Like sports betting, online casino and game providers offer promotions on their games. And just like with sports betting, you can use that to your advantage to make a profit.
Casino offers provide a brilliant way to add extra income and flexibility to your matched betting activities. They offer some added benefits that you don’t get with sports betting.
- You can do them at any time.
- You don’t need to keep an eye on events.
- You don’t need to look for suitable back and lay odds.
- You can complete an offer in one go; no waiting for events to finish.
These points make casino offers perfect to fit around your sports betting, or at quieter times of the year, like during the football off-season.
I’ll teach you how to profit from them by providing the basic concepts and working through some real-world offers. Then I’ll direct you towards where you can find every online casino’s new and existing customer offers and a set of tools to calculate your expected profit from any casino offer.
Introduction
It can feel like a leap from sports betting, with which you may already be familiar. Casino games may make you think of Las Vegas, high stakes and extreme risk. A world away from something you would typically play. As the saying goes, ‘the house always wins’, and it’s entirely accurate.
However, when you factor in promotions, the odds swing in your favour. Like bookmakers and sports betting, online casinos are happy to make a loss to get players in the door, intending to get you hooked so that you lose in the long run.
If you can use the same discipline as you do for matched betting, then a lot of profit is being given away. Casino offers are no more complicated to profit from than sports betting offers. In some ways, they are more convenient, as you don’t have a real-life event you need to follow or wait to place a bet on. You can do casino offers at any time. Stick to the strategy, and you’ll have a second revenue stream with a separate set of offers each month.
How much can you make from casino offers?
Given the number of offers, it’s not unreasonable to make the same, or even more, than you can with sports betting offers. Every promotion has an ‘expected value’ you can make from it, and you may even hit a jackpot along the way, giving you a handsome profit. I’ll talk more about expected value later.
Like bookmakers, online casinos offer new customers free spins, bonuses and other incentives, and recurring promotions to keep them coming back. Some bookmakers also have a casino section and may even offer free spins in exchange for wagering a certain amount on a sporting event.
House edge
Before we get too far into profiting from casino promotions, it’s important to understand how online casinos and gaming operators make their money.
Every game has a ‘house edge’ factored into it, which means they are inherently unfair against the player. While you may get the better of a game in the short term, the house edge will always come through in the long run.
Take a roulette wheel with 18 red numbers and 18 black numbers. When betting on red or black, your return on a winning bet is twice the amount you staked. If you simultaneously place equal bets on red and black, they would cancel out, and overall you would not win or lose money.
However, roulette wheels don’t just have red and black numbers. They also include ‘zero’, which is not considered red or black. You can cover red and black and still have the wheel stop on zero, losing both bets.
Including zero, there are 37 numbers on a roulette wheel. On average, the wheel will stop on zero 1 in 37 times, causing both your red and black bets to lose. 1 in 37 times is another way of saying 2.7% of the time. Therefore, roulette has a 2.7% house edge.
For every £1 you put in, you’ll lose 2.7 pence on average. You could turn this around and say that for every £1 spent, you’ll get 97.3 pence back. Therefore, a standard roulette game has a 97.3% ‘Return to Player’ or ‘RTP’ for short.
Every game has a ‘Return to Player’ favouring the casino or operator. Over the long term, this will always win out, even if you have a lucky streak for a short time. It’s why casinos have existed for hundreds of years and why gambling is a terrible idea.
Putting the edge in your favour
Just like matched betting, promotions put the edge back in your favour. Say you have £20 to use on roulette. The 97.3% ‘Return to Player’ will give you back £19.46 on average. That isn’t good if the £20 is your money, but if you received that £20 for free, you’re £19.46 up!
Most free bonuses will require you to wager the amount a certain number of times before you are allowed to withdraw it. The example above may need you to wager your £20 five times before it’s withdrawable. That’s the same as wagering £100. At 97.3% ‘Return to Player’, you can expect to lose £2.70 of the £100. Take £2.70 from your free £20, and you’re still £17.30 up! Gaming operators often publish the ‘Return to Player’ values in the terms and conditions of their games.
The above £20 bonus can be said to have an ‘expected value’ of £17.30. However, due to the nature of short-term chance, it’s unlikely you’ll make exactly £17.30. You could make much more, less, or lose the bonus altogether (known as ‘busting’). But, the expected value will always come through over the long term. Over hundreds or thousands of bonuses, you will get a return of around the expected value of those offers. The short-term fluctuation is called ‘variance’.
Limiting variance
Some variance is unavoidable – you may have a losing streak or hit a massive win. However, the expected value will always win out in the end.
You can use simple techniques to lessen its impact in the short term.
Lower stakes
Betting lower stakes will increase the spins needed to complete a wagering requirement. More spins mean you’re more likely to end up closer to the average. Big stakes mean you can quickly lose a lot in a short losing streak or win big if you get lucky. However, this is extremely risky, so I recommend small stakes as the safest way to play.
Bankroll
Some offers are considered high risk due to the amount of variance involved. Only tackle those offers once you have a certain level of bankroll. Otherwise, you could have nothing to bet with if a bad streak hits you. Although they’re considered high risk due to the level of variance, it’s important to remember it’s all about expected value over the long term. It’s where you’ll find some significant profits, so they are worth tackling when your bankroll is ready.
The offers I’ll cover are low-risk, so bankroll will not be a factor. Only when you hit much larger promotions will bankroll become a consideration.
Completing offers
Now that you understand how to profit from a casino promotion, try walking through either of the offers below to make some real money.
Once completed, you’ll likely be hungry to add more casino profits around your matched betting activities.
There are several services where you can get instructions for every available casino offer, but I strongly recommend OddsMonkey. Their clear and thorough guidance covers everything you need for any casino offer. Once you have access, head to ‘Casino’, then ‘Casino Guides’ from their main navigation.
If you find it isn’t for you, they have a 30-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked.
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The Matched Betting Academy
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