So, you've found an online casino that offers a $100 bonus for a $100 deposit. Now what do you do? Play until both your deposit and bonus are wiped out? WRONG! Play until the bonus is gone, and maybe some of your own cash? WRONG AGAIN! If you're anything like me, you'll be wanting to play to keep your cash AND keep your bonus AND win even more money.
Here's what has worked for me:
First of all, let's concentrate on hanging onto that bonus. The casino wants you to give them a certain amount of action. They'll tell you this up front. I'm a great believer in giving them all the action they want, and then giving them some more action. "Without action, nothing can happen," is one of my favorite sayings. We have $200 to play with, let's get on with it!
Now, the casino wants us to play the deposit once, and the bonus once. We want to get through this action playing the game that gives the house the smallest edge, and that game, my friends, will always be Blackjack. I'm not saying that I don't play slots. I DO play the slots, but I play with my Blackjack winnings. If you're a slot player, then an online casino gives you way more chances at winning a really large jackpot than any bricks-and-mortar casino. Slots also give the casino the biggest edge.
We start off playing $2 hands, and we watch our account swing from $190 to $210 and back. When we get to $206, we start playing $4 hands. When the account dips down to $202, we revert to playing $2 hands. If we get the account up to $210 betting $4 hands, we can change the safety point - the point where we go back to betting $2 hands to protect our money - to $212. When we get to $216, we start betting $4 again. It's not long before we've put in the required $200's worth of action. And now? I'm going for blood!
I have $220 in my account. I like to play until I've either lost half my bonus or doubled it. I've locked in a win either way, so now I can have fun while I play. I'll use a "Capped Martingale" system, betting $2 - $4 - then $8 after each loss. Usually, one of these three bets comes in and I'll pick up a $2 win. Usually. Not always. If it doesn't happen, I switch tactics and use Oscar's Grind, which means that I keep betting $8 in the hope that my luck will change. I'm down $14, and I bet $8. If I keep losing, I'll quit when I'm down to $150. But I'm hoping that I'll win $8, which will leave me $6 down, I'll bet another $8 and win, which puts me $2 up, and then I'll start betting $2 - $4 - $8 again. However, this doesn't always happen, which is where Oscar comes in.
Oscar kicks off with a one-unit bet. One unit could be any amount, but for us it's $8. We bet one unit and we win. We bet one more unit and we end up $2 ahead. This marks the end of the first progression. If we bet another unit and lose, then we bet one unit again. We lose again, we bet one; we win one, we bet two to end up with a one-unit win when we win. If we lose this two-unit bet, we revert to one unit. With Oscar, we drop a unit after each loss until we're down to one unit, and we up our bet by one unit after each win, unless we reach a bet that will produce more than a single-unit win.
Let's assume that we're down by four units. Bet one and win, bet two and win, and we're now down one unit. But we want to end the progression when we're one unit up, so we'll bet two units instead of three. We could bet three, but that's not a true Oscar's Grind. Then we go back to the $2 - $4 - $8 unit until we need Oscar to step in again.
So what do we do when we get to $300? Reset our goals. Keep playing until we reach $250 or $400. The sky's the limit! Keep nudging it up, but walk away when we hit our loss limit. We can take some of our winnings and play for a nice big progressive jackpot.
If you stick to the limits you set, you'll always be a winner!
