No Deposit Bonuses

To encourage you to join up, some casinos offer a no deposit bonus. This means you’re given cash on the house to spend on their games simply for registering – you don’t need to make a deposit in order to receive the bonus, exactly as its name suggests. 

However, no deposit bonuses are not always easy to come by. Casinos like to give you a bonus once you’ve given them some of your hard-earned cash, so it tends to be the larger casinos that are backed up by big corporate outfits that are able to give you no deposit bonuses as smaller casinos can‘t afford to give away winnings without some sort of financial outlay on behalf of the player. 

All of them, though, come with what are known as playthrough requirements. Also known as rollover requirements or wagering requirements, these are multiples of your bonus that amount to a set monetary target you need to meet before you can make withdrawals. 

Many players are intimidated by the playthrough requirement details as they usually appear as small print in the casino terms and conditions, but in fact they’re perfectly fair and utterly necessary. Without them, unscrupulous players would simply join, accept a bonus and then withdraw it straight away which would prevent any casinos whatsoever from offering a bonus – so they’re a fact of life, and they’re also what make bonuses possible.

Some no deposit bonuses are also given a time restriction: You’ll have a set period after registering – say 24 or 48 hours – to spend the cash you’re given; other no deposit bonuses are purely for demonstration purposes, so you can never withdraw any winnings made with them – you just use the bonus to get a feel for the casino and try out the games. 

You’ll also find it easier to meet your playthrough requirement target if you play certain games. If everybody played the lowest risk games (like even bets on roulette) to meet their playthrough targets then casinos would lose heavily, so the concept of game Weights is always used to prevent any problems. 

A game weighting is the percentage of any wager that counts towards meeting redemption. 100% of all virtually all slots wagers always count, with lesser percentages of wagers on other games like roulette, no deposit blackjack and videopoker contributing.

As always, it’s always worth checking exactly how a no deposit bonus works before accepting one – but as long as you bear in mind the concepts explained above then you’re unlikely to come unstuck.