You’ve found a ripper of a welcome bonus at a new casino—a 100% match on your deposit. You’re a keen Blackjack player, so you think, “Beauty! I’ll use this bonus to play some cards.” You play for an hour, applying perfect basic strategy, and you check your bonus progress. To your shock, you see that you’ve barely made a dent in clearing the wagering requirements. What’s going on?
Welcome to one of the most important, and most often overlooked, parts of any casino bonus terms and conditions: Game Weighting. It’s a crucial concept to understand, as it dictates how much your chosen game contributes towards clearing a bonus. Ignoring it can lead to a lot of frustration and the potential forfeiture of your bonus funds.
What is Game Weighting and Why Do Casinos Use It?
Game weighting, sometimes called game contribution, determines what percentage of your bet on a specific game counts towards fulfilling the wagering requirement. Not all games are created equal in the eyes of the casino when it comes to bonuses.
The reason for this is simple: it all comes down to the house edge. Pokies generally have a higher house edge than table games like Blackjack or Baccarat. This means, over the long run, the casino is more likely to win on pokies. A game like Blackjack, when played with perfect basic strategy, has an incredibly low house edge (around 0.5%).
If bets on Blackjack contributed 100% to the wagering, a skilled player could take a bonus, play Blackjack with a tiny house edge, clear the wagering requirements with minimal expected loss, and walk away with the casino’s money. To protect themselves from this, casinos assign lower weightings to games with a low house edge.
A Typical Game Weighting Table
Every casino is slightly different, so you MUST check the T&Cs for the specific bonus you are claiming. However, a typical game weighting table will look something like this:
- Online Pokies: 100%
- Scratch Cards & Keno: 100%
- Roulette & Baccarat: 10% – 20%
- Video Poker: 10%
- Blackjack: 5% – 10%
- Live Casino Games: 0% – 10%
- Jackpot Pokies: 0%
How It Works in Practice: A Clear Example
Let’s imagine you claimed a $100 bonus with a 30x wagering requirement. This means you need to make a total of $3,000 in bets ($100 x 30) to clear the bonus.
- If you play pokies (100% weighting): Every $1 you bet counts as $1 towards the $3,000 requirement. You would need to make $3,000 worth of spins to clear the bonus.
- If you play Blackjack (let’s say 10% weighting): Every $1 you bet only counts as 10 cents towards the $3,000 requirement. This means to clear the bonus, you would actually need to make a staggering $30,000 worth of bets on Blackjack!
As you can see, the difference is massive.
What’s the Takeaway?
This doesn’t mean you can’t play table games with a bonus, but it does mean that if your primary goal is to clear the wagering requirement, pokies are almost always the most efficient way to do so. If you’re a table game enthusiast, you might be better off declining the bonus altogether and just playing with your own cash, free from any restrictions.
Before you claim any bonus at an online casino ausy, take two minutes to find the game weighting table in the terms and conditions. Understanding this simple concept will save you a lot of headaches and ensure you know exactly what you need to do to turn that bonus money into real, withdrawable cash.
