Every worked figure below is an illustration of a method. None of it describes a real promotion, because no promotion is named on this site and none is being recommended. The point is to give you a calculation you can run on whatever lands in your inbox.
Start with what a bonus is, mechanically. It is not money. It is a conditional credit that becomes money only if a specified amount of betting happens first, inside a specified window, within specified per-bet limits, and it converts to at most a specified amount. Five numbers. Any description of a bonus that gives you fewer than five is incomplete, and a personal offer delivered by a message rather than a terms page is almost always incomplete.
The five numbers
| # | Number | The question that produces it | What a bad answer looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The multiplier | How many times over must it be bet? | A number with no base attached |
| 2 | The base | Times the bonus, or times deposit plus bonus? | Silence. This one doubles the work. |
| 3 | Max bet while active | What is the largest single bet allowed? | No figure, or a figure in a separate document |
| 4 | Max cashout | What is the most that can convert to cash? | A cap expressed as a multiple of something unstated |
| 5 | The window | How long, from when? | "Limited time", or a clock that starts at credit rather than first use |
Why the base matters more than the multiplier
Readers compare multipliers because multipliers are the number that gets advertised. The base is the number that decides the answer.
Take a deposit of 100 and a matched bonus of 100, so the bonus is 100 and the combined balance is 200. At a multiplier of 30 on the bonus alone, the required turnover is 3,000. At the same multiplier of 30 on deposit plus bonus, it is 6,000. Identical headline, identical multiplier, double the work. An offer at a multiplier of 40 on the bonus alone — which sounds worse — requires 4,000, which is substantially better than the 30 that was calculated on the combined figure.
So the first question on receiving any offer is not how big the multiplier is. It is what the multiplier multiplies. Until you have that, you do not have a number.
Game weighting, the silent multiplier
There is a sixth number hiding inside the first, and it is the one that most often turns a workable requirement into an impossible one.
Contribution weighting means that not every dollar bet counts as a dollar towards the requirement. Pokies typically count in full. Table games commonly count at a fraction, and some games are excluded entirely. If a game contributes at one-tenth, then a turnover requirement of 3,000 becomes 30,000 of actual betting on that game. That is not a worse version of the same offer; it is a different offer wearing the same headline.
The practical consequence is narrower than it first appears. A weighting schedule effectively tells you which games the operator will allow you to clear a bonus on, and the answer is nearly always the ones with the house's preferred mathematics. So read the weighting schedule not as fine print but as an instruction: this is the game you will be playing for the duration. If that is not a game you would otherwise choose, the bonus has just bought your preferences off you, which is a cost that never appears in anybody's calculation.
Max bet, and the quiet forfeiture it enables
A bonus almost always carries a cap on the largest single bet permitted while it is active. The figure itself is unremarkable. What matters is what happens when it is exceeded.
In most published terms, a bet above the cap is grounds for forfeiting the bonus and everything won from it. Not a warning, not a void bet, not a refund — forfeiture. And the cap is a trap of a specific kind, because it is easy to break by accident: a feature that raises the total bet automatically, an autoplay setting carried over from before the bonus was credited, a currency conversion that puts a familiar bet just over the line, a game whose minimum is already above the cap.
The defence is dull and effective. Write down the cap. Set the bet manually at or under it. Turn autoplay off for the duration. Check it again after any feature round that changes the stake. Then, before anything else, find the clause that says what happens if the cap is breached, because an operator whose terms say "may void winnings" and one whose terms say "will reduce the bet to the maximum permitted" are offering materially different products.
Max cashout, which is where the ceiling really is
This is the number that makes most VIP bonuses worse than they look, and it is the one most often omitted from the message that delivers the offer.
A max cashout caps what the bonus can ever become. Suppose a bonus of 100 with a cashout cap of 500: no sequence of events, however fortunate, pays more than 500 from that bonus, and anything above it is removed when the balance converts. Which means the bonus is not an amplifier of a good run — it is a lottery ticket with a printed maximum prize, and the requirement in number 1 is its price.
Run the two together and the shape becomes clear. A requirement of 3,000 in turnover for a maximum possible gain of 500 is a different proposition from a requirement of 3,000 for an uncapped gain, and the second scarcely exists. The honest way to evaluate a bonus, then, is: what does the turnover cost me in expectation, and what is the most I can win? Both sides of that comparison have ceilings, and only one of them is in your favour.
A note on the expected cost of turnover, since this is the one piece of arithmetic that genuinely requires a figure: betting a fixed total through a game with a published return gives back, on average, that proportion. The difference is the expected cost of clearing the bonus. Whether it is smaller than the capped gain is the entire question, and it is a question you can answer with a calculator before accepting anything. The return-to-player page explains what the published proportion means and, importantly, what it does not promise over one evening.
The window, and when the clock starts
The fifth number is a duration, and the only thing worth checking about it is the starting point. A window that begins when the bonus is credited is quite different from one that begins when it is first used, and a window that runs in days rather than from a fixed date behaves differently again around a weekend. Operators are not generally obscure about this; readers simply do not look, because a duration feels like the least technical of the five numbers and is therefore the one skipped.
Combine it with the turnover requirement and you get the only number that tells you whether an offer is realistic at all: required turnover divided by days remaining is the amount you have committed to bet per day. If that figure is larger than you would bet on a day when nobody had offered you anything, the bonus has changed your behaviour, and that is what it was for.
Why a personal offer is usually worse than the public one
This is the finding most readers find counter-intuitive, and it follows from the five numbers rather than from any suspicion about motives.
A public promotion sits on a terms page. It is dated, it is indexed, other people have read it, and it can be compared against the public promotions of competitors. All of that exerts a small but genuine discipline on how aggressive the five numbers can be.
A personal offer has none of that. It arrives in a message, often with three of the five numbers absent and the other two rounded flatteringly. There is no comparable version to compare it against, no third party has read it, and its terms may be a bespoke document rather than the published schedule. The feature being sold is exclusivity, and exclusivity in this context means precisely that nobody is checking.
Which yields the most useful habit on this page: when a personal offer arrives, open the public promotions page of the same site and run both sets of five numbers side by side. Often the public offer is plainly better. Sometimes the personal one is better on one number and considerably worse on another — a larger headline against a tighter cashout cap, say — and the comparison makes it visible in a minute. And if the personal offer's five numbers cannot be obtained in writing at all, there is nothing to compare and therefore nothing to accept.
One structural reason for the asymmetry is worth naming. An offer directed at an individual is usually triggered by that individual's behaviour: a recent withdrawal, a period of inactivity, a large deposit, a long losing run. Each of those triggers has an obvious commercial purpose, and the purpose is not generosity. The timing of an offer is information about the offer.
The Australian context, briefly
Two things apply to all of the above for a reader in this country. No online casino holds an Australian licence, so none of these terms is enforceable through an Australian regulator, and a disagreement about whether a cap was breached has no Australian forum. The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 is aimed at the supply of these services, not at the person playing. And in a South Australian pub the comparison does not arise, because state law restricts offering inducements to gamble and the per-spin ceiling is set by statute rather than negotiated — which is why nobody in Angaston has ever been sent a personal bonus. The South Australian VIP page covers that side, and the service page deals with what happens when a dispute does arise.
Over-18s only. A bonus is a cost in required turnover, not free money, and the ordinary outcome of accepting one is a loss. If an offer has made you bet more than you meant to, Gambling Help Online is free and open around the clock on 1800 858 858.
What this page rests on
The figures in the worked examples — 100, 200, 30, 40, 3,000, 6,000, 500 — are arithmetic chosen to make a method visible. They are not any operator's terms and are not presented as any operator's terms. No casino, brand, promotion, multiplier, cap or expiry is named, quoted or recommended anywhere above. Turnover requirements, contribution weighting, maximum bet clauses, maximum cashout clauses and expiry windows are described as the standard components of a bonus's published terms, and the reader is told to read the actual figures in those terms rather than here. The legal frame is the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, which addresses the offering and advertising of these services rather than the act of playing, and the fact that no online casino holds an Australian licence. South Australian restrictions on inducements and the statutory per-spin limits sit under the Gaming Machines Act 1992 and are administered by Consumer and Business Services SA; no limit figure is printed here.