The bonus: the credit and the wagering
A bonus is rounded twice before it is used: once when the credit is calculated and again on every contribution toward the wagering requirement. This page follows eight deposits through both roundings.
- deposits
- 8
- deposited
- 836.22
- credited
- 782.00
- rounding gap
- 4.22
A bonus credit is calculated as a percentage of the deposit and then rounded down to a unit the operator chooses, usually the whole currency unit, and capped. On eight invented deposits totalling 836.22, the credit came to 782.00: 50.00 of the gap was the cap and 4.22 was the rounding, and one deposit of 0.99 credited nothing.
Eight deposits, two roundings
The first rounding decides how much bonus exists; the second decides how much of each bet counts toward releasing it. Both are published, and both move the arithmetic away from the headline percentage.
| Deposit | Credit | Rounding | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 49.50 | 49.00 | 0.50 | rounded down |
| 100.00 | 100.00 | 0.00 | exact |
| 0.99 | 0.00 | 0.99 | credits nothing |
| 25.75 | 25.00 | 0.75 | rounded down |
| 199.99 | 199.00 | 0.99 | rounded down |
| 200.00 | 200.00 | 0.00 | at the cap |
| 250.00 | 200.00 | 50.00 | cap bites |
| 9.99 | 9.00 | 0.99 | rounded down |
| 836.22 | 782.00 | 54.22 | 50.00 cap + 4.22 rounding |
Then the wagering is rounded too
The credit is not the end of it. The wagering requirement is calculated on the rounded credit, and each qualifying bet contributes only a rounded share. On the sample the credit of 49.00 carries a 35-times requirement, and the arithmetic happens on the credited figure rather than on the deposit.
That last line is the point of the page, and it cuts both ways. A rounding that reduces a credit reduces the amount that has to be wagered, and a wagering requirement is itself a cost: the arithmetic is not simply "less bonus is worse". What the rounding does is make the offer's published percentage untrue at the level of the single deposit, and the cap untrue at the level of the larger one, and both of those are decided by numbers printed in the terms rather than by chance.
- Find the credit unit and the cap in the terms; a 100% headline is a 99% credit on any deposit whose fraction is below the unit.
- Check the wagering contribution rates per game before judging the requirement: they are rounded per bet as well as set per game.
- Notice that a very small deposit can credit nothing at all, as the 0.99 deposit did on sample E.
- Read the cap as a hard ceiling on the credit, not on the deposit.
- Remember the wagering is computed on the rounded credit, so a smaller credit is a smaller requirement as well as a smaller bonus.