The wagering requirement is the main catch to Casino's bonuses. This effectively means that you can't withdraw your bonus and sometimes your deposit until you have bet (turned over) the bonus and sometime the deposit a certain number of times.

FOR EXAMPLE: Say your bonus was £100 you might be required to wager (turn over) that bonus 20 time i.e. £100 x 20 = £2,000. So you need to be £2,000 before you can withdraw anything. Suddenly you can see why the Casino's offer these bonuses, they get you betting with your own money, unless you know what you are doing. iFreeBet Strategy click here...

At some Casinos your bonus can not be withdrawn, these are called "sticky bonuses". We have a completely separate strategy for these. So please don't apply this strategy to "stickies".

How can I tell a sticky, usually Casinos that offer bonuses of $500 or $1000 are stickies. In the T&C's will say something like "bonus credits are for wagering purposes only". Generally bonuses offered between £/$50 to £/$250 are withdrawable. What to look out for is the wagering requirement, in the T&C's, until you can withdraw. i.e. this is normal a figure of about 20 times. This is usually written something like, "Before the deposit bonus can be withdrawn, the bonus amount must be turned over 20 times".

The next thing to do is to check which games the casino site will let you play in order to use your bonus. Most T&C's will say something like "Bets on Roulette, Craps or Baccarat do not count towards the customer's wagering requirements". iFreeBet as advises the best game to play in these circumstances would be BlackJack. In fact, wherever possible iFreeBet advises that you play BlackJack.

In some cases casinos will exclude all games except slots from their wagering requirements and slots tend to have a higher house edge than other games. Playing Slots for your wagering requirement therefore is more risky than other games and I would advise against it.

You've now:

a) Deposited and claimed you bonus

b) Understand what games you can play (BLACKJACK)

c) Know your wagering requirement. (e.g. 20 times = £2000)

How do you turn this highly conditioned free money into real money?

The bonus bagging strategy is extremely simple, you play continuous low bets, e.g. £1 repeatedly in order to reduce your variance and in turn reduce your losses, therefore once you reach your wagering requirement (in this case £1 x 2000times) you can withdraw as much of the free money as possible.

Imagine you are playing a game of heads and tails, using a coin, with a friend.

As you know there are only two sides to a coin and so your chances of winning are 50% and chances of losing are 50%. Therefore if you played the game many hundreds of times, although at times you would be up and times you would be down you would end up winning the same amount each. Pretty pointless game really!

Please see a random set of 10 coins spins tabulated below.

As you can see I won £2 off my friend by choosing Tails, next time there is just as much chance of the opposite happening.

BUT imagine my friend offered to give me £10, on the condition I played 10 rounds heads and tails at £1 stakes. Please see the table below, if the results were the same as the above.

Suddenly it looks much more interesting, you win £12 and the odds are suddenly stacked firmly in your favour.

This is the principle we advocate for bonus bagging except using £1 stakes on blackjack. Blackjack has similar odds as heads and tails instead of 50/50 it's very slightly in favour of the house at 49.5%/50.5%, a 0.5% house edge, and instead of using a £10 bonus and 10 plays, it's a £100 bonus and 2000 plays.

With the 0.5% house edge of 2000 plays at £1 will cost you 0.5% of £2000 = £10.

Therefore playing your wagering requirement of 2000 times at £1 will cost you £10 of your initial £100 deposit. However, if you add to this the £100 bonus you can now withdraw you are withdrawing £190 a £90 profit.

Please note these sums are made as if you are playing the game in perpetuity (i.e.) they are the odds if you continued playing this game for ever, as you are not playing for ever these figures are not guaranteed. The more times you play the game the closer the results will be the above.

i.e. if you only were playing 100 stakes at £20 you may win a lot more, but you may lose more quickly, you also may win much more, depending if you luck is in, but we don't do luck we do statistics. Therefore as we stated earlier keep the stakes as low as possible usually £1 to reach your turnover requirement as this reduces variance.

2000 plays will take about 3 hours, so with £90 profit £30/hr tax free isn't bad. Luckily lots of Casino sites do have automatic AUTOPLAY functions so the computer can do the work for you, so you don't have to lift a finger.