#1 Find an Offer

So, how does one actually bump into a bonus offer? There are many different ways to come face to face with a bonus – such as Google ads, promotional emails, sites giving out bonus codes, reviews, and so on.

Obviously, our recommendation would be to stick to the list we provided above. The casinos we included are all top-notch, with a long history of accepting US casino players. This should be the first step towards your goal of playing with a great casino bonus – a casino that’s also great.

A site’s reputation can be a great precursor to the bonus experience. If a certain casino has a history of unethical practices, alleged scams, and withheld funds, they’re most likely not a place where you want to leave your money. Even if such sites do come out with a compelling offer, it’s probably too good to be true.

On the other hand, online casinos that are known for their generosity will almost certainly deliver on their promises and give you that extra financial boost.

Once you’ve found an offer, you should analyze it. How much money do you get? What’s the exact match percentage? Are there any additional conditions? What are the wagering requirements? How much time do I have to use this bonus? You need to find an answer to all of these questions before you decide on a particular deal and deposit some money.

Read the Terms and Conditions of both the casino and a whole, and the specific bonus you’re interested in. Remember, sites are legally required to state everything in the T&C, so it’s the best way to find out everything about online casino bonuses.

When you have already double checked everything and taken a liking to a certain casino, you can now move on and…

#2 Deposit Real Money

At this point, you need to be absolutely certain that your money is going into the right hands. If you’re unsure, check again, and continue with this step once everything checks out.

Everything ready? Okay, now it’s time to activate the bonus. To do so, create an account on the site offering said bonus. While most sites allow you to create an account whenever you want, there are some sites that require identity verification if you wish to increase your spending limits.

Keep this in mind during the account creation process. If the spending limits don’t hinder your playing style, you can do this afterwards.

Now that you’ve created an account, it’s time to fund it. Go to the Deposit or Banking section and select your preferred banking method. You should pick a payment platform that can be used for both deposits and withdrawals. This will allow you to log in just once and your browser, as well as the casino site, will remember the details. After that first transaction, every cash injection to your account should be a piece of cake.

Before you confirm the transaction, make sure you’ve entered an amount that will allow you to activate the full benefits of your bonus. Also, you should read up on the T&C just to see if there is a requirement that disqualifies you.

For instance, some casinos don’t allow bonus-triggering deposits to be made via PayPal, ecoPayz, and other eWallets. If such limitations exist, you should find them in the T&C. Now that all the boxes are checked, you can confirm the deposit and wait for the magic to happen. It’s time for the fun part!

#3 Casino Matches It & Sets Requirements

If you’ve fulfilled all the conditions, your deposit should be instantly cleared and the casino should match it. Before you can invest the cash from this casino bonus and increase your bets, we need to take a look at the requirements themselves and the way they impact your playing experience.

The match percentage, in most cases, is the most important bonus-related details. It’s basically a number that signifies to which extent does the casino match your initial deposit. Most sites revolve around a 100% match, up to a certain threshold. It’s usually $100, but high-rollers can also snatch a bigger bonus to get a proper piece of the action.

What this all means is that you will get double the money, as long as you stay above the minimum deposit limit and under the max amount the site will match. If you deposit $50, you will get $100, and so on. You can still go over the match threshold, but you won’t get double your money anymore. Instead, you will just get the maximum match available.

Let’s say the bonus is something along the lines of this – First Deposit 100% Match – Up to $100, and the minimum deposit on the site is $10. If you deposit $11, you will get $22. However, if you deposit $150, you will still get just $250, as the maximum amount the casino can give you is $100.

Next, you should also take a look at the wagering requirements. You’ve probably seen them written in the form of 5x/10x/50x. What this multiplier means is that you’re required to wager your bonus at least a certain amount of times before you can claim it.

This system exists so that the house always has an edge. If there were no wagering requirements, people would create new accounts on every site and just walk away with the cash they just received, right? Of course. That’s why the playthrough system exists.

For example – you’ve just claimed a bonus. It’s a 100% match on your first deposit, you’ve deposited $100, and the wagering requirements are 40x. To be able to claim those $100, you need to wager a total of $4,000 (40 x 100).

The best online casino bonuses usually have low wagering requirements, which can help your overall efforts because you will mathematically be at less of a risk of losing your money. Once you’ve taken care of all this, it’s time to actually put your bonus money to good use.

#4 You Wager & Try To Fulfill Requirements

Finally, we’ve arrived at the part where you actually get to use the bonus. However, you should hold your horses once again – using a bonus is much more than choosing a game and going berserk with every bet.

Before you make the first wager with your online casino bonus, you need to check out the game weightings. This is the part that players view as the biggest source of confusion throughout the whole process, so bear with us.

A game weighting is a number, expressed through a percentage, that indicates how certain a certain game counts towards the wagering requirements. This limitation exists mainly because not all casino games are the same, at least in terms of hose edge. But what does this have to do with casino bonuses?
Well, let’s say you’ve picked a bonus that can be used in the entire casino section of a site. You will most likely want to try slots and roulette. While these games are both iconic, the outcome of a spin in roulette is much easier to affect with your own conscious decisions. You can choose the numbers or an area of the wheel, which makes winning a realistic expectation.

Slots, on the other hand, are hard to win at because everything depends on the software. You can tweak your bets and lines, but that’s just about it. If you don’t get the right symbols, too bad. There’s nothing you can do.

For this reason, slots have a much higher game weighting than other games, usually 100%. This means that for every $1 you bet on slots, $1 will be counted towards your wagering requirements. Table games, usually hover around the 25-75%, depending on the variant you’re playing. If, for example, all blackjack games, have a 50% weighting, half of every bet you make will count towards the requirements.

Why do sites do this? Well, everyone would play the games with the lowest house edge if the game weightings were the same. By making this decision, casinos ensure that players won’t just claim the bonus after a few successful bets. Slots with low RTPs give you a much higher chance of losing out, so the high game weighting evens things up a bit.

You Manage To "Wager The Bonus" & Cashout

This is the first outcome of any bonus-related experience. Once you’ve calculated things such as game weighting and playthrough requirements, you can start playing the games you love.

If everything goes well and you score a couple of sizeable wins, you can easily chip at the remainder of the money to be wagered. The best way to accomplish this is to take a strategic approach and keep track of how close you are to fulfilling the wagering/playthrough requirements.

While we’re all for having fun whilst using online casino bonuses, responsibility comes first. Play it nice and slowly, or you’re going to find yourself fighting the urge to make another deposit and make good on the wagering requirements. Combine the games you know and love the most with some good solid numbers. Pay attention to the game weighting and you should do quite fine.

You Lose The Deposit/Bonus Trying

Hey, don’t worry! Losses happen even to the best of us. Online casino bonuses are, after all, gambling. You can’t realistically expect to claim every promotion to take up, so be prepared to call it a day when you see things aren’t going well.

Like we said previously – play responsibly. This is especially important to remember if you’re using a Canadian casino bonus while playing slots. Even though the 100% game weighting can be enticing, slots are volatile and depend almost solely on luck. Know when to call it quits, as self-control is essential if you want to continue viewing casino games as a fun hobby.

However, you can prevent losses by online picking casino bonuses that have realistic terms (more on that in a bit. Having realistic playthrough requirements and a hefty sum of money might not seem like much, but it’s a combination that gives you the best chances to turn that bonus into a nice, hefty withdrawal later on.

Wagering Requirements

A basic component of every casino bonus you’ll see, wagering requirements are a way for casinos to stop players from robbing them blind. That’s why a bonus needs to be cleared before you can withdraw the amount you one.

To fulfill the wagering requirements, you need to bet the amount of your bonus multiplied by the number in the requirements. For instance, if you claim a $100 bonus with 10x wagering requirements, you need to bet $1,000, as 100 times 10 is 1,000.

When you’re reading the T&C, you should pay extra close attention to this particular term. Some sites like to falsely advertise that they have low wagering requirements, only to have players wager their deposit AND the bonus a certain number of times.

Before you create an account or make any sort of payment, check to see if the wagering requirements refer to only the bonus amount, or is the deposit included in the sum. Stay away from sites that include the bonus – it’s robbery, plain and simple.

Stake Size

In regard to the wagering requirements, casinos have come up with yet another way to make cashing out with your bonus as difficult as possible. Stake size refers to the maximum amount you can bet while still being eligible to claim the bonus.

This one makes a bit of sense, as you can imagine that many people would be willing to wager $1,000 on a safe bet in roulette in order to claim their bonus right away. If the bet wins, the casino not only loses a lot of money from the bet but by forfeiting the bonus, as well.

Usually, deposit bonuses at online casinos have pretty realistic limits when it comes to stake size. It’s usually a number that changes from game to game but is still in the ballpark of not hindering your playing experiences. The T&C usually contains game-specific info, as well.

Restricted Game

When you see ‘restricted game’ in the T&C, it refers to a game that doesn’t count if you’re looking to clear a casino bonus. You can still play the game and win regular money, but such actions won’t affect the playthrough requirements.

Why does this happen? Well, two types of games are usually restricted when it comes to online casino bonuses. The first group is usually newer games, ones that haven’t been tested enough for sites to be able to include them in their bonus scheme.

The second group mostly refers to games with a low house edge. Think of blackjack, as an example. Some sites simply don’t deem blackjack bets to feasible for them, as players can easily win and cash out their bonus in no time.

Low-Risk Exclusion

It’s probably clear that all of these bonus terms are just an elaborate plan to prevent the casino from potential losses, both in the short run and the long run. While wagering requirements, low bets, and off-limits games are all great, players will still try to find the easiest route to cashing out.

For a long time, a favorite way to side-step the bonus terms was to place low-risk bets. After some time, casinos caught up with this method and decided to start banning bets with an overwhelmingly high chance of winning. Since it’s not necessary to lose your bet, casinos became aware that they might be leaving room for exploits.

Basically, you can’t bet on multiple outcomes in blackjack, or you can’t bet on more than half the wheel in roulette. That sort of stuff. Usually, the T&C contains all the bets that fall under the low-risk exclusion role. The list varies from site to site.

Time Limitation

You can’t use a promotion forever, as great as that would be. Online casino bonuses are not designed to make you rich – they’re designed to make the casino owners rich. With that in mind, sites often put time limits on their bonuses, just as a means of convincing you to spend your money ASAP.

Therefore, you should always look for a casino that imposes reasonable limitations. 7 days is considered pretty low nowadays, while most sites have warmed up to the idea of offering a 15-30-day bonus to their players.

Also, you should read what happens to the bonus funds if your bonus is voided. How is the time calculated? When does it begin, exactly? You should be able to find these details in the T&C, as well.

Voided Bonus

In online casino lingo, ‘voided’ means that your bonus can’t be used anymore. This can happen for a number of reasons. The most usual situation is improper conduct from the player.

Now, the definition of improper may vary from site to site, but it usually refers to things such as giving out fake information, account sharing, side-stepping the rules, etc.

This is perhaps the most important ‘term’ that you should focus on. Read the T&C thoroughly to see what are the reasons the casino can void your bonus for. If you see anything overly irrational, disregard the casino completely. Putting insane requirements in small text and hiding them in the middle of the T&C is a pretty shady move.

Listing potential cases when a bonus can be voided is a form of legal protection for the casino. If, for example, they say that they will void your bonus for drinking milk on a Sunday, they can do that without the fear of being sued. You agreed to the terms, and not reading them isn’t an excuse.