Just about every online casino and USA online blackjack site around offers a welcome bonus in order to attract new customers and persuade players to give them a try. In the olden days – which is probably pre-2005 when it comes to online casinos – it was very easy to use these bonuses to pretty much guarantee a profit, or at the very least one could say the offers had a positive expected value.
However, because some clever (or dishonorable, depending on your point of view) blackjack fans took advantage of these offers the casinos quickly got wise and introduced increasingly strict wagering requirements that had to be completed prior to making a withdrawal.
These bonus rollover terms were essentially designed to make sure that the bonuses were being used fairly by recreational players, as opposed to being exploited by professional and semi-professional gangs and individuals.
Nowadays the best US-friendly casinos and online blackjack sites have the balance just right, with bonuses that are difficult to guarantee a profit from but that also offer the player a decent chance of success and enough incentive to play.
Many casino players automatically assume that they should play slots in order to try and complete the bonus rollover requirements but this isn’t always the case and blackjack is still a valuable tool, especially, of course, if you love playing online blackjack.
The reason that slots are so often favored is because they almost always contribute at 100% towards any rollover conditions. By that, we mean that if you play $10 on slots, $10 comes off the remaining wagering requirement. In contrast blackjack very rarely, if ever, counts at such a high percentage. At many casinos, even the first class blackjack-focused sites we feature here at USABlackjackCasinos, it’s not uncommon to see blackjack count at as little as 5%, although 10%, 25% or even 50% are available at our favorite sites.
If blackjack only counts at 10%, that means that one $10 hand will only knock $1 off the remaining bonus wagering. That’s often enough for many players to automatically discount blackjack when trying to clear a bonus but they’d be wrong to do so because the low house edge of the game means it can still land you a nice profit.
The house edge (casino advantage) on blackjack can be less than 0.5% if you find favorable rules, although 0.7% is perhaps a more realistic figure. That means that for every $10,000 of blackjack you play you “should” only lose $70 (and obviously with just a little luck that figure could easily be smaller or even a profit).
As such, for those that love blackjack, this great game can be well worth playing if you’re looking to clear a bonus, although of course you should always check the exact terms before you accept such a bonus.
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