Free spins are crucial to success with casino offers – but if you’re a newcomer to casino, you might never have encountered them before.
So how do they work, and how can you use them to your advantage?
In this beginner’s guide, we’ll talk you through all you need to know about free spins – what they are, how you get your hands on them, how to claim your winnings, and exactly how you can turn casino offers into profit.
What Are Casino Free Spins?
A casino free spin means a free play of a slots game. Slots games work by pressing a button to spin a series of reels – you win if you get several matching symbols along a payline, or if you manage to land a certain number of bonus symbols.
Normally, you stake your own money when you play a slots game. Stakes can be as low as 5p or as high as £5, the legal maximum for a stake per game cycle (or £2 for 18-24 year olds).
But bookies and online casinos are always keen to incentivise customers to play their games.
Offering free spins is, from their point of view, a great way to give a customer a taste of slots, in the hope they’ll want to keep playing with their own money.
How Do You Get Free Spins?
Bookies have tons of offers that will reward you with free spins! Those offers can be roughly divided into two categories: sign up offers and reload offers.
- Sign up offers are for new customers, and are generally pretty generous. Sadly, you’ll only be able to do each offer once per bookie, as they aren’t accessible to existing customers.
- Reload offers are for existing customers, and aren’t nearly as generous as sign up offers. However, they’re often still worth doing, and can make a significant contribution to your monthly profits.
As for what you have to do to receive your free spins, there’s a wide range of different qualification requirements. Some bookies or casinos will hand them out for no reason at all, on particular days or to certain customers, but it’s more common to have to ‘earn’ your free spins somehow.
Depending on the site in question, there are a few different ways you might qualify for your free spins.
- Make a deposit. Some of the more generous offers will only ask you to make a deposit in order to earn free spins – meaning you get a risk-free way to potentially profit.
- Play a free game. Lots of bookies and casinos have daily or weekly free games, which give you the chance to win rewards, including free spins.
- Stake your own money on slots. One of the most common ways to earn free spins is to risk your own money. For example, you might be asked to play through £10 on slots (sometimes on a specific game) to earn a number of free spins.
- Place a sports bet. Some sites like to mix and match their sports/casino offers, so you might be asked to bet money on a certain sport, or a certain event, to earn free spins.
- Play a different casino game. On occasion, you might be asked to wager a certain amount of money on a live casino game, like roulette or blackjack, to receive free spins.
- Exchange credits for free spins. Some bookies/casinos have their own internal ‘currency’ (such as coins on Coral and ladbucks with Ladbrokes), that can be exchanged for free spins. You can usually earn these credits by completing daily free games.
Are Your Winnings Paid In Cash?
Often, but not always.
Many offers will pay you any winnings directly in cash, which is perfect – you can withdraw the funds straight away if you like, or keep them in your account for use on other offers.
Some offers, however, may pay your winnings as a ‘bonus’, rather than as cash, and ask you to wager your winnings in order to convert them to cash.
This means you could in theory lose all your bonus from your free spins before you get to profit from it, reducing the potential value of the offer.
You should therefore always double check how your winnings will be paid before you embark on an offer.
What Are Wagering Requirements?
The wagering requirement is the number of times you’re expected to wager your bonus funds in order to convert them to cash.
The number of times you’re expected to wager your winnings can vary enormously. Some sites won’t have any wagering requirement at all, and will pay you in cash, while others may require you to wager your winnings as many as 40 times over, or even more.
In practice, this means that if you’ve won, say, £10 in bonus funds from your free spins, with a 40x wagering requirement, you’ll need to play through an entire £400 before you can access your winnings.
If you’re completing an offer with a high wagering requirement, we recommend playing through the wagering with fairly low value stakes, in order to reduce the impact of variance.
For example, you could easily lose an entire £10 bonus in two £5 spins – but if you went with 20 50p spins instead, there’s much less risk of losing the lot.
How Do You Know The Value Of Free Spins?
As a rule, free spins are low value – a casino isn’t going to give away more money than it has to!
To find the exact value, you can check the terms of the offer, usually listed on the opt in page.
The vast majority of free spins will be worth 10p each, but sometimes you’ll see free spins at 5p or 20p – or, very occasionally, even higher values.
How Can You Take Advantage Of Free Spins?
The most important question of all! Oddsmonkey members who choose the All Access package gain access to over 100 casino sign up offers, plus tons of reload offers. These allow our members to make hundreds of pounds a month from casino!
So how does that work? To start with, it’s important to understand the concept of ‘return to player’ (also known as RTP) in casino games. This refers to the average percentage of money staked that is paid out in winnings.
So for example, a game with an advertised RTP of 95% would pay out £95 for every £100 staked on average, with the remaining £5 forming the casino’s profit.
Every slots game has this profit margin baked right into its operating software. This means that, on average, players should always expect to lose a portion of their money when paying slots.
But that’s before you take free spins into account.
When you factor in the free spins from an offer, it’s often the case that, rather than expecting to lose a percentage of the money you’ve staked, you come out statistically ahead.
For example, let’s consider a typical sign up offer to receive 100 free spins if you wager £10 of your own money.
If the game in question has an RTP of 95%, you’d expect to win £9.50 on average from your £10 wagering, making a 50p loss.
Taking a typical value of 10p per free spin, you can calculate that your free spins are also worth £10 – and if you play them on a slots game with a 95% RTP, you can expect to make another £9.50 in winnings on average.
As a result, you would end up with an average of £9 in profit from the offer – not a bad return on a £10 investment!
It’s important to be aware that there is risk in completing casino offers. You won’t get results that precisely match the advertised RTP of a game over the course of just a couple of hundred spins – and in theory you could lose your £10 and win nothing from your free spins.
However, the likelihood is that you will end up in profit overall, and this is ever more likely as you complete more offers, reducing the variance in your results.
Other Ways To Make Money From Online Betting Sites
Casino offers are a great way to make money from the comfort of your own home, but they do involve an element of risk.
A much less risky alternative, which we’d recommend if you can’t comfortably afford to lose any money staked on casino offers, is to have a go at Matched Betting.
Matched Betting is a strategy that involves betting both for and against the same outcome, and using freebies from bookies to come out in profit. Oddsmonkey’s handy tools and guides make this a super straightforward process, even if you don’t have any experience of sports betting at all.
To find out more, take a look at our beginner’s guide to Matched Betting – or if you prefer to learn on the go, take out our free trial and earn your first £29 in Matched Betting profits.
