Earn Money Online Gambling
You’d be forgiven if you wanted to find a sure way to make money on the internet without having to work for it.
Online casino bonus hunting seems to offer you the opportunity to make easy money.
15 years ago, it WAS easy to actually pull this off. Online casinos offered large signup bonuses with easily-achieved wagering requirements.
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And they were making so much money in those days that they didn’t even look too closely at the advantage gamblers who were taking advantage of these bonuses.
I had a good friend who deliberately took advantage of the bonus hunting opportunities available to make enough money to buy a jukebox for his game room, in fact.
The casino comps 0.1% of your total bets, or 0.3% for triple points. 1,000 x 1.25 x 0.0076 = $9.50 regular hourly winnings. $1,200 total bets x 0.003 = $3.60 in comps; You earn $13.10 per hour. Even if you spend 50 hours in the casino, this only works out to $655 per week, and you’d earn $34,060 when we stretch this out for an entire year. To successfully make money gambling with poker there needs to be a very large gap between your skill level and that of your opponent. In other words, the better your opponent, the less money you make. So here is the secret.
Blackjack was the most profitable game to play during these heady days. The house edge is so low for a perfect strategy blackjack player that it’s hard to go wrong. Deposit money, claim your bonus, play perfect strategy blackjack until you’ve cleared your bonus requirements, and then cash out your profits.
Rinse and repeat.
This process was called “bonus hunting” or “bonus whoring.” If you specialized in blackjack, you would even refer to it as “blackjack bonus hunting” or “blackjack bonus whoring.”
But even then, the terms and conditions of the bonus affected how you had to go about this kind of thing.
Wagering Requirements and How They Affect Bonus Whoring
Michael, the other writer on this blog, wrote an entire post about wagering requirements and how to beat them. If you’re looking for a detailed explanation, that would be the post to read.
Here, in brief, is how wagering requirements work:
The wagering requirements are just the amount of money you have to gamble before being allowed to cash out at the casino. They’re normally expressed as a multiple of your deposit plus your signup bonus.
Here’s an example:
You’re playing at a casino with a 35X wagering requirement. You deposit $200 and get a $400 bonus. You have $600 in your account, so you must make $600 X 35, or $21,000 in wagers before cashing out.
You can estimate your losses on that amount of action by multiplying it by the house edge for the game you’re playing. If you’re playing a good blackjack game with perfect basic strategy, the house edge might only be 0.5%. Your expected loss given those wagering requirements is $105.
Since you started with $600, you would have $495 left after losing $105. Since you only put up $200 of your own money, you’d see a profit of $295 in this scenario.
And, of course, this is a statistical, theoretical prediction. Your actual results might be much better or much worse than this.
The Law of Large Numbers suggests that the closer you get to the long run, the more likely your actual results are to resemble the prediction.
So your best strategy would be to play blackjack for the lowest limits possible so that you could play as many hands as possible. The fewer hands you play, the more likely it is that your actual results will deviate from the mathematically expected results. (This is called “minimum boldness,” as opposed to “maximum boldness.”)
I’ll have more to say about wagering requirements and how they’ve changed over the last 15 years soon. I’ll also have more to say about minimum and maximum boldness, too.
But first, let’s look at some of the other factors that affect your ability to make money from online casino bonuses.
The House Edge of the Games You’re Playing
The ideal situation would be to find a casino game at an online casino where you have an edge over the casino. I don’t know of any casinos where this is possible now, and it was unlikely even 15 years ago.
But you could theoretically find a great pay table on a video poker game.
Or you might find a blackjack game with rules that are so liberal that the player would have a small edge over the house.
In those cases, you wouldn’t even need bonus whoring to make a profit. You could just deposit money and play with perfect strategy until the casino said we don’t want your action anymore.
Almost all (99.99%+) online casino games have a house edge. This means that the mathematical advantage belongs to the casino.
The house edge is the percentage of each bet that the casino theoretically expects to win based on the math behind the game.
Here are the house edge figures for the most common online casino games:
- Blackjack 0.5%
- Craps 1.41%
- Keno 35%
- Roulette 2.7%
- Slots 7%
- Video poker 0.5%
Those figures are just estimates based on the best bets and the best playing conditions at most online casinos. Obviously, the rules for the specific blackjack game you’re playing affect that figure. So does your ability to play with perfect basic strategy.
The 1.41% figure for craps that I quote is for the pass line bet, which is the most commonly played “good” bet at the craps table.
The 35% house edge I quoted for keno is assuming a really good game. It could be higher than that.
The 2.7% house edge for roulette assumes you’re playing a game with a single zero.
The 7% figure for slots is a wild guess, but don’t believe the sales literature from the casinos claiming that their casino offers an overall 98%+ payback percentage. That’s an overall figure; it’s not specific to their slot machine games.
The video poker house edge varies based on the paytable and how well you play the game. 0.5% is probably the best you can hope for at most online casinos, although you might have a hard time finding a pay table that good.
What Kind of Online Casino Bonus Is This, Anyway?
Some online casino bonuses are “cashable.” Most are not.
This is a major distinction for someone who wants to make money with online casino bonuses.
The way most casinos handle their bonuses is to consider the money from your deposit to be the first money you wager. The money from your bonu gets wagered after that.
And most casinos don’t allow you to cash out bonus money. They only allow you to cash out your own funds and any winnings you might have. The bonus amount gets subtracted from your withdrawal.
You can find “sticky” online casino bonuses and “phantom” online casino bonuses. These are both examples of casino bonuses that are NOT cashable.
Here’s how they work:
A phantom bonus is subtracted from your balance when you make a withdrawal.
Here’s an example of how that might work:
You deposit $100 and get a $200 phantom bonus. You gamble and meet your wagering requirements, and you have $250 left in your account. You make a withdrawal request, and the $200 bonus disappears from your balance, leaving you with $50 that you can cash out.
A sticky bonus, on the other hand, stays in your account after you cash out. In the example above, you’d still only be allowed to cash out $50, but the $200 in bonus money would stay in your account. You could still gamble with it.
If you got ahead, you could make another withdrawal of those winnings.
Cashable bonuses are, of course, the best situation you could ask for.
In the example I gave above for how online casino bonus hunting works, I assumed a cashable bonus.
Restricted Games
In the good old days, you could more or less just play any game and still cash out.
But modern online casinos restrict which games counting towards your wagering requirements. Many times, they limit the games that count to just slot machines, keno, and online scratch-off tickets.
Some casinos allow wagers on other games to count, but at a discounted rate. For example, they might allow wagering on blackjack to count, but only at 10% of the rate of play.
In other words, if you bet $100 on a hand of blackjack, it would only count as $10 toward fulfilling your wagering requirements.
Can You Still Make Money Bonus Whoring?
The sad reality is that at most online casinos, you CAN’T get a positive expectation via bonus whoring or bonus hunting.
The casinos have gotten so strict with their wagering requirements and other policies that it’s all but impossible to get into a positive expectation situation with them.
The online casino industry is more competitive than it used to be. Efforts from the United States government drove a lot of sites out of the business, and they also had a chilling effect on gamblers throughout the country. So the casinos are seeing fewer depositing players.
It’s important to the online casinos that they make the most profit from each depositor that they can.
Can you still find profitable opportunities?
You probably can, but they’re rarer than hen’s teeth these days.
Other Strategies for Making Money from Online Casino Bonuses
If you’re playing with bonus money, you can do things which you wouldn’t normally do at an online casino.
For example, you could bet both red and black at the same time on the roulette table. You could also bet on the 0 and the 00, making sure you’d only lose the house edge on every bet. There would be no variance in that situation.
When black hits, you lose $100
You could also bet both pass and don’t pass at the craps table.
Or you could bet on the banker AND on the player in baccarat.
It would be almost impossible to lose in those situations if you took into account the bonus money.
But guess what kind of attitude online casino management is going to have about that kind of behavior?
Not only are they going to frown on it, but you’re also going to look like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. They’re going to invalidate your bonus and probably not let you play there anymore.
Minimum Boldness and Maximum Boldness
Earlier I mentioned that the best way to try to get your results to mirror the expected results is to place as many wagers as possible. This means betting the minimum. If that provides you with a positive expectation, that’s the right strategy.
But what if you have an overall negative expectation?
What’s your best strategy for bucking those odds?
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To make as many wagers as possible, you would bet the minimum. That’s why it’s called the “minimum boldness” strategy. If you had an edge, this would be the best way to play, because it would maximize your probability of seeing the theoretical results become actual results.
To make as few wagers as possible, you would bet the maximum and hope to get lucky early. Book that early win, and you can switch to a minimum boldness strategy to preserve as much of those winnings as possible.
Here’s an example:
You deposit $250 and get a $250 bonus. You have a total bankroll of $500. You decide you want to play roulette.
You bet all $500 on black and win.
Now you have $1000.
The wagering requirement is $17,500, so you decide to just bet the minimum on the rest of your wagering requirements–you need to make $17,000 more in wagers.
And you’re playing at an online casino which has a single zero roulette wheel and the en prison rule in effect, which means the house edge on their roulette game is only 1.35%.
1.35% of $17,000 is $236.
That leaves you with $764. Subtract the $250 bonus from that, and you now have $514, which is a $264 profit.
MOST of the time, this won’t work. The probability of winning that first bet is close to 50%, but it’s LESS than 50%.
It’s 48.6%.
But a 48.6% probability of making a $264 profit from gambling on a casino bonus isn’t a bad deal.
And that’s called a “maximum boldness” strategy because you’re risking your entire bankroll on that first bet.
This is the kind of thinking you need to start engaging in if you have any hope of making money from online casino bonuses in today’s online casino market.
Conclusion
How do you make money from online casino bonuses?
In today’s online casino environment, blackjack bonus hunting doesn’t really work any more–not with any kind of reliability.
Your best bet at making money from an online casino bonus in this environment is to get really lucky.