What Are Casino Golden Chips?

Golden Chips are a freebie dished out by online casinos as part of their promotions; they're basically the casino equivalent of a sports free bet.

Where a casino might give out free spins for slot games, they'll instead give you free Golden Chips for table games and live games (e.g. Blackjack, Roulette or Gameshow games).

Golden Chips are completely risk-free; if your chip loses, then you haven't lost any of your own money. On the flip side, if the chip is placed on a winner, then you'll get to keep all the profit!

In this article, you'll learn how Golden Chips work, how to use them, and what strategy to use to maximise your profits.

How Golden Chips Work

They're incredibly simple to use, however, they come with one small catch: the value of the chip itself isn't paid out, only the profit. This is exactly the same concept as most sports free bets. Let's look at what that actually means to you:

If you place a £1 bet on Red on Roulette with real money and it wins, you receive £2 back. This is your £1 stake + £1 winnings. You've doubled your money.

Now here's where Golden Chips are slightly different. If you place a £1 golden chip on Red on Roulette and it's a winner, you'll receive £1 cash. This is because you don’t get the stake value of the golden chip as part of the payout, only the £1 winnings.

This subtle difference impacts what betting options are best for placing your chips. It's only a slight change to playing the game with your own cash, but it makes a big difference in strategy to get the best possible value out of your Golden Chips.

We'll go into more detail on strategy and value later!

How To Place Golden Chips

After you've had Golden Chips credited to your account, start by simply opening up an eligible game. The Outplayed offer guide/casino terms and conditions will tell you which games will allow you to play with the chips.

The Golden Chips will appear in the section where you can select which value chip to use. This will look like a gold-coloured casino chip with the monetary value written on it. If you have multiple Golden Chips then this will also be indicated next to the chip.

The example below shows that you have 4 x £5 Golden Chips ready to use:

Select the golden chip here, and you can then click on what you want to bet on, whether that be a hand of Blackjack or a single number on Roulette for example.

Golden Chip Payouts

For those of you who are familiar with Matched Betting, you'll know that you can make more profit and gain much more value by placing a free bet at higher odds. Golden Chips are no exception! 

The lower the chance of an event happening, the higher the return from the golden chip will be. For example, betting on Red in Roulette will happen roughly 50% of the time (a relatively high chance), but only give a £1 profit from a winning £1 golden chip (a low return).

This means that you have a decision to make when using Golden Chips:

Do you take a low risk option where you're more likely to have a winning golden chip, but accept that you'll have a smaller payout and a lower EV (Expected Value - the long term average value of each chip)?

Or do you go for a higher-risk option? You'll win less often, but when you do, the payouts are much larger, and it'll have a higher EV.

Win more frequently or bank more value? That's the question. And one that we'll help you figure out!

The image below shows six different potential placements of a chip on a game of Roulette (a pink £0.10 chip in this example):

• A – Even Money Bet (e.g. Red/Black, Even/Odd, 1-18/19.36. This covers approximately half of the Roulette wheel)
• B – Line Bet (Chip placed between two rows of three numbers at the bottom. This covers six numbers in total)
• C – Four Bet (Chip placed in the middle of four numbers. This covers four numbers in total)
• D – Street (Chip placed at the bottom of one row of three numbers. This covers three numbers in total)
• E – Split (Chip placed between two numbers)
• F – Straight Up (Chip placed on one number)

Each placement has a different chance of winning, payout, and EV, which you can see in the table below:

The payout and EV are based on the Golden Chip having a £1 value.

Golden Chips aren't always worth £1; they can come in different values. This will always be nice and clear in Outplayed's offer writeups and also on the chip itself.

Our Recommended Strategy

As you can now see from the table above, the value of a Golden Chip can vary significantly.

A £1 chip has just £0.49 EV when used on a Roulette Even Money Bet (for example, betting on Red). While this is the lowest-risk option, the EV is really low.

In comparison, a £1 Golden Chip is worth £0.95 in value if used on a single number. This is, however, a super high variance option. After all, we expect to win with a single number bet 1 in 37 times!

It's usually a good idea to prioritise long-term value over a higher chance of making small profits in the short term. We would avoid using Golden Chips on Blackjack (where possible) or Even Money Roulette bets. However, it's also often quite a risky approach to just bet on a single Roulette number. Let's find a nice balance!

A great compromise between EV and risk is to use your Golden Chips on a Line Bet (which covers six numbers) or a Four Bet (which covers four numbers). These have a higher chance of winning than a Straight Up bet on a single number and have a very good EV of over £0.80 per £1 Golden Chip.

If you were to place a Line Bet with 5 Golden Chips, you'd expect to hit at least one winner around 60% of the time. While you won't win every time, you'll still win fairly often and bank a nice amount of value.

Can You Place More Than One Golden Chip At A Time?

Sometimes. Some casinos will only allow you to place one Golden Chip per game round (for example, each time the Roulette wheel is spun). This is absolutely fine; it just means you'll place your chips one at a time and wait for the next spin to place another.

If you're allowed to place multiple Golden Chips on the same spin, then even better! This allows you to lower your risk while still taking great value, with each chip being on a higher-risk selection. For example, by placing 5 different Golden Chips, each on different Line Bets on the same spin, you'll cover 30 out of 38 numbers. 

Your chance of winning is really high, and since each individual Golden Chip was placed on a Line Bet, they're each great value.

Calculating The Value Of Golden Chips

Outplayed will always tell you the details of the value of each offer you're doing, but if you find yourself with a casino offer that you've been exclusively invited to, you can use Outplayed's EV Calculator tool to show you the value of your Golden Chips.

This is a great way to find out if an offer is worth doing.

1. Set the mode to Golden Chips (Roulette)
   
2. You can then enter the number of Golden Chips, the value of each chip, and the number of numbers you have covered (a bet on Red would be 18 numbers covered, for example).
   
3. The calculator will then show you the value of your Golden Chip(s)
   

Summary

You should now be very well equipped to know exactly what to do with Golden Chip casino offers.

The placement is simple: click your chip and then click to bet!

The strategy is just as easy: place them on a Four Bet or a Line Bet.

If you want to know the value of your Golden Chips or the overall value of an offer involving Golden Chips then you can make use of our EV Calculator.

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