Learning and Understanding the Clearplay Bonus System

Added: May 15, 2015

For New Zealand online casino fans, Microgaming-powered online casinos make up most of the best options. Because casino bonuses can be so complicated and difficult to understand, several of them use what's known as the Clearplay bonus system. The idea is to use one unified set of rules so that everywhere you play has the same regulations regarding their promotions. Wagering requirements, game restrictions and everything else is uniform across the sites that use this system, and that makes it a lot easier on the players since you only have to learn one set of rules for bonuses from a ton of casino sites.

To begin with, the wagering requirements are always 30x. This is always on the sum of the bonus and the deposit as well. The idea here is that the play-through shouldn't be confusing, and casinos shouldn't use different play-through options on different bonus offers. It's too hard to keep up with all of the fine print. For example, if you get a 150 percent match bonus on a deposit of $250, your deposit is $250, and your bonus is worth $375. This gives you play-through requirements of 30 * $625 which comes to $18,750.

Now to make things more interesting, they allow you to play just about all of their games with their bonuses. To keep things fair, however, there are four levels of percentages when it comes to how wagers on these games contribute to the play-through requirements. Bets on pokies, parlor games and American roulette all count as 100 percent, for example. Play on casino poker, casino war, Sic Bo and other roulette titles are worth 50 percent. Play on craps, Baccarat, most video poker and most blackjack games count 10 percent. Finally, wagers on Classic Blackjack and All Aces Video Poker typically count as a very-low two percent.

Classic Blackjack and All Aces Video Poker are two very important games at Microgaming-powered online casinos. The reason for this is that with correct play, they both have house advantages in the range of a tenth of a percentage point. Because of this, they can't contribute very much to bonuses because it opens them up too much to promotional abuse. Letting this type of abuse go on would make it impossible for them to offer good deals, so it's actually in the best interests of the total player pool for these restrictions to be in place.