Almost every online casino has some sort of welcome bonus to help try and persuade you to sign up and use their website rather than their competitors. With a little bit of thought and cleverness, we can take these new-player casino bonuses and convert them into withdrawable cash.

Jun 27, 2010 I feel I would make a decent comparison study between BJ and poker since I'm an AP in both. We already know that a good return in BJ per hand is 1%-1.5% of your average bet assuming you're only using straight counting. I bought my house with the money I made from card counting! It’s definitely possible to play blackjack for a living. It takes hard work, determination, and self control, but we are living proof that you can make a living counting cards at blackjack (not to mention the 100 people we hang out with at the blackjack ball, half of which are.

But before we delve into casino bonuses, let’s talk about sportsbook bonuses. Making money from them is known as matched betting and is pretty easy and may be where you started off?

But right now because of the COVID-19 coronavirus most sports aren’t running so there aren’t that many matched betting offers available. But to try and keep customers casinos are offering better bonuses than normal. Now is a great time to try some casino bonus bagging – especially as we all need to make some more money!

Contents

Unlike Matched Betting, Casino Bonus Bagging Isn’t Risk Free

Unlike matched betting, making money from casino bonuses is not risk-free. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be profitable and worth doing.

We call this notion EV (expected value). By using maths we can work out how much money we will make on average from the bonus. So why is that not risk-free? Because of variance. Each time we make a slightly different amount, but over the long term it averages to the EV.

If you understand what I mean then feel free to skip straight to the how casino bonuses work section.

Note: this can get quite complicated. If you want someone to explain it to you one-to-one then Oddsmonkey have an onboarding coach who will hold your hand when you sign up to their £17.99 a month service.

The Maths – How Casinos Make Money

Let’s say that we are playing a game of flip the coin, and because we’re fun people we’re also betting on it.

If we bet £1 a throw.

• I win £1 and you lose £1 if the coin comes up heads.
• You win £1 and I lose £1 if the coin comes up tails.

That is what we call a fair game.

There is risk – we could play 100 flips and I might lose money, or I might win money. But either way, it is just down to luck. Statistically, I am not more likely to win than to lose.

There is a 50% chance of me winning each throw, and a 50% chance of me losing each throw.

That is not what it is like in a casino. The casino has an edge.

Let’s change the rules slightly:

• I win £1 and you lose £1 if the coin comes up heads.
• You win £1.10 and I lose £1.10 if the coin comes up tails.

That is not a fair a game.

There is still risk – we could play 100 flips and I might make money. But I am more likely to lose.

On each coin toss I expect to lose 5p. We use this word “expect” a lot when it comes to making money from casino bonuses. It means the average in the long-term.

Here is a very simple tree showing you how we worked out that expected loss of 5p.

(0.5 x £1) + (0.5 x -£1.10) = -£0.05

That number becomes what is called the house edge. For every £1 we bet we expect to lose 5p.

If we play 1,000 flips, I will have bet £1,000 and expect to lose £50 (1,000 x 5p).

The More We Play The Closer To Expected We Get

Now we get a bit more complicated. The longer I play, the more likely I am to lose money.

I am not going to explain the maths here (email me if you want to know), but over 1 coin flip my chance of walking away with a profit is 50%. The coin can either come up heads or tails.

Over 100 coin flips my chance of making a profit has dropped to 31.7%, that’s almost a 1/3rd chance which still is quite high. I might decide that I’m feeling especially lucky and take that 1/3rd chance. But over 6,000 coin flips my chance of leaving with a profit drops only 1%.

That is how a casino makes money. If there are 60 people playing at your casino and each plays the coin flip game 100 times, then each person has a 31.7% chance of leaving with a profit. But as the casino is playing 6,000 total flips it only has a 1% chance of not making a profit overall. A pretty clever business model.

What Are The House Edges Of Different Casino Games?

Now you can’t actually play our coin flip game in a casino so let’s apply this concept to two real casino games.

Roulette. Is a very basic game which almost everyone understands.

There are 36 numbers not including the zero. Of those 36 – 18 are red and 18 are black. The number zero is not red or black. Each time the wheel spins there is an equal chance that the ball will land on any of the numbers 0 – 36.

If you bet on red and it comes up, you win your stake back. So a £1 bet would win £1.

There is an 18 out of 37 chance of a red colour coming up. That means that you have a 48.6% chance of winning, and a 51.4% chance of losing.

Let’s draw that same tree we did earlier but this time for roulette:

(0.486 x £1) + (0.514 x -£1) = -£0.028

For ever £1 bet we expect to lose 2.8p. That’s the house edge.

That’s pretty low. But roulette is not the casino game with the lowest house edge. That award goes to….

Blackjack. Forget card counting or anything you’ve seen in the films, your basic blackjack is the casino game with the smallest house edge.

There are many different rule sets for blackjack, and the house edge depends both on those rules and also on how close to perfect strategy the player is playing. But most games of blackjack have a house edge of about 0.5p per £1 bet (0.5%).

Let’s just think about that, 0.5%. That’s so low! It’s the equivalent of playing the coin flip game with the rules:

• I win £1 and you lose £1 if the coin comes up heads.
• You win £1.01 and I lose £1.01 if the coin comes up tails.

If we played 1,000 hands of blackjack at £1 a bet, we would have staked £1,000 and expect to lose just £5.

How Casino Bonuses Work

Thank you for sitting through all of that. Now that the basics are out the way let’s talk about the juicy stuff. How we can actually make some money from casino bonuses.

Just like with matched betting, most casinos offer new players an incentive to sign up and play at their casino.

Unfortunately, unlike with matched betting, there is no way we can hedge out our bets. But we can use this knowledge of the house edge to turn things in our favour. Provided the bonus is good, we can expect to make money.

Let’s take a look at one bonus that is currently offered by William Hill on their live casino.

To get the bonus, we need to deposit £25 and then place a series of bets that total at least £200. When we have reached that target and we contact customer service, a bonus of £25 will be added which we are then free to withdraw along with whatever is left of our initial deposit.

How We Make Money From Casino Bonuses

£200 sounds like a lot, but after what we’ve learnt about house edges and blackjack it shouldn’t sound so bad. Remember blackjack has a house edge of 0.5%.

Over £200 staked we expect to lose only £1. That means we expect to keep £24 of the bonus!

This is what we expect to happen.

• We deposit £25 into William Hill Live casino.
• We place 200 £1 bets. At the end, we have lost £1 and have £24 left.
• A £25 bonus is added to our balance.
• We withdraw our balance of £49 (£24+£25).
• We have made a profit of £24.

But, there is risk.

There is a chance we will lose more than just £1. There is even a chance of us losing more money than the bonus is worth. If we use up all of that £25 we would need to deposit more in order to finish the staking.

We won’t go into the maths on variance. But understand this. Blackjack has a house edge of 0.5% and a standard deviation of 1.15.

That means that at a £1 bet size there is a 95% chance we will make somewhere between £7.75 and £40.25. But it also means there is a 7% chance of making a small loss.

That is the essence of making money from casino bonuses. You are simply moving the odds to your favour.

Websites like Oddsmonkey and Profit Accumulator (more on them later) have calculators for working out your variance and house edge from different casino games. They also have strategy calculators to help you play the games optimally.

Whew. So after all that explaining, the actual steps were very simple.

But we had to go into all that details because it will enable you to look at more advanced offers and take advantage of them as well. Every casino bonus has different terms and you need to be able to work out what strategy to follow to get the highest ‘expected profit’ or ev from the bonus.

Which brings us on to the hardest part of making money from casino bonuses.

Where To Find The Best Casino Bonuses

You can only do that William Hill Live casino offer once, so to continue making money you need to find some more offers.

And the unfortunate truth is for more casino bonuses it is not profitable to make money from them. You need to find the diamonds in the rough.

You can do this in exactly the same way as you would when sports matched betting. And in fact, if you have done matched betting before you will probably already know the following two choices:

• Look through casino terms and conditions manually.

95% of people pay for a service. Compared to the EV you can make the services are cheap, they give you a curated list of offers to work through, and they point out any dangerous loopholes in the terms and conditions.

My two favourite paid for services for casino bonuses are:

• Profit Accumulator. Free for your first few bonuses, then £19.99 a month.
• Oddsmonkey. Free for your first few bonuses, £19.99 a month.

Nowadays they are both pretty similar with largely the same offers but different communities, website feel and customer service. They each have free accounts you can try out so I suggest signing up to both and then choosing which one you like the most.

Note: this can get quite complicated. If you want someone to explain it to you one-to-one then Oddsmonkey have an onboarding coach who will hold your hand when you sign up to their £19.99 a month service.

There Are Lots Of Different Types Of Casino Bonuses

Wow what a beast of a post!

Let’s just finish on saying that there are lots of different types of casino bonuses and all have slightly different best ways to exploit them.

By now you should understand the concept of expectedvalue and therefore making money from casino bonuses. You have a guide to tackle your first bonus and you have plenty of resources to help you research and find new offers. Good luck!

USEFUL LINKS

• More details on casino wagering requirements.
• My summer betting diary where I made £250 a week throughout the summer holidays.

FAQ

What happens if I lose all of the £25 before completing the wagering requirement??

Can You Make Money Off Blackjack Reddit

This is a very real risk and is also the reason why there is a chance of losing a small amount of money while completing the wagering requirement.

What you need to do is to deposit more money and finish the betting.

I hear people talking about ‘sticky’ bonuses or doubling up. What does that mean?

You should really join a forum and start asking people there. You are getting into some quite complicated areas with the potential to lose some large amounts of money if you make a mistake.

But in short: A sticky bonus is one that you can never withdraw. You can only withdraw the winnings. This means that the tactics we spoke about earlier don’t work. Doubling up is a technique to make money from them. You basically bet the whole bonus on red on roulette. If the bet wins you withdraw the winnings. If you lose you’ve lost the bonus which you couldn’t withdraw anyway.

What are the house odds of some other casino games?

• Baccarat – 1.06%
• 3-card Poker – 2.01%
• Craps – 0.34%
• French Roulette (you get 50% of your stake back if it lands on 0) – 1.35%
• American Roulette (two 0s) – 5.26%
• Slots – 3-10%. Average is about 5%.

Can I card count online blackjack?

No, you cannot. Card counting relies on the contents of the remaining cards changing as the rounds go on. In online blackjack the cards are shuffled every hand so the contents don’t change. You can do it with live blackjack – but I believe they shuffle regularly to make it more difficult. I have never tried.

I have a question that is not answered here?

Drop me an email at hello@sampriestley.com and I will do my best to get back to you.

Can you make money from casino bonuses while self-isolating or under quarantine?

Yes you can! It is actually a very good time to do it because you can do every step of the offer from your home.

Do you love the casino scene?

Does being a casino dealer seem like the perfect blend of glamour, excitement, and fun?

At first glance, being a dealer at a casino might seem like the perfect job. After all, you probably already enjoy the games you’ll be playing. And you will be getting paid to play them.

You don’t even have to risk losing any money while you play. The casino is banking all the action.

As a casino dealer, the amount you win for the house has no bearing on your pay, though. You get an hourly wage plus tips.

Compared to some jobs, being a casino dealer might be a great deal. As casino gambling continues to grow across the nation, more jobs become available, and fewer potential employees are out there to fill those jobs. This means wages are climbing, too.

This post examines how much you can expect to make as a casino dealer, tips and all.

What Is the Average Wage for a Casino Dealer?

Your average wage as a casino dealer isn’t impressive at all. It’s a service industry, so when you calculate how much you’ll make, you need to take the same kind of mindset that waitresses and bartenders take:

How much money you make is based more on tips than on your hourly wage.

And the better you serve your customers, the more they’ll tip.

In other words, if you’re not a people person, becoming a casino dealer might not be a great idea.

The hourly wages for casino dealers don’t vary based on the game, either. Blackjack dealers make the same kind of money as baccarat dealers, who make the same kind of money as poker dealers or roulette dealers (or croupiers, as they’re called).

The starting pay for an average casino dealer is between $8 and $10 per hour. Some of that is based on experience, too.

If you’re able to get 40 hours a week, which is unusual, you’re looking at $16,000 to $20,000 per year. Most casino dealers, especially starting out, don’t get 40 hours a week, though.

That’s barely enough to pay the rent if you have a roommate and live in a cheap apartment.

Depending on the casino and the stakes of the games you’re dealing, you can expect to make anywhere from $15 per hour in tips to $50 per hour in tips, on average.

That $50 per hour figure, by the way, is an outlier statistic. This assumes you’re working at a high-end casino dealing the higher-limit casino games to the high rollers.

Even then, some high rollers don’t tip — or if they tip, they don’t tip well at all.

Poker dealers make the most money from tips on the most consistent basis, but a lot of this depends on people skills. In some casinos, the dealers are required to pool their tips.

I once played at a casino in Las Vegas with an older poker dealer named Boris. He got mad at me for saying the words “Carpe diem” at the table. He said that I was only allowed to speak English at the table.

Being a friendly guy, I smiled and explained to everyone at the table that the phrase is Latin for “seize the day.”

Boris didn’t think that was helpful, either. He was surly and rude.

As a result, I didn’t tip him.

I shared the story with a professional poker player friend of mine, and he told me that he would have raised hell with the cardroom manager until Boris had been fired.

And the thing is… I don’t mind a little correction. In fact, I’m a humble guy. Had he been reasonably friendly and polite about it, I would have continued to tip him. So it goes.

Also, just because you’re dealing a higher-stakes poker game doesn’t mean you’ll make more in tips. Some of the high-rolling poker players are notorious cheapskates. If you’re dealing high-roller blackjack, craps, or roulette, you’ll do a lot better than if you’re dealing high-limit hold’em.

According to Glassdoor, the average wages for dealers and related jobs are all over the place. They suggest that the average dealer makes $40,000 a year. They also suggest that an average poker dealer only makes $20,000 a year.

Other related jobs include the floor supervisor, with an average salary of $53,000 a year, a casino host, with an average salary of $35,000 a year, and a casino shift manager, with an average salary of $27,000 a year.

The site also lists salaries by company, and it looks like Caesars is the best place to be a dealer, with a salary of $42,000.

Indeed.com has more survey results and suggests an average of $15/hour, which equates to $30,000 a year. They had a listing for a dealer position in Black Hawk, Colorado, where the starting pay was $38/hour. That’s $76,000 a year.

ZipRecruiter suggests that top dealers make $400,000 a year, but I can’t imagine that’s accurate. The rest of their averages are in line with what I saw on the other sites mentioned.

The Perks and Drawbacks of Being a Casino Dealer as a Career

If you know anything about the service business, you probably know that dealing with the customers can be the biggest perk and the biggest drawback to your job. This is especially true in the casino business, though, because emotions tend to be amped up when money is on the line.

You’ll probably spend a lot of time on your feet if you’re dealing table games in the casino. If you’re dealing poker in the cardroom, you’ll probably need to bring a pillow for some extra cushioning at your chair.

One of the other drawbacks of being a casino dealer is that it turns what used to be a leisure activity into a work activity. Playing blackjack is great when you get to do it a couple of times a year for a few hours at a time.

But after dealing blackjack for 30 hours a week for six weeks straight, it becomes drudgery.

In most casinos, smoking is still allowed. That might or might not bother you. I’ve spent enough time in bars and AA meetings that cigarette smoke doesn’t bother me at all, but I’m not like most people.

One of the perks of dealing casino games is that it doesn’t require a degree. You can go to a vocational school to become a dealer, though, but the time and financial commitments are smaller than with other careers. You can usually be qualified to be a casino dealer after a couple of months and an investment of $1,000.

If you’re a night owl, or if you’re looking for a second job — we used to call it “moonlighting” — casino dealing might be perfect for you. After all, most casinos are open 24/7. And guess which shifts are the hardest ones for the managers to cover.

Most casinos are owned by large companies with human resources departments. This means that you’ll probably be eligible for a benefits package. These can include health insurance and retirement benefits, as well as paid time off.

Breaks are longer for casino dealers than you’ll see at other jobs. At most casinos, you work for 90 minutes and then take a 30-minute break. During an eight-hour shift, you get a total of two hours of break time.

If you like having stories to tell, being a casino dealer puts you in a position to have lots of anecdotes. Heck, I have quite a reputation as a raconteur just from the stories I have to tell by being a player. And believe me, I haven’t spent THAT much time gambling in casinos — not compared to someone who deals for a living, anyway.

What Are Your Job Responsibilities as a Casino Dealer?

Think of the dealer as the host for a specific game. The dealer shuffles and deals the cards, or spins the roulette wheel, or directs the action at the craps table. The dealer also trades chips for money.

If you’re a poker dealer, you’re responsible for collecting the rake. It’s your job to make sure the players post their blinds.

If you’re dealing a casino game, you collect the players’ losses and pay out their winnings in chips.

It’s traditional to start your career dealing blackjack because that’s the most popular table game.

But in Europe, it’s more likely that you’ll start as a croupier — that’s the fancy name for the dealer running the roulette game.

The dice table is the toughest table game to be a dealer. Even after writing about craps for years, I still have to look things up. The action is fast, there are lots of bets on the table, and there’s just a lot to keep up with. Craps is the last game most dealers learn.

You’re responsible for maintaining your own gambling license, too. It’s similar to having a driver’s license if you’re going to drive for a company or a food handler’s permit if you’re going to cook for people.

If you have lousy credit and/or a criminal record, you might run into trouble getting your license.

By the way, I have a lady friend who dealt blackjack for years. She’s clueless when it comes to basic strategy. You’re not required to learn the correct strategies for the games you deal.

My advice to prospective dealers is to avoid giving advice to players. That’s a no-win situation because the players are going to lose their money in the long run because of the nature of the games. If they followed your advice, they’ll just blame you for this.

Make Money Blackjack Reddit Play

Who needs that kind of headache?

Conclusion

If you like people, enjoy casino games, and don’t mind cigarette smoke, becoming a casino dealer might be the career for you. You don’t get to keep the money the players lose, but they’ll often tip you when they’re winning, so you’ll get to root for them.

You’ll make at least $15,000 a year dealing casino games, but you might make as much as $100,000 a year. I’ve seen reports of dealers who made more, but I’m skeptical, and you should be, too.

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