If you’ve ever played at an online bingo site before, then you know the first thing to look for is a juicy welcome bonus. This is just something to sweeten the deal, and is also where it helps if you know what wagering requirements are! That’s where we step in...
Sure, this may sound a bit boring. But go ahead, register, and start playing with your welcome bonus. You might even win one of those sweet jackpots with the money that the casino gave you. But, before you click that button, what if I told you that your wagering requirement means that you can't withdraw any of your winnings.
Do I have your attention now?
Here’s the skinny on wagering requirements and how they can get in the way of you claiming your riches.
Alright, so some technical terms are going to come into play here. A wagering requirement for online bingo is the minimum amount that players must spend after they’ve claimed a bonus if they want to withdraw their winnings. It’ll usually be a multiple of the bonus, ranging from 10x up to 50x the bonus amount.
Let’s say you’ve just signed up to a new online bingo site. You’ve pulled your lucky pants up to their extra lucky spot, and you’ve spent £50 on bingo tickets to start with. You happened to sign up to an awesome site too because they’ve given you a £50 bonus! Now you’ve got £100 to play with.
But before you get distracted by the flashing lights and colours of the
If this is the first time you’ve ever heard of a wagering requirement you’re probably shocked. But the truth is that you’ve probably played online bingo games before that have worked this way. It might sound a bit unfair, but there are reasons why most gambling sites have these T&Cs in place, and it’s to protect you as well as their business.
The first place you’re going to see a wagering requirement is normally with the welcome bonus that you get for signing up to an online bingo site. The reason that welcome bonuses normally have wagering requirements is to stop people from bouncing between online bingo sites and snatching up free bonus money all the time – fair enough!
Did you know that not every bingo site has wagering requirements attached to their welcome bonus? In fact, some online bingo sites don’t have welcome bonuses at all. Typically, the best and most popular sites will have bonuses and there’s usually a wagering requirement attached, but it is still important to know that you have options. After all, this is your money we’re talking about and you’d better have a say in how you get to spend it!
Think of the wagering requirement as a security deposit. The casino needs to know that you are a regular customer and that you aren’t just here to snatch their bonus and run off. It isn’t just a selfish gesture though, and online casinos have these measures in place to make your life better too.
If the site you play bingo at just kept giving away free bonuses, and those players just made off with the cash instead of staying and playing, then they wouldn’t be able to offer bonuses for very long before they go broke. Think about it… if you had to hand out free money all day, you’d probably go broke too. And if your favourite online bingo site went broke, then you’d be a very sad panda, no?
A lot of online casinos only have the wagering requirements in place to discourage fraudsters and scammers from trying to abuse their bonuses and their players – and it works!
To play through the wagering requirement you do what comes naturally – you play! Like we said before, you must bet a certain amount on the game you’re playing before you can withdraw the bonus money. Each bet you make will reduce the wagering requirement and get you one step closer to claiming the massive bonus winnings you’ve been building up.
Now that you know what you have to bet to get the benefit of the bonus you signed up for, you might be asking questions like “how much is too much?”, “is that fair?” and “do these lucky pants make me look fat?”. There’s no real measure of how much is too much but the most popular are typically around 10x, 20x, and 30x the bonus value. (And no, your lucky pants do not make you look fat.)
DON’T PANIC! I know that’s much higher than the example we gave earlier, but I was soft balling it until now. This is real talk.
As a rule, and this is entirely up to you to decide for yourself, any online bingo site with a wagering requirement of 40x or more should be thought about very carefully. In the end, you need to be sure that you are going to be playing here regularly so that you can eventually whittle away at that wagering requirement, and claim your winnings.
If you like the idea of snatching up a big bonus and playing through the wagering requirement, then why not try your luck here at Lucky Pants Bingo? We offer a 30x wagering requirement to start, but remember that you can play this through or get lower wagering requirements on other offers too!