Live Dealer Online Craps
If the only thing preventing you from enjoying online craps versus the land-based alternative are doubts about virtual dice, your best bet is the look for online casinos with live dealer games.
Online casinos have jumped aboard the Live Dealer bandwagon of late, utilizing innovative technology from Evolution Gaming and other providers to create a connection between player and game. When you play Live Dealer craps, the pixels and graphics are replaced with genuine casino dice, a physical table, and trained human dealers.
Live Dealer games are filmed in real-time from dedicated studios, and that footage is beamed directly to your screen via live streaming technology. You’ll still use mouse-clicks and buttons to place your wagers, but from there, a human dealer takes over by rolling the dice and announcing the results.
The best Live Dealer craps games even have zoomable cameras that catch every bounce before the dice fall in place, perfectly recreating the sweat that all shooters crave.
Online Craps Bonuses
To entice new online craps players to make a deposit, online casinos offer generous Welcome Bonuses designed to double – at the very least – your starting bankroll.
You’ll usually need to enter a craps bonus code to claim these free funds, so be sure to check the Promotions page for the latest letter/number combos. Once you’ve entered the code and made your first deposit, the Welcome Bonus provides a percentage match on your money.
For example, a site running a 200 percent match craps Welcome Bonus would turn your initial $100 deposit into a $300 starting bankroll ($100 deposit + $200 bonus = $300 bankroll).
Another way to collect valuable bonus bucks is through a Reload Bonus. These supplementary bonuses are awarded whenever you “reload” your account with subsequent deposits. For the most part, Reload Bonuses offer reduced match rates in the 50 percent range, but scoring a free $50 on a $100 reload is still a sweet deal.
The other main form of online craps bonus to look for is a No Deposit Bonus, which is exactly what it sounds like. Rather than match funds when you add cash to your account, a No Deposit Bonus simply rewards regular play by sending a free bonus gift your way.
You’ll typically receive an email notification when a No Deposit Bonus comes your way, but you can also check your site’s virtual wallet to see if you’ve earned enough player points to claim the instant bankroll booster.
These three bonus types differ in how and when they’re awarded, but they all have one thing in common – playthrough / rollover requirements.
In online gambling parlance, a playthrough / rollover requirement refers to the level of wagering players must put in before their bonus funds become available for withdrawal. Initially, these requirements can feel like a “strings attached” situation, but from an online casino operator’s perspective, requiring playthrough / rollover simply makes sound financial sense.
Think about it for a minute… if you were able to make one deposit with a new site, claim a healthy Welcome Bonus, and then withdraw the funds straight away, online casinos would have no reason to offer the promotion. By adding a playthrough / rollover requirement, sites ensure that you’ll at least stick around for a while playing craps and other games to clear your bonus money.
Now that you’ve been given the good news, let’s talk about the bad. Unfortunately, craps specialists have to get creative when it comes to clearing their playthrough / rollover benchmarks.
Let’s say your online casino of choice shows a playthrough / rollover requirement of 25x. This multiple simply means you’ll need to wager 25x the combined amount of your deposit and its attached bonus (or just the bonus when it’s a No Deposit deal). Using the same $100 deposit + $200 Welcome Bonus example from earlier, the 25x multiple puts your playthrough / rollover finish line at $7,500 in total wagers ($300 combined deposit/bonus x 25 = $7,500).
If you play slots and other high house edge games, you’ll usually see 100 percent of your wagers applied to the playthrough / rollover requirement. A few of the lower house edge table games like blackjack and baccarat might drop that wagering contribution to 20 percent. In other words, for every $1 you put on the line, $0.20 would count towards the playthrough / rollover rate.
But for a low house edge game like online craps – which also offers a slower pace of play due to instances when a roll doesn’t settle any of your wagers – most online casinos use a 0 percent wagering contribution when you play craps online.
Yep, if you play craps by trade, you’ll need to find other games to play when trying to unlock a bonus for withdrawal.
Slots are usually your best bet in that regard, but if you’re solely a skill-game player, check your online casinos Wagering Contribution section under the Terms and Conditions page to find out exactly how video poker, blackjack, and other table games stack up.