Bonus arithmetic: what an offer is actually worth

Line one: gross

Cash side of the offer, at the top of the advertised band, plus free spins counted at C$0.20 each because that is the stake rooms set them to.

A hundred percent match up to C$500 plus a hundred spins is C$500 plus C$20, so C$520 gross. That figure is the largest number the offer will ever be, and it assumes you deposited the whole five hundred.

Line two: turnover

Gross multiplied by the playthrough. C$520 at 35x is C$18,200 of staking before the balance opens up.

Read whether the multiplier applies to the bonus alone or to deposit plus bonus. Deposit-plus doubles that figure without changing anything in the advertisement.

Check the game weighting too. Slots usually count at 100%, tables at 10% or less. Clearing on blackjack can mean ten times the stakes for the same progress.

Line three: what the turnover costs

Staking is not free. At a 96% return the maths takes four cents of every dollar that passes through, and the money that passes through is the same money going round again.

Do not subtract four percent of C$18,200 from a C$520 stack; that gives C$728 of cost against C$520 of bonus, and an offer cannot leave you worse off than declining it. The stack is cycled thirty five times and loses four percent of itself on each pass, so C$520 becomes about C$125. Roughly C$395 of the headline is gone before a single other term is read, and it is a completely ordinary offer.

Now the same headline at 10x: C$5,200 of turnover, about C$208 of cost, C$312 left. Same money advertised, entirely different product.

The clock, and the phone

Divide the turnover by what you would normally stake in a day. At C$25 a day, C$18,200 takes seven hundred and twenty eight days. The offer expires in thirty.

That gap is the real term of most welcome offers and it is never stated in the headline. Our free money board prints the days-to-clear figure next to every offer for exactly that reason.

One more check, and it is the one this site cares about most: can the whole claim be done on the handset? A few rooms only show the bonus field on the desktop cashier, which makes the offer unavailable to somebody with a phone and no laptop. Those are marked rather than quietly listed.