Winning With Casino Money (Strategy Guide Pt.4)
Posted by: alugoool : Category: Strategies for Blackjack“When we put 50 machines in, I consider them 50 more mousetraps. You have to have a mousetrap to catch a mouse.” – Bob Stupak, former Las Vegas casino owner
The Internet is literally awash with golden opportunities for as the number of online casinos increase so does the competition to find and keep customers. This has meant bigger and more attractive offers are available to players both to try out a casino and then to remain loyal to it. So with all this going on how do casinos win the battle for customers? How are they able to attract the attention of curious visitor and then make sure that he/she remains a regular player?
Sprats to Catch Mackerel
There are several different types of offers that casinos use to attract custom. These vary in size from one casino to another but the basic ones are;
Free No-Obligation Deposit,
Welcome Bonus
Payment Bonus
Recurring Bonus.
Periodical Bonuses
Rewards Schemes
They can be a little complicated to understand so let us now take a closer look at these incentives and how they work.
1 – The Free No-Obligation Deposit
Many good online casinos offers a new player a no-obligation deposit. This is a free deposit made to your account when you first sign up. You generally don’t even have to make an initial deposit yourself. The amount on offer varies from one casino to another but usually they are somewhere between $10 and $25. This is enough to guarantee a few games and to get you to experience the thrills and spills of online gambling. An example of a good casino offering a no-deposit bonus is www.mummysgold.com. Note: It would seem tempting just to go around signing up to casinos, taking their free deposits and moving on. Of course, it does not work like this. Instead there are terms and conditions attached to any payout. Sometimes these relate to the amount of play you have to give before cashing in whilst many casino now limit the amount of winnings that you withdraw. However these restrictions do not limit us unduly.
The free bonus incentive gives anyone a great opportunity to get started with no money whatsoever! Using the offer you can begin to build a sizeable betting pot through three strategies.
Option 1: Take the whole of your free bonus and put it down as one bet on the first hand of Blackjack Remember on your first visit to the table you will have an almost equal 50/50 chance of winning – which are pretty favorable odds. Later on you will learn how to increase that 50% chance dramatically by introducing you to the best play for any given situation.
Option 2: A slight modification on this all-or-nothing approach is to split your bonus into two or even three parts. This reduces the chances of crashing out on game one and gives you a little room for maneuver should you find a hand winning opportunity that you want to double up on.
Option 3: This method takes a little more time, effort and patience but will invariably bring you the right result.
First of all search out a casino with a good introductory bonus but which also offers a low minimum bet amount. This ought to be 50c and $1. (Two of the best I could find at the time of writing were www.piggspeak.com and www.captaincookscasino.com)
Now play a very careful game using only the minimum betting stakes and avoiding any risky moves. Your bonus payment should give you somewhere between 20 and 40 hands of Blackjack depending upon your playing style and gradually you should be able to build this up to a decent pot. I do recommend that when you reach a level of about three times your free bonus that you check that you have fulfilled your playing requirements and then cash in. Do not risk your winnings – just take them and cash-in. With your winnings you can then move on to take advantage of any casino’s second sign-up incentive – that being the Welcome Bonus!
Tip: If you lose your initial opening free bonus then just move onto another casino. You will find a list of Casino Free Bonuses directories in Appendix 2 of this manual. It is also worth signing up for a newsletter service such as the Mayer Club, so you are updated when offers become available.
2 – Welcome Bonus
Once you have established your account at a casino and are ready for your first serious game then always look for the casino’s `Welcome Bonus’. This is an amount offered by the casino to compliment your first deposit. Usually it is given in percentage terms and usually amounts to 1, 2 or 3 times your deposit. This means that with even a small initial deposit, and it could be your winnings from the Free No-Obligation Bonus, you can create a decent playing purse.
However like the earlier bonus system that we looked at there are advantages and disadvantages to playing with this incentive.
Advantages
The major plus to using a welcome bonus is that you are effectively playing with the casino’s money as a way of safeguarding your own. For example, imagine that you deposit $100 and then receive another $100 as a bonus. You can play with a stop-loss system of $100, which means that you will not come out of the game as a loser. You are in effect playing with safe money.
There is a strategy amongst some Blackjack players to visit a casino, make use of the free money and then move on. This means that even if you lose 20% of the hands (which is very unlikely) you will still emerge with a profit of 80$ … and your deposit intact! You only need visit a few before you have generated a very sizeable financial advantage!
However I should warn you that some casinos are getting wise to these players and are blacklisting them. Personally I do not use the Welcome Bonus very often but for another completely different reason – namely, the play-through limitations, which brings me to the disadvantages of this system.
Disadvantages
Payout on winnings made using a casino’s Welcome Bonus are dependent upon the player fulfilling a complex set of terms and conditions. These are usually revealed in either the General Playing Terms and Conditions or the Introductory Bonus Terms and Conditions. A link to these is usually included on the casinos home page.
Now these Bonus Conditions usually require some skill to interpret. Typically they reveal the games that you can and cannot play using the bonus (thankfully Blackjack is usually included in their list of acceptable games) and the amount of play (measured in $) that you are required to play before you can cash-in. This play-through amount can be between 7 and 30 times the deposit plus bonus. This means that if you deposit $40, then receive another $40 in bonuses at 10 times play-through you have to wager $800 in bets.
As I mentioned earlier I do not like the limitations that the Welcome Bonus places upon a game. I find it cramps my playing decisions and restricts my choice of when to judge the optimum time to cash-in. However if you are prepared to see a game through many hands with the risk of total failure then even a complete novice can win a decent amount of money if he/she chooses the right casino and playing tactics.
The best joining bonuses tend to be at the best-known casinos, such as www.888.com or www.casinocraze.com
3 – Payment Bonus
Really good bonuses that many casinos offer are `Payment Bonuses’. This generally amounts to some 10 – 15% extra for all deposits that are made with specific third-party processors. If you take the advice that I offered earlier then you would undoubtedly be using one of these anyway. This is a decent offer and one that is particularly attractive if you are depositing several hundred dollars at a time.
4 – Recurring Bonus
Although much smaller than the Welcome Bonus, the Monthly, or recurring bonus, is sometimes a much more attractive offer. In many regards it is a cross between the Free and Welcome Bonuses – it is a set amount (perhaps $30 – $40) with a low play through that the casino offers you – usually on a monthly basis. UK-based players are the lucky ones here as they have access to Intercasino, who kindly top up your account with £50 each and evry month. Lets hope they soon accept US players!
5 – Periodical Bonus
Once you have joined a casino they will email you regularly with time-limited bonuses. Some of these can be pretty spectacular amounting to as much as the first-time bonus itself. Some Casinos are now starting to offer their regular players guaranteed cash back on their lost deposits. It really is a player’s playing field out there!
6 – Reward Schemes
Quite often a casino will offer a player a wide range of other rewards programs. The most useful is the points system in which you are credited with a number of points per $ deposited. The player can generally convert these back to Dollars.
Whilst this type of bonuses are not worth playing a specific casino for they can add a little added bonus to the serious Blackjack player who wagers large amounts over a period of time. There are others such as Rewards Incentives and bonuses for VIP players but these only become available after you have been playing at the casino for a while.
And So…
That brings us to the end of this chapter and of looking the various casino payment and incentive systems. With a little imagination you can see how with careful use of them they can add significantly to your overall profits.
In the next chapter I want to take a look at the actual playing strategy that will strip the house-edge down to virtually nothing
