No Wagering Requirements – Casino & Slot Sites
Slot and casino players generally love bonuses – who wouldn’t want apparently free money? – but hate wagering requirements and historically casino and slot sites have dealt with this by hiding the wagering requirements in the small print – but times are changing and now there is a new wave of casino and slot sites with NO wagering requirements whatsoever. The number of No Wagering slot sites remains small and is not expected to increase significantly during 2020, but they are very popular with players.
A new breed of casino & slot site
No Bonus casinos have been around for quite some time as a niche product for players who prefer no-frills cash play, but in 2017 a new breed of slot and casino sites started to appear; these are aimed at players who still want to participate in promotions and rewards but are fed up with wagering requirements. These casinos and slot sites do not offer traditional bonuses but instead incentivise and reward their players in new and innovative ways which enable them to have no wagering requirements.
2017 & 2018 – bad years for casino bonus
There are a couple of very good reasons why casino and slot sites moved away from giving out big bonus offers:
The crackdown on gambling advertising – this means that wagering requirements and other restrictive terms and conditions must be made explicit when a bonus is offered, making bonuses look a lot less attractive to players (and alternative reward schemes more attractive by comparison).
Taxation of bonuses – the rules for this changed at the beginning of August 2017. Previously, free bets and bonuses at online gambling sites weren’t within the scope of the 15% point of consumption tax, but now they are. This makes it much more expensive for casinos to give out any bonus, especially a welcome bonus. Before the tax, if a casino or slot site gave out a big welcome bonus and a player used it up and then left in search of better luck elsewhere, it didn’t cost the operator anything – now it does.
Goodbye to “Free Spins”
Many slot sites and bingo sites responded to the above issues by switching their bonus offers to “free spins” offers but these are often not all they seem. Most so-called “free spins” offers pay any winnings from the spins as a slot bonus with a big fat wagering requirement and sometimes a maximum convertible (a cap on what can be won from bonus play) – and with all these strings attached plus the necessity of making a deposit to receive the spins, this is not what most people would understand by the word “free”. Indeed many operators have stopped using the term and replaced it with something that is less likely to get them in trouble with the Advertising Standards Authority and the Gambling Commission – such as bonus spins, extra spins, or complimentary spins.
The type of “free spins” offers found on No Wagering slot, casino and bingo sites are only “not free” in that they require a deposit to be made and/or an amount of cash play to be completed. Any winnings would be paid in cash. Even so, most of them have a cap on “free spins” winnings – PlayOJO is one that doesn’t.
Slot spins are probably the most common type of reward given out to players at No Wagering sites when they deposit or play, but they are by no means the only type of reward – raffle tickets, the opportunity to play a bonus game to win slot spins or cash, and cold hard cash are all in the mix.
A better deal for players
The No Wagering model has a number of advantages for players over and above the elimination of the wagering requirement itself.
- At a No Wagering site, a player could conceivably cash out everything in their account any time and go play somewhere else. In the absence of any wagering requirements to bind the player, the site has to try quite a bit harder than is usual to please players so they won’t want to leave – resulting in a full schedule of promotions and exciting new slots to play (at the best sites anyway).
- At a No Wagering site, when players choose a game to play (as opposed to using preset spins) they will always be playing with their own withdrawable cash and this will never expire. There will therefore be no pressure to complete any specific amount of play within any time limit (as there would be if working down a wagering requirement on a bonus before it expires). Arguably this helps players to gamble responsibly and moderate their play.
- At a No Wagering site, there is generally a tendency towards greater transparency and simplicity. A site with a traditional bonus offer and associated wagering requirements will often have all sorts of restrictions in the small print covering such matters as which games players with an active bonus can play, what bet size they are allowed, how much of their winnings they would actually be able to keep and whether they are barred from any promotions. No Wagering sites do not have any of this annoying small print so playing at one is hassle free.
