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Online casinos are a profitable business, they may work to tiny margins but a ‘locked-in’ player can and will drip-feed a tidy revenue into a casino over time.
Consequently, like all good businesses, more and more companies are throwing their hat into the ring and joining the online casino merry-go-round hoping they have what it takes to attract new customers and keep them.
Traditionally brick-and-mortar casinos spent all their time and effort in keeping their customers loyal. Online casinos took that a step further by focusing on new customers and attracting them with tasty ‘sign-up bonuses’ which also work to ‘lock in’ new players who have to dedicate some substantial game play hours to receive the sign-up bonus in full.
But now all online casinos are offering sign-up bonuses and operators have been forced to pull a new offer out of their bag and that is ‘No Deposit Free Bets’.
Of course offering people free money to play with is fraught with danger. Bonus hunters will exploit the free bet and free money offers but, nevertheless, as the freebets.com list of no deposit free bets offering sportsbook and casino sites shows, more and more online operators who have a bolt-on casino offering are choosing to go this route.
These no deposit free bet promotions are certainly headline grabbing but how do they work and how do operators stop freeloaders and convert the people it attracts into becoming regular visitors to their table games, slots and scratch cards?
For starters many operators insist new customers who wish to avail of a No Deposit Free Bet offer register a payment card before they can proceed with any such offers. They also exclude customers who register or make payments with electronic payment methods such as Skrill and Neteller.
Secondly a new customer in receipt of No Deposit Free Bet funds has to wager that money several times before it becomes withdrawable. Typically a $/£/€10 No Deposit Free Casino Bet bonus has to be wagered ten times before winnings become withdrawable.
That 10x times rule is only applicable to play on Slots, Arcades and Scratch Card games. For these games $/£/€100 needs to be wagered before a new player can get their hands on any winnings.
But this is the ‘best case’ scenario and Roulette players are generally asked to wager 40x the No Deposit Free Bet sum. Blackjack players will need to ‘turn-over’ around 100x their free bet balance and Craps players can expect to be asked to wager a breath-taking $/£/€2,000 before being able to make a cash withdrawal.
If these restrictions have set the bar fairly high stop to consider the rule that most No Deposit Free Bet promoting online casinos enforce which states the wagering requirements must be met within three days!
And then there is the biggest safety net of them all, a small print rule which says potential winnings from a No Deposit Free Bet promotions will be capped at a relatively small sum, generally $/£/€25 for a $/£/€10 No Deposit Free Bet Promotion.
