Incentives are offered by legitimate bookmakers to attract new players or retain customers; scam operations use these perks as well to entice bettors to deposit with them. It might be difficult to distinguish between the two only by looking at the incentive structure, but remember if an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is. You should use your good sense and be very skeptic on bookies offering 20% and higher bonuses to sign up, while the industry norm is around 10%. Furthermore, to assess the real value of a betting bonus or a promotion there are other factors to consider and some can be quite complex. Remember that the majority of disputes between bookmakers and players are caused by misunderstandings on regulations and rules for these incentives.
Conditions applied vary from bookmaker to bookmaker and you should be aware of and understand them. Read the fine print to make sure there are no grey areas. Contact the bookie's customer service to find out the details.
When choosing a bookmaker, you should consider other factors first and certainly never choose on bonus alone.
Remember that the betting industry has no tolerance for players signing up only to profit from a bonus or promotion, with no intention of risking their deposit.
These are all the factors to consider when choosing an online bookmaker, like Sportingbet or bwin, bearing in mind that one alone should never outweigh the others. If you want to learn about the procedure we use to review online bookmakers, please visit our review policy section.
