Online Casino Bonuses

March 21, 2005 10:04 AM

Is there any reason why this method of collecting bonuses from online casinos wouldn't work?

It truly seems too good to be true. Assuming you bet the minimum, what are the odds of losing money overall? Is this something that one with little gambling experience and no online gambling experience could do?

posted by Coffeemate to work & money (10 answers total)

Yes, you can make money this way. If you make enough money this way, they will eventually notice and kick you out -- they don't particularly have to have a reason to ban you, keep that in mind, they just have to want to. A friend of mine took advantage of every offer that sites he used ever had, and made some decent scratch (a few thousand dollars a year say) playing lots of very boring blackjack hands. Eventually they threw him out and banned him from all the sites their company owned. He moved on to other sites. I'm sure the same will happen again.

If you know the rules to blackjack (that is, how to bet while minimizing losses) you will lose money at a minimal rate, and should be able to come out ahead with their offers.
posted by RustyBrooks at 10:47 AM on March 21, 2005

That is, how to *play* while minimizing losses.
posted by RustyBrooks at 10:48 AM on March 21, 2005

Yes, it is definitely workable, but very tedious. Remember that you'll be playing hours and hours of blackjack "by the book", no originality required, just click whatever button, lather, rinse, repeat. There is a limited number of places to do this at, so you will in theory hit a ceiling at some point. There just aren't that many people willing to chase the bonus and only the bonus, everywhere they can; it's very, very boring.

My experience on this comes mainly from poker sites (guide to bonuses here). For poker bonuses, you usually have to play a certain number of raked hands for the bonus to unlock. I notice that for black jack they have a "Wage Requirement" which seems to mean a total amount of wagered money. If so, since the mathematical expectation for any black jack play is "easily" determined, and the house has a mathematical edge, it would seem to me that the wage requirement is in line with this on some level. Perhaps it is the average total of wagers for their playerbase for them to lose that bonus amount? I don't know, but I wonder about it.

If you've got hours with nothing to do and cash burning a hole in your pocket, by all means, try it out and see. If you have the patience and self-control necessary to stick to the plan to the letter, you should come out with a healthy profit. Me, I prefer poker. I have fun playing it, but then it's easier to lose your bonus.
posted by splice at 11:29 AM on March 21, 2005

I followed this page roughly (just the first couple of casinos) just after a consulting gig I had went belly up and was basically just bored. I made a profit of around $350 for a day's worth of boring blackjack hands.
posted by hominid211 at 11:47 AM on March 21, 2005

I did this a couple of years ago, at casinos where the wage requirement was a lot lower. Worked just as expected, although they paid out with US$ cheques so I had to pay a bit to get them cashed.
It wasn't too tedious, but I only had to bet the bonus amount once over, and I think the novelty of beating the casinos helped make it more interesting.
posted by OldMansHands at 11:52 AM on March 21, 2005

I guess there's also the question of how you define "work." After you invest all the time and the knowledge necessary would you have been better off, when figuring $ per hour intake, working a second job at McDonald's?

Don't miss the risk to reward ratio, either. When trying to maintain that near-even 50-50 odds ratio you can't afford to screw up even once. If you have to play perfectly for only 4 hours to get that $100 that's a lot of stress.
posted by phearlez at 11:54 AM on March 21, 2005

The level of stress depends on how good at blackjack you are. I (and many other people) have played enough blackjack that playing "strictly by the book" is second nature and doesn't require any thought at all, any more than the multiplication tables require thought.

Boring, yes. Stress, no.
posted by Justinian at 12:13 PM on March 21, 2005

When you get pretty good at card-counting, basic strategy play is done without even thinking. It's completely mathematical, and for most people the "thrill" of gambling is important.

I could sit at a table for 5-6 hours without moving and still be able to play hands without being stressed.

But as Justinian says, it does get incredibly boring if you're not even going to vary your bet.
posted by madman at 1:35 PM on March 21, 2005

Yahoo used to have online blackjack where you didn't have to pay, but prizes could be "bought" with the online credits you accumulated -- prizes worth real money, like gift certificates to online stores. It was probably mostly prizes from Yahoo advertisers, and it took a hell of a lot of playing to accumulate enough credit to get anything.

That said, my friend wrote a program that did some optical character recognition to play blackjack for him. He did this for quite a while and accumulated enough prize money to get a nice digital camera, among other things. His brother, on the other hand, had several hands going at a time with the program at an insane number of hours per day. Yahoo got wise to the whole thing eventually (or just noticed that a lot of money was paid out) and discontinued the whole thing.
posted by mikeh at 9:35 AM on March 22, 2005

my friend did this and made about $7-9 an hour.

you can get free ipods too, it just is a PITA.

but yeah, if you're unemployed, or in a cubicle (or you just want to learn blackjack), i guess this would be fun. I've considered checking it out.
posted by fishfucker at 6:11 PM on March 23, 2005