Online Casino Bonuses for 2021
Casino bonuses are rewards players receive from online gambling sites for promotional reasons. Online casinos provide players with bonus offers for signing up, making deposits, being loyal, referring others to the casino, and other actions they take. All casinos offer one type of bonus or another to real money online gamblers as a way of attracting more traffic to their site. Read this guide to online casino bonuses, so you’ll know how to maximize their promotional benefits.
Any time you accept a bonus offer, you lower the effective house edge while gambling online. Players often collect casino promotions using bonus codes. Always, these casino bonuses have wagering requirements, even if the rollover is 1x the bonus amount. Understanding the terms and conditions for an offer is essential, because certain bonuses depend on the software, what constitutes the bonus, the brand and the target audience. Our casino reviews rate bonuses on these many factors.
Top Casinos for Bonuses
| Ranking | Casino Name | Bonus Amount | Review | Payment Options | Minimum Deposit | Actions |
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Types of Casino Bonuses
Casino bonuses are plentiful. The two major bonuses usually offered through a casino’s arrangement with a website are match bonuses and no-deposit bonuses. Other types of bonuses include weekly and monthly bonuses, reload bonuses and refer-a-friend bonuses.
Deposit Bonuses – Welcome Bonuses
The basic promotion is called the welcome bonus or deposit bonus. When you make your first deposit, you’ll receive matching cash in your player account. The basic bonus is 100%, meaning you receive $1 in bonus cash for every $1 you deposit.
Deposit bonuses can span the first series of deposits you make. Many casinos offer welcome bonuses on the first three deposits, though some are known to offer cash on your first nine deposits.
No-Deposit Bonuses - Sign-Up Promotions
No-deposit bonuses are quite common, and they are available as exclusive no-deposit bonuses or as no-deposit free-play bonuses. The free-play bonuses involve a free cash advance offered to players to play casino games and for those who maximize the bonuses’ free-play section. As a general rule, these bonuses can offer a deposit return of up to 1,000%.
For instance, a casino could offer a $2,500 bonus for an hour. Any winnings the player gets within the hour are transferred to their account up to a certain amount. This means with a minimum first deposit of even $50, the player could end up with up to $500. Often, they have a max cash-out, meaning there’s a top amount you can cash if you win money with the no-deposit bonus.
The biggest thing to remember is you don’t have to make a deposit. It’s a no-risk, no-obligation promotion that simply convinces players to register an account.
Reload Bonuses
New depositors are not the only ones who receive bonus cash. Longtime, loyal customers receive reload bonuses any time they make a deposit. These offers tend to have a lower match rate – perhaps 50% to 75% instead of 100% to 200%.
At the same time, reload bonuses are redeemable many times over. Because they can be activated many times, smart and experienced players often decide which casino gets their money based on the best reload bonuses.
Casino Cashback – Monthly Insurance – Rebate Bonus
They include the casino cashback, which is one of the rarest online casino bonuses, but also one of the most sought after by online gamblers because of the lucrative nature of the cashback bonus. A player gets back the cash they’ve lost in the form of cash or credit. Casino cashback sometimes is known as monthly or weekly insurance – or a casino rebate.
Every casino offering cashback will have its own percentage and time frame of rewarding the player. Both parties win: the player is saved from total loss and their bankroll is stretched, while the casino gets an irresistible incentive through the time frame to keep players coming back.
Exclusive Bonuses & VIP Rewards
Exclusive bonuses are another major attraction for VIP gamblers. A player can receive an exclusive bonus by signing up at a casino using an exclusive link from a third-party website. It’s a win-win situation for everyone: the casino gets additional customers, the player gets fantastic deals, and the third-party website gets an incentive for providing readers with the best deals.
Exclusive casino bonuses offer new players a great way of increasing their start-up bankroll and experienced players a risk-free way of trying new things.
High Roller Bonuses
High roller bonuses are the greatest bonuses at online casinos and are offered to the high-stakes players. They usually exceed a $300 maximum bonus value. Often handed out for high volume play or to those at the top tier of the player rewards clubs, premium players should always take advantage of high roller bonuses.
Online casinos with the best reputation make these offers, which include high maximum bonus amounts and low wagering requirements. High roller perks include many things, including a personal account manager, special gifts, tickets to sporting events and concerts, free vacations and higher withdrawal limits.
Online Casino Bonus FAQ
Every online casino has clear rollover requirements stipulated in its fine print. Also called wagering requirements or playthrough, these terms of use state that a player must first wager a certain amount of money to withdraw a bonus or its proceeds.
In short, you’ll have to wager the bonus a certain number of times before you can withdraw your bonus cash.
This protects the casino from bonus shoppers who might accept the cash, then never play. Rollover requirements exist to protect the casinos because in their absence players would sign up, make deposits and then withdraw their bonus cash without even playing, and the casinos would bleed money till they went out of business.
Clearing casino bonuses isn’t an easy task. The bonuses often come with wagering requirements that dictate how much of their deposits players must first spend within a given period in order to be able to access all their bonuses.
The most effective strategy for clearing bonuses is to play high-probability, low-risk and low-variance games using small wagers so that the amount you lose is less than the bonus amount and you can pocket what’s left.
Blackjack is the best casino game in many players’ opinion, because it has the smallest house edge. Remember to check which games your bonus allows you to play in order to clear your bonus, because sites often exclude blackjack or limit its ability to clear requirements, due to its house edge. Wagers placed on some games are often exempt from clearing requirements.
Bonuses can be withdrawn only after a player has made wagers amounting to a specific amount at the casino. This relationship between the bonus and the rollover requirement is best explained with an example. Say you sign up at a casino offering a 100% deposit bonus and you make a $100 first deposit.
In the casino’s fine print, the wagering requirements might state a player has to wager 20 times the deposit and bonus amount. This means with your account total being $200, you have to wager 20x $200, which is betting action worth $4,000.
Most casino bonuses usually exclude some games or reduce their impact on rollover requirements. Games often excluded have a low house advantage and they include Blackjack, Video Poker, Baccarat and Craps.
Some casinos reduce these games’ impact on meeting the rollover requirements instead of excluding them entirely. For instance, Blackjack wagers could count by .50 meaning every $1 wagered reduces the remaining rollover requirements by $0.50. Best Online Casinos calls this the “match rate,” meaning the percentage that games like blackjack and baccarat match the wagering requirement.
Any online casino bonus is either a cashable bonus or a non-cashable (sticky) bonus. Cashable bonuses are those that can be withdrawn when a player meets the wagering requirements while sticky bonuses cannot be withdrawn and are instead used alongside a player’s deposits to play any game they want.
Any proceeds from the non-cashable bonus can be withdrawn, but the bonus itself cannot be converted into actual money.