Menu
Hot Shot is a classic free slots game, which is online casino earn real money developed by Bally Tech. The applicable procedure and its respective duration depend heavily on the type of gambling. Jun 17, 2016 So now we have almost $20,000 a month in fixed expenses, and we have 40% of player revenue accounted for on top of that. So just to break even, an online casino needs to earn enough money so that 60% of its earnings equate to $20,000 a month. So we’re looking at a minimum casino win of at least $33,000 a month just to break even. How Can You Earn with Online Casino Bonuses Online casino sites constantly run promotions to get more customers and retain existing customers. These promotions are commonly referred to as real money casino bonuses, and they can really be advantageous if you know how to use them. While most people realize online casinos require you to spend some money to play and you could win money while you play, they don't know if you can make any real money while playing the games. Before you brush aside the possibility of making money or think you can earn a living playing these instant play games, it is time to evaluate the.
You’d be forgiven if you wanted to find a sure way to make money on the internet without having to work for it.
Online casino bonus hunting seems to offer you the opportunity to make easy money.
15 years ago, it WAS easy to actually pull this off. Online casinos offered large signup bonuses with easily-achieved wagering requirements.
And they were making so much money in those days that they didn’t even look too closely at the advantage gamblers who were taking advantage of these bonuses.
I had a good friend who deliberately took advantage of the bonus hunting opportunities available to make enough money to buy a jukebox for his game room, in fact.
Blackjack was the most profitable game to play during these heady days. The house edge is so low for a perfect strategy blackjack player that it’s hard to go wrong. Deposit money, claim your bonus, play perfect strategy blackjack until you’ve cleared your bonus requirements, and then cash out your profits.
Rinse and repeat.
This process was called “bonus hunting” or “bonus whoring.” If you specialized in blackjack, you would even refer to it as “blackjack bonus hunting” or “blackjack bonus whoring.”
But even then, the terms and conditions of the bonus affected how you had to go about this kind of thing. Pca poker 2009.
Wagering Requirements and How They Affect Bonus Whoring
Michael, the other writer on this blog, wrote an entire post about wagering requirements and how to beat them. If you’re looking for a detailed explanation, that would be the post to read.
Here, in brief, is how wagering requirements work:
Vegas7games online. The wagering requirements are just the amount of money you have to gamble before being allowed to cash out at the casino. They’re normally expressed as a multiple of your deposit plus your signup bonus.
Here’s an example:
You’re playing at a casino with a 35X wagering requirement. You deposit $200 and get a $400 bonus. You have $600 in your account, so you must make $600 X 35, or $21,000 in wagers before cashing out.
You can estimate your losses on that amount of action by multiplying it by the house edge for the game you’re playing. If you’re playing a good blackjack game with perfect basic strategy, the house edge might only be 0.5%. Your expected loss given those wagering requirements is $105.
Since you started with $600, you would have $495 left after losing $105. Since you only put up $200 of your own money, you’d see a profit of $295 in this scenario.
And, of course, this is a statistical, theoretical prediction. Your actual results might be much better or much worse than this.
The Law of Large Numbers suggests that the closer you get to the long run, the more likely your actual results are to resemble the prediction.
So your best strategy would be to play blackjack for the lowest limits possible so that you could play as many hands as possible. The fewer hands you play, the more likely it is that your actual results will deviate from the mathematically expected results. (This is called “minimum boldness,” as opposed to “maximum boldness.”)
I’ll have more to say about wagering requirements and how they’ve changed over the last 15 years soon. I’ll also have more to say about minimum and maximum boldness, too.
But first, let’s look at some of the other factors that affect your ability to make money from online casino bonuses.
The House Edge of the Games You’re Playing
The ideal situation would be to find a casino game at an online casino where you have an edge over the casino. I don’t know of any casinos where this is possible now, and it was unlikely even 15 years ago.
But you could theoretically find a great pay table on a video poker game.
Or you might find a blackjack game with rules that are so liberal that the player would have a small edge over the house.
In those cases, you wouldn’t even need bonus whoring to make a profit. You could just deposit money and play with perfect strategy until the casino said we don’t want your action anymore.
Almost all (99.99%+) online casino games have a house edge. This means that the mathematical advantage belongs to the casino.
The house edge is the percentage of each bet that the casino theoretically expects to win based on the math behind the game.
Here are the house edge figures for the most common online casino games:
- Blackjack 0.5%
- Craps 1.41%
- Keno 35%
- Roulette 2.7%
- Slots 7%
- Video poker 0.5%
Those figures are just estimates based on the best bets and the best playing conditions at most online casinos. Obviously, the rules for the specific blackjack game you’re playing affect that figure. So does your ability to play with perfect basic strategy.
The 1.41% figure for craps that I quote is for the pass line bet, which is the most commonly played “good” bet at the craps table.
The 35% house edge I quoted for keno is assuming a really good game. It could be higher than that.
The 2.7% house edge for roulette assumes you’re playing a game with a single zero.
The 7% figure for slots is a wild guess, but don’t believe the sales literature from the casinos claiming that their casino offers an overall 98%+ payback percentage. That’s an overall figure; it’s not specific to their slot machine games.
The video poker house edge varies based on the paytable and how well you play the game. 0.5% is probably the best you can hope for at most online casinos, although you might have a hard time finding a pay table that good.
What Kind of Online Casino Bonus Is This, Anyway?
Some online casino bonuses are “cashable.” Most are not.
This is a major distinction for someone who wants to make money with online casino bonuses.
The way most casinos handle their bonuses is to consider the money from your deposit to be the first money you wager. The money from your bonu gets wagered after that.
And most casinos don’t allow you to cash out bonus money. They only allow you to cash out your own funds and any winnings you might have. The bonus amount gets subtracted from your withdrawal.
You can find “sticky” online casino bonuses and “phantom” online casino bonuses. These are both examples of casino bonuses that are NOT cashable.
Here’s how they work:
A phantom bonus is subtracted from your balance when you make a withdrawal.
Here’s an example of how that might work:
You deposit $100 and get a $200 phantom bonus. You gamble and meet your wagering requirements, and you have $250 left in your account. You make a withdrawal request, and the $200 bonus disappears from your balance, leaving you with $50 that you can cash out.
A sticky bonus, on the other hand, stays in your account after you cash out. In the example above, you’d still only be allowed to cash out $50, but the $200 in bonus money would stay in your account. You could still gamble with it.
If you got ahead, you could make another withdrawal of those winnings.
Cashable bonuses are, of course, the best situation you could ask for.
In the example I gave above for how online casino bonus hunting works, I assumed a cashable bonus.
Restricted Games
In the good old days, you could more or less just play any game and still cash out.
But modern online casinos restrict which games counting towards your wagering requirements. Many times, they limit the games that count to just slot machines, keno, and online scratch-off tickets.
Some casinos allow wagers on other games to count, but at a discounted rate. For example, they might allow wagering on blackjack to count, but only at 10% of the rate of play.
In other words, if you bet $100 on a hand of blackjack, it would only count as $10 toward fulfilling your wagering requirements.
Can You Still Make Money Bonus Whoring?
The sad reality is that at most online casinos, you CAN’T get a positive expectation via bonus whoring or bonus hunting.
The casinos have gotten so strict with their wagering requirements and other policies that it’s all but impossible to get into a positive expectation situation with them.
The online casino industry is more competitive than it used to be. Efforts from the United States government drove a lot of sites out of the business, and they also had a chilling effect on gamblers throughout the country. So the casinos are seeing fewer depositing players.
It’s important to the online casinos that they make the most profit from each depositor that they can.
Can you still find profitable opportunities?
You probably can, but they’re rarer than hen’s teeth these days.
Other Strategies for Making Money from Online Casino Bonuses
Best Real Money Casino Online
If you’re playing with bonus money, you can do things which you wouldn’t normally do at an online casino.
For example, you could bet both red and black at the same time on the roulette table. You could also bet on the 0 and the 00, making sure you’d only lose the house edge on every bet. There would be no variance in that situation.
When black hits, you lose $100
You could also bet both pass and don’t pass at the craps table.
Or you could bet on the banker AND on the player in baccarat.
It would be almost impossible to lose in those situations if you took into account the bonus money.
But guess what kind of attitude online casino management is going to have about that kind of behavior?
Not only are they going to frown on it, but you’re also going to look like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. They’re going to invalidate your bonus and probably not let you play there anymore.
Minimum Boldness and Maximum Boldness
Earlier I mentioned that the best way to try to get your results to mirror the expected results is to place as many wagers as possible. This means betting the minimum. If that provides you with a positive expectation, that’s the right strategy.
But what if you have an overall negative expectation?
What’s your best strategy for bucking those odds?
To make as many wagers as possible, you would bet the minimum. That’s why it’s called the “minimum boldness” strategy. If you had an edge, this would be the best way to play, because it would maximize your probability of seeing the theoretical results become actual results.
To make as few wagers as possible, you would bet the maximum and hope to get lucky early. Book that early win, and you can switch to a minimum boldness strategy to preserve as much of those winnings as possible.
Here’s an example:
You deposit $250 and get a $250 bonus. You have a total bankroll of $500. You decide you want to play roulette.
You bet all $500 on black and win.
Now you have $1000.
The wagering requirement is $17,500, so you decide to just bet the minimum on the rest of your wagering requirements–you need to make $17,000 more in wagers.
And you’re playing at an online casino which has a single zero roulette wheel and the en prison rule in effect, which means the house edge on their roulette game is only 1.35%.
1.35% of $17,000 is $236.
That leaves you with $764. Subtract the $250 bonus from that, and you now have $514, which is a $264 profit.
MOST of the time, this won’t work. The probability of winning that first bet is close to 50%, but it’s LESS than 50%.
It’s 48.6%.
But a 48.6% probability of making a $264 profit from gambling on a casino bonus isn’t a bad deal.
And that’s called a “maximum boldness” strategy because you’re risking your entire bankroll on that first bet.
This is the kind of thinking you need to start engaging in if you have any hope of making money from online casino bonuses in today’s online casino market.
Conclusion
How do you make money from online casino bonuses?
In today’s online casino environment, blackjack bonus hunting doesn’t really work any more–not with any kind of reliability.
Your best bet at making money from an online casino bonus in this environment is to get really lucky.
Disclosure: We may receive a commission when you click on our links, but this is at no extra cost to you. Read our privacy policy for more information.
Want to Earn Some Extra Money?
- Survey Junkie: Earn up to $50 per survey with one of the highest-paying survey sites on the web. Join Survey Junkie Now
- Swagbucks: Make money watching videos, taking surveys, shopping online and more. Join Swagbucks Now & Get a $5 Bonus
- Mistplay: Earn free cash by playing games online with friends from your mobile phone. Join Mistplay Now For a 50 Unit Bonus
- MobileXpression: Earn free money (passive income) just by leaving an app installed on your phone. Join MobileXpression Now & Get a Free Gift Card in One Week
During my years as a blackjack and roulette dealer I watched a lot of people lose a lot of money. I also saw a few players win money — I’ll get to that in a moment.
Oddly, most of my coworkers loved to gamble. You would think they’d know better, since all of their wages (and all those pretty buildings) are paid from gambling losses.
I didn’t (and still don’t) share their gambling habits. On the other hand, it can be fun to hang out in a casino, especially if they have free drinks.
So I understand why people might budget a little bit of money to lose at the slot machines or table games.
Of course it would be even more fun if you could do better than limit your losses, right? It would be great if you could make money at casinos.
Well, you can! And 44 states have casinos!
Here are ten ways to make money at casinos, along with some ways to save money by going to a casino, and — in case you need to satisfy your inner gambler — a way to risk a little money to win big.
1. Become a Card Counter
Regular blackjack gives the “house” (the casino) an edge of about 0.5% to 3.0% depending on the rules and how well you play. However, at times the game is in your favor as a player.
Specifically, you have an advantage when the remaining cards include more aces and face cards than normal.
To know when this situation has developed you can track the cards using a simple plus-or-minus count, and then bet more when the count is right.
You can learn card counting in a few hours, but to be proficient while playing at a busy blackjack table takes many more hours of practice.
Keep in mind that casinos can ask you to leave, even though card counting isn’t illegal. Where I worked management tolerated small-time card counters.
They probably figured that having a few winners encouraged the less-disciplined players to keep trying. The edge from good card counting is only 0.5% to 1.0%.
Online Casino Make Money
So, for example, if you play at a table with a $5 minimum and alternate your bets between $5 and $50 (when the count is right), and there are 50 hands dealt per hour, you might bet a total of $700 per hour, for an expected profit of just $7 per hour (with a 1% edge).
Clearly, to make some serious money you have to be good and bet more.
By the way, having the odds in your favor doesn’t eliminate the ups and downs. I can tell you from experience that even the house, with a larger statistical edge, loses on some days.
So with bets of, say, $25 to $100, you may do well in the long run, but you have to stomach nights when you lose thousands of dollars.
Still, if you do it right, you’ll be ahead in the long run, so you’re working, or investing, not gambling.
2. Try Credit Hustling
Credit hustling is simply looking for leftover credits on slot machines. Players often forget and leave without cashing out.
On slow nights when I had no players at my blackjack tables, I used to watch credit hustlers checking the machines, and they sometimes found credits.
A Daily Mail article on people who live in the tunnels under Las Vegas reports on one couple that survives by doing this.
They once found more than $900 in a single machine, although finding a dollar or two is the norm.
While not illegal (if the credit have been truly forgotten and abandoned), casinos don’t care for credit hustlers, so you’ll normally try to keep a low profile.
3. Join A Players Club
Almost every casino has some sort of “players club” you can join for free.
Apart from earning points as you play, which can be redeemed for freebies of all sorts, you also usually get some rewards up front for signing up.
For example, many casinos offer “match play” money. That might be $5 coupons or chips, for example, but you have to bet $5 of your own along with each one.
You can lose, but when you win $10 for betting $5 of your own money the odds are with you even at the worst games.
If you round up enough of these deals you can be pretty sure you’ll make a profit playing just long enough to use up your match play.
Casinos may offer a free meal or other goodies for joining the club too, which at least saves you some money.
4. Take Advantage Of Promotions
The casino where I worked handed out out $10 in free play to everyone who walked in the door (for a while anyhow).
Some couples came every day to get $20, playing perhaps 50 cents each in the slot machines before leaving with the rest of the money.
When my wife and I lived in Florida we went to a casino where they gave us each $5 in free slot machine play, and a free dinner, and free wine.
The catch was we had to play at least 100 times, but at nickel machines with a 12% house edge the expected loss is only 60 cents (100 x 5 cents x 12%), so, by playing slowly, we left ahead (and full) every single time we went.
Watch for any promotions at casinos near you, and see if there is some way to turn a profit from them.
5. Become A Good Poker Player
When you play against the casino, the house has the edge, but when you play against other players, you can have the edge if you’re good.
There are plenty of online tutorials on how to win at casino poker, but keep in mind that the house takes a cut of every pot, so you have to be significantly better than the other players to come out ahead.
As someone who has won money at poker (and chess) without much skill, I can tell you that the key is to play against weaker players.
Going against stronger competitors might help you prove something, but if you want to make money, look for tables with weak players.
6. Play In Slot Tournaments
Slot tournaments usually involve playing to see who does best in a set time, using machines set up with fake credits.
These events encourage fast play and are meant to get people into the casino, where they might gamble their own money before and after the competition.
Googling “free slot tournaments vegas” turns up (at the moment) a couple options, including one tournament that cost nothing and has prizes of up to $500 in slot play (you may have to play it through a machine, and then you keep whatever you’ve won).
Even tournaments with an entry fee can be money makers, because the prize pool often significantly exceeds the total of the entry fees.
In other words, if you’re good, and you play in a dozen tournaments, you’ll probably win more than what you spent on entry fees.
7. Play A Biased Roulette Wheel
There are 38 pockets on an American-style roulette wheel, and a “straight-up” bet pays 35-to-1 when you win (plus you keep the bet). You can see that this is a losing proposition.
But what if, instead of each number coming up randomly 1-in-38 spins, some numbers came up more often than they should?
It happens.
When I ran a roulette table one of my customers made a profit of $80,000 over the course of 16 months or so. I met him at a coffee shop after I quit, to get the whole story. Here’s the short version:
He wrote down the winning numbers for 5,000 spins (it took weeks). The number 2 was winning an average of 1-in-28 spins.
He bet $5 repeatedly on that number. On average, he lost $135 for every 28 spins (27 losses), but won $175 (35-to-1 payout) when the number 2 came up, for a net profit of $40 per 27 spins.
There are various possible reasons for a bias, ranging from a sticky pocket (temporary) to manufacturing imperfections (a more durable bias).
The good news is you don’t need to know why a certain number comes up more often to take advantage. You just need to verify that it’s a true bias (which takes thousands of spins).
I’ll let others teach you more about biased roulette wheels, but I’ll warn you that it’s tedious work to find one, and even with an edge you’ll have losing nights (my customer sometimes lost over $700 in a night, even though he was far ahead in the long run).
8. Identify A Roulette Dealer Signature
Some dealers may habitually (unconsciously) repeat certain patterns when they spin the wheel and the roulette ball, which makes the winning pocket more predictable.
My experience? On a slow night with no players a pit boss and I each chose a number and alternated spinning the wheel and dropping the ball, betting a dollar for each win
I came out $14 ahead in couple hours, meaning I spun my number 14 times more than he spun his.
So I strongly believe dealer signature is possible, and even gambling expert Frank Scoblete agrees, but how often it happens in real play, and whether you can take advantage of it… well, who knows? But here’s what you might look for…
Note the number passing by at the moment the dealer releases the ball, and note the winning number. After doing this many times (with the same dealer) look for a pattern.
For example, a dealer might be so consistent (in the speed of the wheel and the ball) that the ball lands in a certain “section” of the wheel (in relation to the release point) more often than it should.
Online Earn Money By Typing
If it lands in a section that covers a third of the wheel, but lands there half of the time, you have a signature.
Now it gets trickier. If the target section is, say, the 13 numbers starting 4 pockets to the left of the release number, you have to identify the release number and quickly place bets on as many numbers as possible in the target section, before betting is closed.
Could it work? If not casinos wouldn’t be so quick to change balls, change dealers, and move roulette wheels when it looks like people are winning. Where I worked they did all three often.
Good luck!
9. Use Casinos For Business Networking
I heard a lot of conversations at my tables. Sometimes they resulted in players getting new clients or developing new business relationships.
And I learned about how to make money from scrap metal from one such conversation.
It’s common for players to talk to other players at a blackjack or roulette table, which makes a casino a great place to network and find new ways to make money.
And watching how players handle those stacks of chips in front of them can tell you a little about whether you want to do business with them or not.
10. Get A Casino Job
In 1994 I was making $14 per hour dealing blackjack and roulette. A BLS inflation calculator tells me that’s the equivalent of $24 per hour in today’s dollars.
And, in fact, a friend who still works at that casino says she makes over $20 per hour.
Dealing table games is just one of the many positions you might find at a casino near you. One of my coworkers started as a surveillance officer with no experience, and used the knowledge and experience gained to later build a successful business selling surveillance equipment.
Other positions include slot machine tech, bartender, waiter, cage worker (handling the money), and pit boss.
Also, working in a casino usually means you’re forbidden from gambling there, which might be a good thing for some readers.
Save Money By Taking Advantage Of Casino Freebies
Some casinos have free events at which they put out snacks or even full meals. Other casinos offer inexpensive meals at their restaurants. Watch for these deals as a way to save money on a night out.
Even the free drinks offered by many casinos can make for a cheap night out if you know what you’re doing.
For example, my wife and I play 5-cent slot machines, set the speed to “slow” (keno machines usually have three settings), and, by the time we have lost a couple dollars we’ve had a few drinks and some fun.
Turn $60 Into $600 By Betting The Right Way
Maybe you like to gamble, and you’re smart enough to limit your losses. But how you play still matters.
For example, with a $60 bankroll, if you bet $5 per hand at a blackjack table you can often play all night, but you’ll never be very far ahead at any point.
That’s great if you want to sit there and enjoy the free drinks.
But to win big you need to make bigger bets at some point. For example, if you’re $20 ahead, bet $10 per hand, and if you get further ahead, bet $20 or $40 per hand. To summarize:
Bet the table minimum when you lose, and bet more and more when you’re winning.
Most of the time you’ll lose your $60 faster this way (because you’ll often those big bets), but it gives you a chance to win big from time to time.
I saw many people turn $60 into $600 over the years, and not one player did it by always betting the table minimum.
You have to “press your luck” to win big. Just be sure to bring a limited amount of money, so your losses are not a big deal.
Final Thoughts
You may like to gamble, and if you limit your losses, it’s affordable entertainment. Even better, if you time your casino visits to coincide with promotional events you might get some free food and drinks.
And finally, if you’re willing to do the necessary work, you can even make money in a casino, and without really gambling.
If you know other ways to make money in a casino, share your ideas below … and keep on frugaling!