When visiting a new online casino chances are you’re going to be offered a bonus to welcome you as a new customer. Now we can obviously all see that this is an attempt to curry favour and buy your loyalty and continued play but still casinos are offering hundreds, sometimes even thousands to join them there must be a catch mustn’t there?

Not a catch as such but there are terms and conditions which new customers need to be aware of before signing up and accepting these bonuses and always be also aware that you don’t have to take the bonus, if you’re not happy with these terms you can always opt out and play without.
There are usually 2 types of bonus, a deposit bonus i.e. the casino giving you an amount of free money related to the amount of your own money you deposit to play with or a no deposit bonus where the casino gives you free money without you needing to deposit at all.

Whilst terms are different from casino to casino they’ll broadly speaking contain the following kind of general things that you need to be aware of. You won’t be able to immediately withdraw these bonus funds you’ll have to play through them in the casino before making a withdrawal and usually the amount of times you need to play though these funds will be in the region of 20-30 before being allowed to take any funds out. Also the way in which you play through these funds may well be subject to certain game restrictions, again it varies from casino to casino but some games may not count at all and/or other games may only count a limited amount towards your play-through requirements.
Keep an eye on this and bonus funds can certainly still be used and maximise your play but just make sure you go in with your eyes open.

Written by Alex Corcoran, an online gamer who enjoys playing bingo, casino, poker and slots online. She likes to contribute her thoughts to sites like this one on a range of gaming subjects but her best work is normally on Online Bingo.