What bonuses are available
The bonuses that are available to players come in many different forms. The most popular form of bonus is the welcome bonus. This is named the welcome bonus because it is given as a welcome gift to players when they sign up to an online casino. These will most often award players with a matched bonus upon their first deposit. They can also include free spins on various different video slots games. The welcome bonus is offered by almost every online casino on the market and is the most well known of all bonuses.
There are also reload bonuses that are offered to players. These are matched bonuses that will give players an additional boost to their bankroll whenever they make deposits at certain times. They are usually at a lower percentage than the ones offered by welcome bonuses, but can give players increased amounts if they are high roller reload bonuses.
A no deposit bonus is the most sought after kind of bonus for online casino players. This is where a bonus is awarded to players who don’t have to make any kind of deposit. Because it is essentially a free bonus they are very rare but also the most desirable for players.
There are also other kinds of bonuses available for Canadian online casino players, these usually come under the VIP scheme that individual online casinos run. They cover quite a lot of ground, but can give players some lucrative rewards.
What the vast majority of bonuses have applied to them are wagering requirements. This is how much you have to spend in wagers before you are allowed to make a withdrawal of your bonus. These requirements are usually set at between 25 and 60 times the value of the bonus. It’s these that cause some players to choose not to partake in online casino bonuses.
Why play without an online casino bonus?
As mentioned, the wagering requirements are often the reason behind players choosing not to accept an online casino bonus. The wagering requirements can often make a bonus completely worthless to a player. For example, if a player receives a bonus of $300, but it has a 60 times wagering requirement then the player would have to wager $18,000 before they could withdraw that bonus.
Imagine you played a video slot and on your first spin you won $15,000. You wouldn’t be able to withdraw that amount until you had played it through in order to satisfy your wagering requirements. This would be even worse if you were playing with free spins from an online casino.
With free spins any winnings that are created are subject to the wagering requirements. You would be unable to win a prize as big as $15,000 with free spins because the maximum win is usually limited to around $1,000, but you would still have to play through those winnings before you could withdraw them.
A lot of Canadian players prefer to play without any restrictions on when they can make withdrawals. In order to do this they choose to play without using the online casino bonuses.
In the previous examples it just covered video slots. When it comes to playing at the table games, things get a little bit more tricky. If you like to play table games, then an online casino bonus is definitely not for you. This is because table games don’t always contribute the full amount of your wagers towards the wagering requirements. Some online casinos only accept 10% of table game wagers towards the requirements. There are even some that don’t accept any table game wagers.
This means that players who enjoy table games can’t get any benefit from taking an online casino bonus, because it forces them to play games that they would usually avoid. Live casino games will sometimes count towards the requirements, but again this is something that will differ at different casinos. In order to combat this problem, some online casinos offer a table game only bonus, but they will still have wagering requirements associated with them.
So you can never make a withdrawal?
It’s not quite as simple as that. Once you have played through all of your bonus cash then the wagering requirements are no longer in place. But, it essentially means that unless you are able to make a huge win when playing, the chances of your achieving some of the much larger wagering requirements on the market are very slim. If your chances of being able to actually get a benefit from the bonus are slim then, it might not be worth your while taking them.
That doesn’t mean that you should never take an online casino bonus. Just weigh up whether it is worth your while and whether the bonus will be able to help you. If you think it will then play with the bonus, if you think it won’t then playing without the bonus might be the best choice for you.