for disappointment.
Fairer gambling
Thanks to the changes in regulation from the UK Gambling Commission, you should now be able to enjoy much fairer play on casino sites. Sure, a lot of casinos might no longer be offering bonus offers, but these were generally the casinos that had unfair offers in the first place.
Despite the crackdown, our advice remains the same: always read the terms and conditions.
