This step-by-step advantage play guide will go into a real life example of an everyday casino reload offer and show you exactly how advantage play works in practice. For this particular advantage play guide we will be making the best part of £30 from a reload offer from one of the largest casino’s in the UK – Ladbrokes Casino.
Before we start, you will need to understand that advantage gambling can result in you losing money (and sometimes your entire qualifying stake). This is definitely not risk free, if you need any more guidance on advantage play please see my explainer page.
Now you’ve understood the risks involved, it’s time to make a start on this step-by-step advantage play guide using a simple reload offer. Similar to a matched betting bet X and get Y offer, this is instead stake £20 for a £10 bonus. This offer had an Expected Value (EV) of around £6. Simply put, if we played this offer a million times (or much more) we would come out with an average profit around about that figure. Of course due to the nature of variance this will mean that several thousands of people will come out ahead way ahead of the £6 figure and several thousands will end up negative on the offer and return a loss.
The first step of the offer is pretty simple, we need to open the slot and wager £20 of our own money. This particular slot “Eye of Horus” has an advertised 96.31 Return To Player Percentage (96.13% RTP). What does that mean? Well again it’s a mathematical figure that represents millions (if not billions) of spins on the slot and the percentage returned back to the player. So if we wagered £100 an infinite amount of times we would expect to get £96.31 back.
However, that does not cover the full story, this is a medium/high variance slot. This means that wins/losses will come in much bigger swings than a low variance slot (which would give smaller and more regular wins). Casinos increasingly use these types of slots for offers as it increases their chance of coming out in a profit. Often you will not profit from this type of offer if you don’t hit a bonus round on the initial higher variance wagering slot, so the more of these offers you do the more chance you will hit a bonus round and finish the wagering with a nice profit.
For wagering we want to minimise our losses so we opt for the minimum bet amount and increase the pay lines to the maximum combination possible. This is a strategy you will see a lot described on Oddsmonkey as “Max lines/Minimum Stake”. As you can see from the above picture, I’ve set my pay lines to 10 (the max) and reduced my bet size to 1p (10 lines x 1p = 10p total stake).
As our staking requirements state, we need to place £20 worth of 10p bets. This equates to 200 spins. This can be done 100 at a time on something called auto-spin or auto-play which is available on most slots. You can see it denoted in the picture above by the rotating arrow in the black circle in the right-hand bottom corner.
After playing 200 10p spins I end up finishing the wagering requirements with £7.10 profit. As I mentioned previously, wagering wasn’t going particularly well until about 7 spins from completion I hit a bonus round which returned £19 off one 10p spin! Without the bonus round I would have been about £12 down. Being down after wagering happens to a lot of people every single day. This is the risk you take with advantage play.
After finishing the wagering, I check in my Ladbrokes Casino bonus section to see that my £10 bonus has been added. Now unlike matched betting we can’t lock in a profit with that free money, instead we have to wager it a certain amount of times before it becomes our cash to keep. In this case we have to wager our £10 a total of 10 times (£100) in order to unlock it as cash.
So if you came out of the wagering process with a profit or broke even, this is a risk free attempt at making some extra money as you stop as soon as you lose the bonus money (known as “busting out”). So in my case I knew that I would stop as soon as my balance decreased to £76.15, as anything after that would be using my own money.
I decided to use a slot called “Golden Tour” to wager my £10 bonus but it had the highest available RTP at 97.71% and it is a low variance slot. Notice my balance is £10 higher than it should be as it includes the £10 locked bonus money.
I decided I couldn’t face doing 5/10p spins as it would have required thousands of spins to meet the wagering requirement of £100. Instead I opted for 50p stakes (200 spins). After hitting two bonus rounds during the wagering of this bonus I finished on £97.65. Remember my actual starting balance for the £10 bonus was £76.15 so wagering the bonus gave me an additional profit of £21.50!
A quick check in my bonuses section showed the bonus no longer active meaning I was free to walk away with my total profits of £28.60 (£7.10 qualifying + £21.50 wagering £10 bonus)!
Obviously, no advantage play guide would be complete without stating the obvious. Casino offers don’t always end so joyously. In fact most of them don’t, which is why the volume of offers you complete is important. If you hit several of these a day you will probably lose money on most of them but you will make a profit on one or two that will cover those losses and return a large profit on top (or at least that’s the idea!).
Hopefully you’ve managed to follow this advantage play guide without too much trouble. If you have any questions, drop them in the comments box below and I will do my best to respond as soon as I can.