Wagering Requirements And Bonus Abuse
Date Added: February 26, 2009
Online casinos pass on a portion of profits earned as bonuses as incentives for players to wager more. However there are some players who misuse the bonuses by trying to claim bonuses not due to them. This is termed as bonus abuse. Bonus abuse is harmful to all concerned. Players who engage in bonus abuse will ultimately get caught, have their funds impounded and will be blacklisted from the casino. The other players suffer as well. This is because the online casinos allocate a portion of their profits as bonuses. They factor in bonus abuse and offer lower bonuses than they could have had there been no bonus abuse. Therefore online casinos that can manage bonuses better and restrict bonus abuse can offer larger bonuses and be more competitive.
One of the forms of bonus abuse is claiming the bonuses before the wagering requirements are met. As mentioned earlier bonuses are given as an incentive to wager at the casino. Therefore online casinos require that the bonuses are wagered a number of times before they can be cashed. Suppose a bonus of $100 carries a wagering requirement of 20x. The player has to wager $2,000 before he can get a whiff of the money. This is a tall order and there are players who do not have the tolerance to wait so long. Hence they try and find ways of claiming the bonus without meeting the letter and spirit of the wagering requirements.
Some of the software providers realized that if the bonus system offered was more user friendly then there would be less bonus abuse and this would allow the online casinos to offer better bonuses. Microgaming was one of the first software providers to offer a radically different bonus system. This is known as the Clearplay bonus system. Players can withdraw their bonuses without meeting the complete wagering requirements but at a cost. They have to forfeit a part of the bonus. So players can take a call on whether to claim a smaller part of the bonus by meeting a small part of the wagering requirements or go for the full bonus by meeting all the wagering requirements.
Wizard Gaming has come up with the Quick Cash bonus system. In the traditional format the player is entitled to the entire bonus only after he completes the wagering requirement in totality. In the example given earlier the player will have to wager $2,000 and will then have the $100 bonus transferred to the cash account. In the Quick Cash system as soon as the player wagers $100 from the bonus account, the online casino transfers $5 to the cash account. Since the player is allowed to cash the bonus at regular intervals the need to cut corners and wrongfully claim bonuses is eliminated. The Quick Cash bonus system goes by the generic name of incremental bonus system. Most software providers today employ some form of an incremental bonus system. These innovative bonus systems have induced better compliance and reduced the incidence of bonus abuse considerably.
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