Live Casino Bonuses

Casino bonuses are the main promotional tool of the casino industry. As the live casino industry is currently booming there is an understandable focus on that part of the industry, and that includes lots of live casino bonuses.

In this guide, we’ll tell you what live casino bonuses are and what function they serve. And we’ll tell you how to assess them. We’ll also tell you about live casino sites and how to get the best experience out of them safely.

Let’s have a look!

Top Live Casino Bonuses – Best Live Dealer Bonuses

Casino Bonuses: A beginner’s guide

Casino bonuses are always a hot topic in the online casino world, and they are always a little controversial.

They are controversial because they don’t quite do what they first appear to do. We’re not saying that they’re illegal or outright scams, but like most marketing tools they don’t present what they are doing in a straightforward manner.

That’s why we’re glad you’re reading this now.

Casino bonuses are a massive part of the industry and they’re a massive source of unhappiness so let’s dive in.

When we refer to live casino bonuses in this guide we generally mean any bonus that gives you access to a live casino or to live casino games.

What does a casino bonus do?

A tool is made for the benefit of the person or organisation who makes the tool.

This is how you should assess casino bonuses as a whole and something you should bear in mind whenever you look at any particular casino bonus.

The people who make casino bonuses are casino companies and game developers.

The thing that most benefits casino companies and live casino game developers are players losing money on the games they make or host.

Gamblers probably understand this about the industry, but it’s rarely put out there in a straightforward way, and we think it’s healthy to remember it from time to time.

Every business (or close enough to every to make no difference) in the current capitalist system exists to maximise profits and to maximise the returns for its owners, who are usually shareholders.

Every penny, cent, or yuan of profit in the casino business is a lost bet. That’s doubly true online, where there’s no bar, restaurant, or show to bring in cash as well as the games. Online casinos are the essence of gambling with few frills on the side and they need you to play and they need you to lose.

Casinos have been making a profit long before the internet was invented of course. That’s because the games that we play in casinos are set up to deliver wins to the casino.

We know this. We even have a name or two for it and we have the figures to prove it.

Let’s have a look at the biggest live casino game of all, live roulette.

Roulette has been around for hundreds of years. Along the way, there have been some rule changes, and the game has now split into three broad categories: American, French, and European rules, to which have been added a load of presentational tics.

The only hard figure we have to judge an online live casino game is RTP. RTP stands for theoretical return to player and it is presented as a percentage and it represents the percentage of money bet on a game that will be returned to players over the entire lifetime of the game.

It is also written sometimes as house edge.

RTP for roulette is complicated. The game features a huge range of bets with very different probabilities and very different odds.

However, an RTP for the base game has been calculated and it is 97.3%.

This can also be presented as a house edge of 2.7%.

That means that over the life of a roulette game it will deliver a 2.7% return to the house. That’s lost bets.

And that is the return that is designed into the game. Gambling games do use random events, but something called the law of very large numbers means that over time random sequences revert to patterns. If you toss a coin three times you might not be surprised to see three heads in a row, even though it is 100% one way. If you toss a coin a thousand times and you get 1,000 heads the result is much more unlikely (every coin toss is a 50% chance of getting heads or tails, but over time these events cling to the averages).

The design of a roulette reel makes it very likely that most bets will be lost, and the pay-outs on the betting (which are always lower than the probability against the event happening) further tie in this house edge.

So if a casino gets you playing it has a very good chance of making a profit from you.

So let’s have a look at how a live casino bonus does that.

We’ll start with the main deal here, which is a live casino welcome bonus.

Understanding live casino welcome bonuses

A welcome bonus is the most important bonus in the casino world. They are the most publicised and they are the ones with the most attractive headline figures.

But let’s go back and use the frame we suggested earlier on, asking what the bonus is meant to achieve.

The bonus is designed by the casino site, so it is designed in their interests and that means it is designed to get you signed up to a site and then to get you playing their games as often as possible for as long as possible.

The big headline figure is how they get you to sign up.

There are some stupid theories around libertarianism (and related conservative “understandings” of the world) that posit human beings as completely rational actors who make decisions by weighing up the good and the bad of an economic offer very carefully, deciding whether they can afford the item they are considering and whether the benefits it will grant them are worth what they are paying for the item.

Is that you?

It’s not me. I do my best, but I am swayed by marketing, and by trying to manage my feelings by shopping, and all sorts of other things.

So if you’re one of the millions of people who sees an offer of “£20 free cash (read the small print for details)” and takes on only the “£20 free cash” without considering the small print then join the club.

The headline looks good to players so they sign up.

A live casino bonus example

We’re going now to look at a live casino welcome bonus as an example.

This one has this headline offer:

“With up to £500 in Welcome Bonus offers!”

That sounds good, right?!

The first round of small print is this:

“New eligible UK players only. Select Live Casino offer on sign-up and deposit. 2 deposits of £10, £50, £100, £250 matched with a bonus cash offer of the same value (14-day expiry). 75x real money cash wagering (within 30 days) on eligible games before bonus cash is credited. Play responsibly. 18+ begambleaware.org. Click for full T&C’s.”

OK, so what do we now have?

We can see that the player must make two deposits to earn the bonus, so if you want the £500 you will have to deposit £500 of your own money.

The 14-day expiry sounds like it means that the bonus money will be removed from your account if it isn’t spent within two weeks.

Then we have a 75-times real money wagering requirement.

What does that mean?

That means that before the bonus cash is credited to the player in a form that they can withdraw from their account – which is what people expect to do with “free money” by the way – the player must have deposited and played with 75-times the amount of the bonus.

That means if you want to claim a £500 bonus you will need to deposit £37,500 of your own money.

And you will need to do this within 30 days.

So, a £500 welcome offer has now become a £37,500 spend in order to get the winnings from £500, which rtp suggests will be less than the actual bonus. All of this with strict time limits.

Now, you can see how a bonus is designed not just to deliver a new member to a site, but to deliver a lot of spending in a short period of time.

The idea of rational actors (homus economicus) would lead us to believe that most people will weigh all this up and decide what is the rational best course. However, psychology tells us that we’re very opposed to giving up things that we think we have. That’s why casino sites don’t offer you the opportunity to win something, but they give you the money so that it feels like it’s yours, but they make it impossible to actually get your hands on it in any real tangible form.

Let’s look at the rest of the terms and conditions.

Many of them are a standard-issue: you must be a new player to collect a welcome bonus, this bonus also describes the bonus as: “a cash reward once a wagering target is completed on any chosen 2 deposits in the first 7 days from registration.”

So now we can see that, as the next set of terms tells us, “Players wager with their cash deposit, and upon completion of the wagering target, they then unlock a cash reward. No bonus funds are included in the promotion.”

This is unusual. Most casino bonuses give players an amount of bonus money that they can then unlock. Here, you actually have to spend your money before you get the bonus, but the bonus is paid to you in straight-up cash. It’s a presentational difference but unusual.

You have seven days to choose how to take this bonus.

Unfortunately, the longer terms and conditions somewhat contradict the shorter ones. The short ts and cs tell us that there is a 30 day limit on wagering requirements, but the long conditions tell us that there are 7 days after selecting the deposit on which you’d like to claim the bonus funds to complete the wagering requirements.

That means if you deposit £10 and choose to use that deposit as one of your bonus deposits you must then deposit and play with £750 of your own money WITHIN SEVEN DAYS.

That’s quite a spend for a £10 bonus.

This wagering requirement must be earned by playing particular games. In this offer, every penny you spend on live casino games will be counted towards the wagering requirement. But nothing that is spent on slots, instant win games or slingo will count, and nothing spent on random number generator table games will count.

Claiming a live casino offer safely

So what is a player to make of this?

This is up to you. If you’d like to work towards becoming the perfect rational economic actor then we salute you.

You should certainly get into the habit of reading the terms and conditions of every offer that you consider. And when we say consider we mean to consider.

It is not always in your best interests to accept a casino welcome offer.

The most important thing when it comes to gambling is your safety. If you think that accepting an offer is going to encourage you in a way that isn’t healthy then you should not accept that offer. And we’ve seen that the purpose of the offer is specifically to get you spending a lot of time on a site and spending a lot of money, often in very short periods of time.

The terms and conditions we used in our example are in fact quite generous. For example, many wagering requirements put a limit on the size of bet that can be counted, meaning that players are committed to making very many games turns in a short period of time.

The best safe gambling advice from the industry is “when the fun stops, stop”. That is a good piece of advice.

It means this. Play gambling games for entertainment. And treat them as entertainment. And you know that you have to pay for entertainment.

The gambling industry cannot say the quiet part out loud, which is this: “You shouldn’t gamble and expect to win.”

It is perfectly possible that you will win. However, we know that these games are set up to deliver a profit. The profit is lost bets. How that loss is divided between players we’re not privy to, but it makes sense that most players, most of the time, will have an experience that is broadly in line with the RTP figures for a game, and that means that most people will lose relatively small amounts of money over the long run.

It’s with this in mind that you should consider a live casino welcome offer.

If you know that a casino offer will cause you to spend a lot of money in a short period of time then you need to know that you can do that safely and that you can do that within safe limits that you set for yourself and that you stick to.

Other live casino bonuses

While welcome bonuses are the main bonuses on offer at live casino sites as they are at every sort of casino site. However, they are not the only offer.

In fact, most casinos offer a programme of bonuses.

Live casinos are somewhat different though. Their selling point is that there is real interaction with real people. That’s a great thing for players.

However, it makes it harder to give away genuine freebies at live casino sites. Staff need to be paid all the time, even if players are making free wagers, and this makes free offers on live games more expensive for the site.

This is why the wagering requirement we saw on our example offer was so high. The typical slots offer will be more in the region of 35-times a deposit.

The most commonly used live casino specific offers are related to loyalty and to high rollers.

These offers are also somewhat controversial. And they are controversial for the same reason that welcome offers are – they are very obviously designed to encourage people to spend more time and money at a site, and for some people, that’s not a good idea.

Unfortunately, this is a problem with capitalism. Capitalism needs growth, and it needs people to buy its products. Unfortunately, some of its products aren’t always good for all people, so the tools that one might accept to encourage people to buy more of something when the product is harmless to become controversial when the product is controversial.

Live games are offered at tables, usually with different betting limits, but also stylistic differences.

It is by spending money that players can earn their way up the hierarchy to the more exclusive tables that promise not just higher betting limits but also a better level of service in some way.

So, you need to assess loyalty schemes, and particularly VIP clubs and High Roller clubs with the same concern that you would welcome bonuses.

That means you need to know that you’re making decisions around your behaviour that are good for you: your health and your bank balance.

High roller and VIP clubs have been controversial because it has been revealed by research in the UK that the vast majority of profits made by online casino sites are made from a relatively small group of very high spending players.

Almost all sites will sign you up for some sort of reward or loyalty scheme as soon as you join. Like the same schemes in supermarkets, they are designed to make you spend more at a site.

So be aware and make safety your first concern at all times. There are advantages to be had from the freebies in loyalty schemes but don’t take them too seriously and make your own decisions based on what is good for you.

Using live casino bonuses safely

To use live casino bonuses safely you need to find safe live casino sites.

Safe sites are licensed and legal, and they are licensed and legal in the jurisdiction that you are using them from.

Please make sure that you check every site that you use and make sure that it has a correct, current licence.

Make sure too that you’ve done a bit of work on how to keep your devices and your online accounts safe.

You’ll need to transfer money to collect live online casino bonuses. For that, you’ll need to use some sort of online money transfer. You need to learn how to do this safely and securely too. You can use banking, e-wallets, prepaid vouchers and even cryptocurrency to fund your account, but make sure that you know how to do it safely.

There’s a lot to be said about safe behaviour on casino sites and the subject of gambling addiction and your psychological safety is too big to go into here, beyond saying that you should take it seriously.

That means learning a little bit about addiction and learning how to spot danger signs. You should also take note of the tools that casino sites offer you to keep safe, including limits on spending and time spent on sites.

And beware of a couple of specific dangers of live casino sites: getting too tied up with apparent personal relationships with the dealers or other staff, and the fact that you cannot play for free (very often). Use RNG games if you can to check out games before you play them live.

While we’re issuing a lot of warnings here, we want to make it clear that some bonuses are good for players, if they understand them properly and use them in the right way – as a free ticket to look around a site rather than a ticket to free money.

Live Casino Bonuses FAQ

What is a live casino bonus?

Live casino bonuses come in a number of forms, the most common of which are welcome bonuses. They are rewards given to players for signup up or spending money at a casino site. They give players some sort of reward, usually bonus funds but sometimes free games or bonus bets and sometimes tangible prizes or benefits. Casino bonuses are very big promotional tools for the casino industry so it is not hard to find out more about them, but you need to use the small print and you need to learn how to assess a live casino welcome bonus to see if it is the right thing for you to do.

What is a no deposit live casino bonus?

No deposit bonuses are any offer that does not require the player to make a deposit to qualify for the bonus. They are usually welcome bonuses. And they are usually much smaller than standard welcome bonuses. That means they will give players much smaller amounts of money or fewer free bets. These offers will also have stricter restrictions on the way that money given to the players can be used. These offers are rare and they may be strictly time-limited or limited by the number of players who can accept the offer so you will need to act quickly if you want to cash in on them.

What are live casinos?

Live casinos are casino websites that offer players the opportunity to play casino games in real-time with real dealers or on a real table over an internet connection. Almost all live casino sites are linked to non-live casinos. Most casino sites offer slots, live casino games, and rng casino games and maybe more. You may find live casinos with bingo sites or sports betting sites attached for example.

Are live casino offers scams?

There are scams in the casino world. They are much fewer and further between these days than they once were but everyone needs to keep their wits about them when they are operating online and particularly when they are spending money online. Anyone who uses the internet regularly knows this, and most people now have the tools they need to get around safely. When it comes to gambling sites your best marque of quality is site licensing. You will have a regulatory framework where you are, and you should find out what it is, how it works and how you can check it against sites that you use. So, most live casino offers are not outright scams, and you can use all licensed casino sites with some level of confidence, but there are deeper safety concerns than that.

How do I use a live casino site?

TO use a live casino site you’ll need a device to get you online, you’ll need a way of getting money into a casino site, and you’ll need to be able to prove that you are who you say you are and that you are of a legal age to play gambling games for money. With all of those in place, you can head to a casino site, where you’ll need to open an account, provide a payment method and maybe some proof of ID, and then you can start to play the games.

How do I find the best live casino bonuses?

Every site you visit will be very keen to tell you that the bonus you are looking at is the best thing that you have ever seen. You need to look beyond that. There are so many bonuses out there though that you may want to outsource some of this assessment process to a third party, like a review site. There are a lot of options, but your best bet in assessing bonuses is to read our guide and follow the steps there to check out if it’s good value for you or not.

How do I claim live casino bonuses?

Claiming live casino bonuses is easy. Many of them are granted to you automatically on sign-up or you may need to opt-out rather than opt-in, but no casino site is going to make it hard to claim a casino bonus. You will certainly need to be a legal player and you will need to be a first-time customer of the site. Beyond that, you’re just looking at ticking a couple of boxes.

Are live casino bonuses worth it?

That’s a big question and one that only you can answer for yourself in relation to each bonus you assess. Using what we have told you, you will know that welcome bonuses are designed to deliver players to a site and to persuade them to spend a lot of money in a short period of time. You may wish to accept a bonus and use the free bets it gives you without actually withdrawing any of the cash associated with it. That’s a very sensible way to treat a live casino bonus, because if you are committed to cashing out that money then you might need to spend many many times what you intended to. Keep safe, and make that your first priority.

What sort of live casino bonuses are there?

As we’ve said, welcome bonuses are the most common live casino bonuses. However, you may see other offers. You might be offered the chance to join a loyalty scheme that will open up new levels of service and spending to you as you spend more time at a site. You might see the occasional no-deposit bonus. And you could get bonus bets. All of these are possible but loyalty schemes are by far the most common of these options. You should treat these bonuses in the same way as any other and assess whether you should be accepting them and whether you’re making decisions about your play based on some future reward or what is good for you now.