Learn, one of five
A turnover requirement is a price, and the bonus pays it
A welcome bonus arrives as a number in an account and leaves as a smaller number in a wallet. What happens in between is arithmetic, and it is arithmetic anybody can do once somebody writes it down.
The sum
Suppose a bonus of B, a turnover requirement of W, and a bookmaker margin of m. You have to stake B, then whatever is left of it, then whatever is left of that, W times over. After one pass a share of one minus m survives. After W passes:
left = B × (1 − m)W
With m at 5.73%, that is what the ladder below does to GH₵1,000.
| Turnover | Left of GH₵1,000 | Share surviving |
|---|---|---|
| 1x | GH₵943 | 94% |
| 3x | GH₵838 | 84% |
| 5x | GH₵745 | 75% |
| 8x | GH₵624 | 62% |
| 10x | GH₵554 | 55% |
| 20x | GH₵307 | 31% |
| 35x | GH₵127 | 13% |
| 50x | GH₵52 | 5% |
Two things fall out of that shape. The first few multiples are cheap and the later ones are brutal, so the difference between 5x and 8x is much smaller than the difference between 8x and 35x. And it never reaches zero, which is why a bonus is never worth less than nothing however bad the terms are.
Every Ghanaian offer that publishes enough to price
Five of the nine offers in the table publish both a ceiling and a turnover requirement. The rest are absent from this table for the same reason they carry no figure in the main one.
| Bookmaker | Headline ceiling | Turnover | What survives | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wiwi Casino | GH₵3,000 | 35x | GH₵380 | 13% |
| Betwinner | GH₵2,500 | 5x | GH₵1,861 | 75% |
| 1xBet | GH₵5,500 | 5x | GH₵4,095 | 75% |
| 22Bet | GH₵750 | 5x | GH₵558 | 75% |
| Melbet | GH₵3,100 | 8x | GH₵1,934 | 62% |
Read down the last column rather than the second. The order of the ceilings and the order of what survives them are not the same order, and that gap is the only reason this site exists.
Three things the sum does not capture
Game contribution. Not every game counts fully towards the requirement. Where a crash game counts for a fraction, the effective turnover on that game is many times the published multiple. What that does to a clearing bonus.
The clock. A requirement with a short expiry is harder than the same requirement with a long one, because failing to finish forfeits the lot rather than leaving a part share. Every offer in the table publishes its window and the windows are short.
Qualifying shape. Most of these have to be cleared on accumulators at minimum prices. A slip built to satisfy a bonus condition is a slip you would not otherwise have placed, and its cost is real even though it is not in the formula.
The arithmetic, asked plainly
- Why does the bonus not just lose the turnover times the margin?
- Because the balance is cycled rather than spent once. You stake it, the margin takes its share, you stake what is left, and so on. Subtracting the whole cost linearly is what produced negative bonus valuations on live pages elsewhere in this project, and a bonus can always be declined, so it can never leave anybody worse off than not taking it.
- Is this the amount I will actually end up with?
- No. It is the expected value of the bonus, which is what it is worth on average before variance. Any individual attempt at a turnover requirement ends somewhere either side of it, sometimes a long way either side.
- What if I disagree with the margin?
- Then change it and redo the sum, which is why it is printed rather than buried. It is 5.73%, the median across the eight Ghanaian books whose price the fact base could compute, and those were not all computed on the same basis.