Mindset For Casino Offers

If you gamble on slots and casino table games, you’ll lose money over time due to the house edge that’s built into all slots and games. 

However, it’s possible to take advantage of casino offers to turn the tables and make long-term profits from the casino. 

Most casinos and bookmakers offer these offers to entice players to join their site and continue to gamble with them once they’re members.  

Unlike with most Matched Betting sign-up offers, and many sports reload offers, it isn’t possible to lock in a profit from casino offers. This means you need a different mindset when doing casino offers. 

When doing casino offers, you’ll inevitably have swings in profit and loss. You’ll be up on some offers, and down on others. 

Over a large number of offers, you’ll make great profits in line with the total EV of all offers completed. However, in the short term, the profit swings can be hard to deal with, especially if you’re new to casino offers. 

These good and bad runs are just a part of doing casino offers and happen because of the inherent variance of slots. 

In this article, you’ll find suggestions for how to adopt a mindset to cope with profit swings and bad runs, and how your stake affects the size of these swings.

General Advice For Completing Casino Offers 

We’ll go into greater depth about how offers work and a good mindset to adopt when completing casino offers later in the article. 

First though, here are a few helpful pointers. 

• Understand that you’ll lose money on some offers
• Focus on the EV (Expected Value) of the offer, rather than your actual profit or loss
• Maximise your EV by selecting appropriate slots or games for each offer
• Focus on long-term profits
• Consider tracking profits and plotting a simple Profit/EV graph
• Trust the system

A Brief Overview of Casinos 

Casinos have been around for centuries. They date back to 1638 when the Casino di Venezia first opened its doors on Venice’s Grand Canal. 

For well over 300 years, land-based ‘bricks and mortar’ casinos were the only option for gamblers. 

The late 20th and early 21st centuries saw the introduction of online casinos. This dramatically increased the reach of casinos and gave 24/7 access to a wide range of slots and games. 

The number of players worldwide and global gambling revenue have both skyrocketed as a result. 

Both real-world and online casinos feature slot machines and table games like blackjack, roulette, and baccarat. 

Since online casinos don’t have the same space limitations that land-based casinos have, they can offer a much wider range of slots and games. 

You can find out much more about casinos in the Ultimate Guide to Casinos.

The Casino’s House Edge

Casinos are businesses that ultimately exist to turn a profit. They’re able to do this because all of their slots and games have a built-in house edge. 

RTP

All slots and games have a Return To Player (RTP).

The RTP is the average percentage of your stakes that’s returned in winnings over millions of spins 

Slots typically have an RTP of around 95%, but this can vary dramatically from less than 90% to over 98% in some cases. 

A slot with an RTP of 95% will return £95 on average for every £100 wagered on it. This means you’ll lose an average of £5 per £100 wagered. This £5 goes straight to the casino, giving them a house edge of 5% for this slot.

Variance

If you’re wagering on a slot you won’t get consistent returns in line with the RTP of the slot. 

One person wagering £100 on a 95% slot might end up with £140, giving an RTP for that session of 140%. 

Someone else wagering £100 on the same slot could end up with £80 and a session RTP of 80%.

It’s only over thousands or millions of spins that the average RTP of all players closely approaches the slot’s stated 95% RTP.

This inherent randomness leads to variance (also called volatility). 

Variance is a measure of how far actual results are spread out compared to the average expected result

This variance occurs because all online slots and games use a Random Number Generator (RNG). This is a hardware or software device that, unsurprisingly considering its name, generates random numbers.

RNGs ensure slots and games play unpredictably, mimicking how real-world slot machines and table games behave. 

Online slots have a wide range of variances, from low-variance slots like Starburst and Blood Suckers to high-variance slots like Immortal Romance and White Rabbit. 

At the extreme upper end of the spectrum of variance is the ‘not for the faint-hearted’ NoLimit City slot Tombstone RTP, which they describe themselves (very accurately) as ‘Insane’!

NoLimit City also helpfully give more details than most online game providers about how their slots play. 

They also tend to specialise in high variance slots and describe their lowest variance slot, Tesla Jolt, as Medium variance. 

We’ll look at the data they provide on the NoLimit City slots that fall at both ends of the variance scale. 

The Hit Frequency mentioned is the percentage of spins that result in a payout of some kind. This payout won’t always be larger than the stake, so you’ll sometimes make a loss or break even after a winning spin.

Here’s the data they provide for the Tesla Jolt slot:

Alongside the very obvious ‘Medium’ label next to the slot’s volatility, there are a few telltale signs that this slot has fairly low variance: 

• It has a relatively High Hit Frequency of 32.02%
• It has a fairly Low Max payout of 582 x bet size
  

The hit frequency of 32.02% means that around 1 in 3 spins will give the player some kind of return. The max payout of 582 bet size shows that the largest possible win from a £1 stake is £582. 

With low and medium variance slots, you’ll tend to have fairly regular wins, which tend to be relatively small in size. 

In stark contrast is their extremely high variance slot Tombstone RIP, which probably has a higher variance than any other slot in existence. Here are this slot’s stats: 

As mentioned, the ‘Insane’ label in the volatility section is a pretty good clue as to the very high variance nature of the slot. 

Here are the same stats as the ones listed for the medium variance slot:

• It has a very Low Hit Frequency of 9.08%.
• It has an extremely High Max payout of 300,000x bet size.

The hit frequency of 9.08% equates to fewer than 1 in 10 spins giving a payout of any kind. 

Bear in mind that some of these payouts will only be equal to or lower than your stake, so you’ll often break even or lose money despite having a winning spin. 

Because of this, when playing Tombstone RIP, you can expect to have prolonged losing streaks. Your wins will be few and far between. When you do hit a win, it will often be a big win, and on rare occasions could hit a truly huge win. 

If you have your eye on the holy grail of a 300,000x win, the stats show they only happen once in every 130 million spins on average. It’s probably well worth keeping your expectations very much in check on that front!

To summarise:

• Low variance slots tend to give small but frequent wins
• Medium variance slots tend to give moderate but less frequent wins, compared to low variance slots
• High variance slots tend to give a small number of large wins, infrequently, with long streaks of losing spins

No matter whether you use low, medium or high variance slots for an offer, something you need to be aware of is that you’ll often lose money on offers.  

This is just a natural part of doing casino offers. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have done those particular offers, since there’s no way to know which offers you’ll make a profit or a loss on. 

How Do Casino Offers Work?

To find out all about casino offers and how they work, be sure to check out Why You Need to Do Casino Offers. 

The How to Play Slots article is a great overview of the topic, especially for newcomers to online casinos. 

Worthwhile casino offers are profitable in the long term because they have a positive expected value. 

The expected value is the average profit you’d make from an offer if you were to do it thousands of times

Here’s an example of a simple casino offer listed on outplayed.com:

Using Outplayed’s EV Calculator shows that the expected value of the offer is £5.40:

When you wager £15 of cash on a 97.34% RTP slot, your average return will be:

Average return = £15 x 0.9734 = £14.60

Since you put £15 into the slot and get an average of £14.60 back, you’ll end up £0.40 down on average. 

The 50 free spins at 12p each have a value of 50 x £0.12 = £6. The average return from these on the 96.71% RTP free spins slot will be:

Average profit from free spins = £6 x 0.9671 = £5.80 

You’ll lose 40p on average from the initial wagering, but make an average profit of £5.80 from the free spins. This means your average profit from the offer (the offer’s expected value) is:

Expected Value = £5.80 - £0.40 = £5.40

Some people will make less profit than this from the offer, or lose money, whilst others will make more (sometimes substantially more). This is just down to the unpredictability and variance of slots. 

On average though, your profit on this particular offer will be £5.40. 

Profit/EV Graphs

A great way to see what to expect when doing casino offers is to look at short-term profits from a small number of offers, then extend this to look at a much longer run of offers.

Plotting a Profit/EV graph of your results can be helpful to reassure you that you’re making long-term profits in line with the expected value. 

I’ll add screenshots of my own profit/EV graphs I’ve plotted for all casino offers I’ve done that have not been risk-free (i.e. have involved wagering my own money). 

The reason for using my own is simple: I have all of the relevant data for every offer I’ve personally completed to date.

This means it’s easy for me to select both the whole run of offers I’ve done and shorter runs.  

When starting casino offers, I wanted to know how much money I was making and compare this to the total expected value of all my offers. 

This was so I could check I was on track and making the long-term profits stated by the offers. 

The First Few Offers

It’s fair to say my early experience of casino offers wasn’t as positive as I’d have liked. You can see from the Profit / EV graph of the first 16 offers, where the EV line is blue and the profit line is orange:

After these 16 offers, which had a total expected value of around £30, I was down over £10 overall. 

Although it might have been tempting to give up at this point, I knew this was still a very small run of offers. Variance is much more significant over a small number of offers than it is over hundreds or thousands of offers. 

This brings up an important phrase to bear in mind when doing casino offers: “Trust the system”. It’s important to point out that this isn’t just blind trust, but results from the fact that the maths underpinning worthwhile casino offers shows they have positive EV and are worth doing in the long term.

Getting Into Profit

The previous graph was deliberately chosen to show that short-term losses will inevitably happen when completing casino offers. 

In the very next offer, I had a decent win on an offer, ending up £67 in profit for the offer. This put me into profit for the first time, and my profit line has been positive ever since. 

Big wins like this aren’t down to pure luck: statistically, if you do lots of casino offers, you’ll inevitably hit plenty of them, although probably not quite as big as these lucky UK jackpot winners!

These big wins are just a natural part of doing casino offers and make up some of the long-term EV of your offers. 

Long-Term Profits

The next screenshot shows all 1815 offers I’ve completed to date. Almost all were completed using minimum stakes of around 20p to 25p.

As you can see, when looking at over 1,000 offers, rather than just a handful, there’s a very clear upward trend and the orange profit line tracks the blue EV line well. 

Profit/EV Graphs From Outplayed Members

It’s interesting to look at profit/EV graphs from different people doing casino offers since everyone’s experience will be different. 

Here are some examples from Outplayed members who shared their profit/EV graphs on the forum. 

Some fairly prolonged bad runs, some lasting over 100 offers, are evident here. Even so, across all 1250+ offers, the profit and EV lines correlate closely. 

In general, the more offers you do, the closer your profit line will come to the EV line. 

As the member points out, logging offers like this and plotting a graph is a great way to see the ‘big picture’, with the inevitable losses just looking like little blips on the graph.

This shows a shorter run of around 200 offers, leading towhich leads to much more obvious fluctuations above and below EV. However, even over this relatively small number of offers, the profit tracks the EV nicely.

Here’s another example showing the value of casino offers, with this member just doing low-risk offers. And making around £1700 profit from 600+ offers.  

This graph shows the effect a lucky big win has on your profit/EV graph. You can see that the profit line jumped up on one offer, then continued to run parallel to the EV line, but much higher. 

Here’s their graph with the big win removed:

Here’s another good example of a typical profit/EV graph: 

The member points out that from time to time you’ll have downswings, which can be quite long on occasion. However, if you persevere with offers, you’ll inevitably have better spells of offers later, and your overall profits will still track the total EV line well. 

If you’re thinking that these profits might just be down to luck, here are screenshots of the first four runs of a casino simulator I made. 

They show simulations of 10,000 £1 roulette wagers on red or black:

In each case, there’s a clear downward trend. This is to be expected since roulette has an RTP of 97.3%, so if you’re gambling on roulette, you’ll lose money over time. This means you’ll lose £2.70 per £100 wagered on average.

This next member’s screenshot makes this point very clearly by breaking down their graph into three parts:

• Blue line - profit/loss from wagering
• Red line - profit from free spins or bonus
• Yellow line - overall profit

• The blue line shows an overall loss over time. This is to be expected due to the RTP of slots and games always being less than 100%, so you’ll make long-term losses from wagering your own money. 
• The red line can only go up (or horizontally if you make no profit from the free spins or bonus). This is because you can only make a profit, and can’t lose, when doing free spins.
• The yellow line shows the overall profit from the offers, and the result of adding together the blue and red lines. One way to look at this is to imagine the blue line being pulled upward by the red line. 

As the member mentions, focusing too much on the initial wagering and hoping for a big win isn’t the right way to approach casino offers.

This also highlights an important difference between gambling and doing casino offers. Please excuse the gravity and helium balloon analogies!

• Gambling on slots and games inevitably leads to long-term losses because their RTP is less than 100%. The profit line of your graph will go down as if pulled down by gravity.
• Doing casino offers inevitably leads to long-term gains because they have a positive Expected Value (EV). The profit line of your graph will go up as if you’ve tied helium balloons to it. 

Ultimately casino offers are all about what happens over many hundreds or thousands of offers, rather than the result of a single offer. 

The Effect of Slot Variance and Stake Size on Overall Variance

In a previous section, you saw that slots come with a wide range of variances. The slot variance, alongside your stake size, affects the overall variance of your casino offers.

For some offers with multiple wagering on bonuses, your EV will be higher if you choose a higher variance slot and higher stake. If you’re doing an Outplayed offer, a suitable slot will always be recommended to take this into account. 

For initial wagering, stake size and slot variance don’t affect the overall EV of the offer, but do affect the overall variance of the offer

Low variance slots 

• Less likely to lose a lot on wagering
• Fewer offers where you make an overall loss
• Shorter losing streaks
• Smaller ‘big wins’ 

High variance slot

• More likely to lose a lot on wagering
• More offers where you make an overall loss
• Longer losing streaks
• Larger ‘big wins’ 

Low stake

• Less likely to lose a lot on wagering
• Fewer offers where you make an overall loss
• Shorter losing streaks. Smaller ‘big wins’
• Complete offers more slowly

High stake

• More likely to lose a lot on wagering
• More offers where you make an overall loss
• Longer losing streaks
• Larger ‘big wins’
• Complete offers more quickly

The most important point to make here is that using higher stakes for initial wagering allows you to complete offers more quickly. 

This comes at the expense of increasing your variance and giving you longer losing streaks and a greater chance that you’ll lose a lot on your initial wagering. 

Focus On EV Rather Than Actual Profit/Loss

As you’ve seen, in the long-term your overall profits from casino offers will be very similar to the total EV of all offers you’ve completed. 

This means that ultimately it’s the EV that’s important rather than your actual profit or loss from any particular offer. 

Let’s take this offer from Outplayed, for example:

If you did this offer, you might get results something like this if you were to do the offer 20 times on a slot.

The Profit/Loss column shows the profit or loss for that attempt.

The Running Average Profit/Loss column calculates the average profit for all offers completed to that point:

The results in the Profit/Loss column don’t look like they relate to the £0.96 EV of the offer. 

However, the data in the Running Average Profit/Loss column is clearly narrowing in on the long-term EV of the offer. 

You can see this even more clearly by plotting a graph of the results: 

The data in the table was made up to give an idea of what would happen to your average profit if you did an offer repeatedly. 

Results were chosen to ensure the final average profit for the offer was equal to the EV.

If you were to actually do the offer, it might take a lot more offers than 20 for the average profit to become this close to the offer EV, but the long-term behaviour would be the same. 

The point to take from this is that when you complete an offer, you should focus on the EV of the offer, not the actual profit or loss you made from it. 

One good way to think about an offer is to ignore the profit/loss you’ve actually made and think to yourself that what you’ve earned is the EV of the offer. 

Casino Offers Need a Long-Term Outlook

Focus on profits in the long term rather than from a small number of offers

Hopefully, it should be clear by now that you need to think about casino offers over many hundreds of offers, not just one and two. 

A good mindset to adopt is to try not to worry about the result of individual offers, or even your profits over a run of multiple offers completed over a few days. 

This is why plotting a profit/EV graph can be so helpful, as it shows you that you’re on track and making good profits in line with EV over a long run of offers. 

Maximise Your EV

Usually, when doing offers you’ll have a choice of which slots to use. This means your EV depends on which slot you use. 

Favouring high RTP slots will increase your EV for offers. For offers involving multiple wagering on bonuses, using higher variance slots and higher stakes tends to increase EV. 

If you’re a Diamond or Pro member of Outplayed, you’ll have access to all of their casino offers. These always list recommended slots and stakes to make the most of the offers. 

Summary

Doing casino offers is a great side hustle, with hundreds of pounds of value available every month and thousands of pounds over a year. 

Even so, casino offers are affected by variance. Although you’ll make great profits in the long term, you’ll inevitably also have losing streaks.

Because of this, doing casino offers requires a particular mindset:

• Understand that you’ll lose money on some offers
• Focus on the EV (Expected Value) of the offer, rather than your actual profit or loss
• Maximise your EV by selecting appropriate slots or games for each offer
• Focus on long-term profits
• Consider tracking profits and plotting a simple Profit/EV graph
• Trust the system

If you want to give casino offers a go, Outplayed.com has everything you need. They list all worthwhile casino offers available from casinos and bookmakers. 

The site has clear guides and tools, so you know exactly how to approach offers, and their customer support is second to none.