So, I'm going to tell you the dirty little secret about online casinos that they don't want you to know. Do I have your attention? Good. I like having people's attention. I'm somewhat vain in that way. At any rate, here it comes. I'm going to tell you right now. Sitting down? Comfortable? Right, so you can actually make money playing at an online casino.

"Wait," you say, "hold on, that's not any kind of news to me, and you sure built it up like you had something worth saying." "Jerk!" You add for good measure. So you've walked into a casino before put 20 bucks on red 15 on the roulette wheel, and low and behold you won. You walk out of the casino with a big fat wad of cash and you go buy you and your closest friends a dinner at the Sizzler. Maybe not the Sizzler, maybe a step up from the Sizzler since you're a swell guy.

Point is, that's cold hard cash you had in your hand; you made money. Hell, maybe you've logged onto some casino site and won some kind of crazy 8's slot jackpot. I once went into Vegas on my birthday and placed a $15 dollar bet on the Kentucky Derby and walked out of there with $600 bucks. I bet on the second longest shot in the race, because my rationale was that the longest shot was a sucker bet.

So, we're all winning, God's up in heaven and all is right with the world. Here's the thing though, you're not a long term winner at the casino. If we put all the money we ever gambled into one big pool, the casino is likely beating our pants off. Hell, we put our pants up as collateral. If the casinos could, they'd have a game where you put your money out, the dealer waves her hands in the air, says "Oh I'm so sorry you lost," and then she drops your chips into the Steve Wynn corporate jet fund. Unfortunately for them, this game isn't particularly fun, and they'd have a hard time finding willing players. Except, of course, for people who play the money wheel, which is essentially the game described above.

So, they have to let us win one now and again, but unless you're on the MIT blackjack team, in the long term, you won't win. Even if you're one of like five people in the country who's up lifetime in Vegas, it's only because you haven't put in enough time to let the millstone of the long-term grind you up into little tiny bits of degenerate dust.

This is all very depressing. There is good news though. Since you're on this site, you already know that the online betting operations are a bit different from the ole' brick and mortar establishments. It's actually a pretty competitive market. Until they figure out how to give out free drinks over the computer, casinos offer money back to their players to try to get you to come to them over the other guys. This comes in the form of bonuses.

So, the thing these casinos need to do is to get you in the door, in this case, the cyber door. That first login is the hardest one to get, and by far the most valuable. As a result, the first deposit bonus is, almost always, the best bonus that casino is ever going to offer you. The bonus is, in fact, so good, that you can not only beat the casino, you can expect to beat them.

Poker players, particularly, online poker players, are very familiar with the term, expected value. What expected value means is that if you made a bet a whole lot of times, you'd win some amount of the time, lose some other amount, and your actual results would get very close to the theoretical probabilities. For instance, if we flipped a coin a 100,000 times we'd get heads very very close to 50% of the time. When the numbers get wonky is when you only flip it one or five times. If you make positive expectation bets, and you make a whole lot of them, you will make money. This is the principle that poker players operate under, and it's also, by the way, how casinos make their money.

So, while the probability of the casino games are not in your favor long term, bonus money can tilt those odds slightly or substantially in your favor. Here's the basic principle: take the amount of the bonus, and then subtract the expected loss of playing through the wagering requirements. If you still have money left over, it's a positive expectation bonus.

Let's try that again in English. So, let's say that you deposit 100 dollars, and get a 100 dollar bonus. The casino says that you have to wager a total of ten times your deposit (1000 dollars) to withdraw. You're going to play blackjack. The average casino edge on blackjack played well is about .5%. So, when you wager $1000 on blackjack you will lose, on average, 5 bucks. But losing 5 bucks isn't so bad when you get to walk away with $195 after a $100 deposit!

That's the basic principle. The deals are rarely that good, and the math involved in figuring out if a bonus is a good one or not can get somewhat complicated, but all it takes is a little work (yuck, I know I'm not fond of that word either) and you'll be on your way to sticking it to the casinos! You know, if you get off on that sort of thing.