Hey, everyone, this is Mike, a guest contributor to the Casino Cage blog. My focus is on advantage gambling and ways of turning the tables on the house and giving yourself the mathematical edge. For this guest post, I want to go over an example of the crazy online casino promos that are out there and the importance of taking advantage of them when appropriate.
It's especially useful to consider stacking up two or three or even more promos together. Even in cases where each individual deal is nothing special, benefitting from several of them at once can give you some pretty sick value.
Free Spin Hero
It all began toward the end of July when I saw that every player at Juicy Stakes Casino could claim 10 free spins (worth $0.10 apiece) in the new Betsoft slot game Wild Drops.
The expected value of this is merely $1 ($0.10 x 10). However, I ran pretty well in my free spins:
👉 Pro Tip
What Is a Wagering Requirement?
The wagering requirement, also known as “playthrough” or “rollover” is an amount that you must bet before your free money or bonus funds can be withdrawn from the casino. This is a common rule put in place by the online casinos; otherwise, you could just claim all bonuses and other complimentary funds and cash them out right away without playing at all.
In total, I won around $38 or $39. The free spins come with a wagering requirement of 30 times the amount won. In this case, that would be approximately $1,170. Making this rollover more onerous, it can only be completed on Betsoft slot games; table games like blackjack are out of the question.
While completing this playthrough, it's highly likely that I would run down my $39 in winnings and indeed probably lose even more money from the remainder of my balance. This means that my free spin winnings are worthless.
Or are they?
Casino Tournaments Often a Good Value
Scouring the Juicy Stakes promotions page for opportunities, I saw that there was a slot tournament coming up. It costs nothing to join, and you play as normal with your regular real money balance. The results are based upon how many spins you make within the tournament timeframe. Four games are included in the tournament, and they are all Betsoft slots, which qualify for completing my free spins playthrough: Stacked, Take Olympus, Fruit Zen, and Tiger's Claw.
Picking the Best Game
In order to figure out which of these four games is best, we will head over to the developer's website and note the return to player (RTP) percentages. Higher is better:
- Stacked: 96.39%
- Take Olympus: 95.49%
- Fruit Zen: 95.96%
- Tiger's Claw: 95.16%
👉 Pro Tip
The Advantage Gambler's Biggest Weapon
What's the most important tool possessed by a serious advantage gamer? Is it a huge bankroll? The ability to make decisions accurately and quickly? The free time to devote to gambling all day? None of these factors are of paramount important. What is critical, however, is knowledge: knowledge of how the games work, the best strategies to use to maximize expected value, what casino promotions are happening at any given time, and the relevant equations to solve to gain an idea of whether a given opportunity is profitable or not. Fortunately, most of the knowledge needed to become a successful gambler is openly available on the internet and requires no special talent to understand.
So it looks like Stacked is the game to play for the best results. However, under the terms of the Juicy Stakes slot tournament, the minimum qualifying spin is $0.50. This means we want to find a game with the lowest possible permitted bet size equal to or greater than $0.50.
Here are the relevant bet sizes for the four games:
- Stacked: $0.60
- Take Olympus: $0.80
- Fruit Zen: $0.54
- Tiger's Claw: $0.50
Well, it looks like Tiger's Claw is the winner. However, the Fruit Zen minimum bet is pretty close, and Fruit Zen has the better RTP. For every 100 spins we make of Fruit Zen, we would be betting $54 and have an expected loss of (.0404 * $54) = $2.18. The corresponding calculation for Tiger's Claw is $50 and (.0484 * $50) = $2.42.
So Fruit Zen is the winner, but the difference is pretty small. Tiger's Claw is definitely the more fun game to play. I think I will play mostly on Fruit Zen with a little bit on Tiger's Claw just to mix it up a bit.
UPDATE: I somehow forgot to consider Stacked, which initially appeared to be the best game, in my calculations until I had already begun the tournament. By spinning 100 times in Stacked, we would bet a total of $60 with an expected loss of (.0361 * $60) = $2.17. Looks like Stacked is even superior to Fruit Zen, so I will be sure to head over to Stacked for the majority of my play.
Figuring Out How Much We Need to Play
In order to gauge what kind of commitment would be required to place highly in the Juicy Stakes casino tournament, we can look at the leaderboard kindly provided by the site. The tournament ends Aug. 9, and we are beginning to play on Aug. 7, so we have a couple of days to proceed with our plan before time is up.
Remember, we have to bet through nearly $1,200 to clear our free spin winnings. That's equal to around 2,400 spins because we'll only be spinning $0.50 or $0.54 at a time. Looks like this volume will be enough to secure third or fourth place assuming no other competitors put in serious play to challenge our position.
Let's take a look at the prize pool:
It looks like our projected 3rd or 4th place finish will be worth $230 or $170. Even if there's an unexpected surge of interest in the event and we wind up in 5th, we will still earn $130.
Is It Worth It?
In order to decide if we want to proceed or not, we will have to calculate the expected value of the tournament prize versus the amount we expect to lose while gaining this prize.
Assuming we make 2,400 spins on Fruit Zen at $0.54 per spin and a house advantage of 4.04%, we get an expected loss of (2,400 * $0.54 * 0.0404) = $52.36.
We already concluded that we might play a bit on Tiger's Claw too. The corresponding figures for Tiger's Claw are (2,400 * $0.50 * 0.0484) = $58.08.
It will only cost us between $50 and $60, on average, to claim our prize of between $130 and $230. And remember, we will be clearing our free spins of $38 or $39 at the same time too. This is definitely a worthwhile use of our bankroll.
Of course, our actual numerical results can vary tremendously from these projections both up and down. A great deal of short-term variance is inherent in gambling.
Still, all we can do is crunch the numbers and act accordingly, trusting to the laws of probability that our long-term performance will come to approximate our theoretical yield as we play more and more.
Playing the Games
Well, enough theory-crafting. Let's get down to brass tacks and see what actually happened. Here's my starting balance:
But remember, about $38.50 of that is the free spin winnings, so my true baseline is around $3,038.
Time to start spinning on Fruit Zen. After 200 spins, we're looking like this:
Sweet, we actually made a small profit. We'll now move over to Stacked for the bulk of our play.
Our balance generally trended downward during our Stacked sessions, but we were saved by a couple of great bonus rounds like the following:
Nevertheless, we drifted back down to end with a bit less money than when we started:
Now we'll conclude with a few hundred spins on Tiger's Claw. This title uses an unusual reel arrangement and is highly volatile with big win potential.
Our mad plan worked! Got a round of 96 free spins on Tiger's Claw:
And this is where we ended up:
Here's what the leaderboard standings look like as of the morning of Aug. 8:
Well, we didn't quite make it to fourth place, but we are comfortably in fifth with quite a sizeable lead over sixth place. The tournament ends in a day, and we will check back closer to the end to see if maybe making a dash for fourth is warranted based upon the point totals at that time.
Aug. 9, 2021 – Let's take a look at the leaderboard with just a couple hours left in the competition:
We have dropped down to sixth place, and it appears that the user in seventh, “Trammy,” is making a bid to surpass our score. It seems that we would have to put in a fair bit of play to regain fifth. Given that the total difference in prizes between fifth and seventh is just $20, I don't think it's worth it. Getting sixth or seventh is good enough.
Final Tally
On Aug. 11, I received the prize for my casino leaderboard position: $120 for sixth place.
In total, my results since I got the free spins to begin with are as follows:
- Free Spin Winnings: +$38.50 (approx.)
- Casino Tournament Gameplay: +$78.25
- Casino Tournament Prize: +$120
- Total: +$236.75
Not a bad haul for an afternoon's spinning! There's just one catch: My $120 tournament prize needs to be rolled over a single time on Betsoft slots. I could play this through right now…or wait for another special to run and take advantage of multiple promotions at the same time again!
👉 Pro Tip
Offshore or State-Licensed Online Casino?
You might be wondering if the prospects for bonus hustling and gambling with a positive expectation are better at an instate gaming provider or one located in a foreign jurisdiction. The truth is that there are good opportunities to be found at either type of internet gambling site. If you really want to make a serious income from wagering activities, you ought to sign up for both types of sites so that you can take advantages of any and all promotional offers that are extended to you. You will need to do more research on the offshore casinos, however, to make sure they're legitimate and honest because they will not have been vetted by your state's licensing authority.
More About Juicy Stakes Casino
Juicy Stakes is an offshore casino and poker site with games from four software studios: Betsoft, Nucleus Gaming, Tangente, and Worldmatch. It often offers casino leaderboard tournaments, free spins, bonuses, lossback weekends, missions/quests, and other promotions.
Juicy Stakes is available to customers in the United States, but a handful of states are excluded. Unfortunately, New Jersey is one of the prohibited jurisdictions. This is not uncommon with international gaming sites; the Garden State is known as a tough area to do business mostly because of the activities of the Division of Gaming Enforcement, which tries to do everything in its power to push users toward state-licensed online gambling destinations.
What Can NJ Residents Do to Benefit From Online Casino Bonuses + Promos?
Still, in many ways, New Jerseyites have it even better than the rest of us. Because the in-state online gaming market operates with the full approval of local authorities, these licensed internet casinos boast a broader palette of deposit and withdrawal options, feature games from developers who refuse to work with “gray market” organizations, and sometimes offer rewarding tie-ins with brick-and-mortar casinos in Atlantic City.
There are only about a couple dozen state-regulated online casinos in New Jersey as compared with the thousands available worldwide. Yet, these 25 operators represent a fantastic value, and they often run lucrative promos that you can take advantage of. I personally have hit the NJ online licensed casinos hard, to the tune of the mid-five figures, merely by playing when visiting the state once or twice per year.
With all the free money being thrown around, there's no excuse for playing without getting bonuses, double comp points, free spins, sweepstakes entries, or whatever other extra perks you can find. If you just play when you feel like it without considering these ways of printing extra money, then you're probably the kind of customer the casinos love.
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