Casinos

Why this site prints no bonuses, and how to read one on the operator's site

Alberta's rules keep bonuses off affiliate pages, and this one obeys them. The rules do not stop a player from meeting an offer on the operator's own site, though, and since that is where the terms live, this page explains how to read them, with the arithmetic that most promotional pages leave out, for reasons that are easy to guess.

The rule, briefly

AGLC's standards allow an "inducement" (a bonus, a credit, "free spins" or anything else offered to make someone play) to be communicated on the operator's own registered site and in direct marketing to a person who has consented, and nowhere else. An affiliate's page is neither, so our cards carry no welcome offer, no number of spins and no promotional code, and none of our buttons promises one (the full reasoning is on what an advert may say).

That leaves a gap we can fill without breaking the rule, which is to explain how an offer works in general, for any operator on any site. What follows describes no particular operator's promotion and quotes no amount from any of them; the numbers are invented for the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is the same whatever the "logo" or the colour of the button on the page.

The terms that decide what a bonus is worth

The "headline" of an offer is the least informative part of it, because a handful of conditions in the terms decide its value. The most important is the "wagering requirement" (also called "playthrough"): how many times a bonus, or a bonus and a "deposit", must be bet before winnings can be withdrawn.

Around it sit the other conditions, starting with the "game weighting" (the share of each bet that counts toward the requirement, partial or nil for most table games). Then come the "maximum bet" while the bonus is active, a cap on winnings (often a fixed multiple of the bonus) and an "expiry date".

The arithmetic, with invented numbers

Take a hypothetical player. Suppose a bonus of $100 comes with a wagering requirement of thirty-five times the bonus alone, on slots that count in full: before withdrawing anything, the player must place $3,500 in bets, which at $1 a spin means three and a half thousand spins, an evening's play many times over.

Now suppose the slots played return 96 per cent of what is staked over the long run, a common figure for modern slots (the page on return to player explains what such a figure is an average of). On $3,500 of bets, the expected loss is 4 per cent, or $140, which is more than the bonus is worth. The bonus, in other words, pays for part of the cost, not all of it. You can still win, of course, since "variance" is real, but the average player who completes the requirement ends up behind!

If the requirement applies to the deposit and the bonus together, the bets double; a $100 deposit with a $100 bonus at thirty-five times both means $7,000 in bets and an expected loss of $280 (4 per cent of $7,000), which is why the base of the requirement (bonus alone, or both) matters as much as the multiple.

The conditions that catch people out

The maximum bet is the condition broken most often by accident. A player placing a single bet above the limit during a bonus can see the bonus and the winnings removed, since the limit is usually printed in the terms rather than enforced by the game (which will accept a bet the terms forbid without a word of warning).

In our reading of terms, game weighting catches the player who switches to blackjack or roulette to clear a requirement more cheaply, only to find that those bets count for little or nothing toward the total (a blackjack bet may count for a tenth, or for nothing). A cap on winnings, meanwhile, can turn a large lucky win into a fixed and modest sum, which is the condition most worth reading before the first spin rather than after the last one.

Declining is always allowed

A bonus is optional, and a player who prefers to keep a deposit free of conditions can decline it, usually with a single "tick box" on the "cashier page". We would decline any offer whose five conditions cannot be found in the terms; we would think twice about any offer whose arithmetic, done as above, comes out well below zero for the average player, which, in our experience of doing these sums, is most of them.

Loyalty schemes deserve the same reading, since points and levels are inducements in the language of the rules and they come with terms of their own (expiry dates, conversion rates, levels that reset). The page about the Casino Rewards brands describes one such scheme without its figures, which, as you will by now expect, live on the operator's site.

By the Alberta Casinos Online editorial team · Last updated: November 13, 2026 · Online since 2026