The Art and Ethics of Bonus Hunting in Online Casinos and Sportsbooks

I discuss, and provide citations to, all of this research in my book Punished by Rewards (Houghton Mifflin, rev. ed. https://ninecasinoofficial.com/ 1992).

In the realm of online casinos, bonus hunting often revolves around games with a low house edge, such as blackjack or certain video poker variants. By combining a favourable bonus with optimal gameplay strategy, skilled players can theoretically turn the odds in their favour and generate consistent profits over time. Sports bettors, on the other hand, may focus on arbitrage opportunities or exploiting mispriced odds to lock in guaranteed profits using bonus funds. Now we have a term for those whose self-identity depends upon the constant admiration of others (narcissism), and now we have ways of measuring callousness and lack of empathy (in the dimensions of non-clinical psychopathy and Machiavellianism). This, you could say, is cultural evolution at work and it looks like we might be getting somewhere in our understanding of the psychology of trophy hunting.

Why trophy hunters smile with such relish

• The psychology behind bonuses can sometimes lead to negative outcomes.
• Alyssa contributes sportsbook/online casino reviews, but she also stays on top of any industry news, precisely that of the sports betting market.
• The one commonality across the triad was ‘low agreeableness’.
• Ethical strategies, real bonuses, and proper bankroll management—those will take you further than a dozen burner accounts, a VPN, and prayers to the casino gods.
• Outside the realm of games and competitions, bonuses are prevalent in our daily lives, especially in the workplace.

It will interest all those concerned about conservation and animal welfare. It is the first time the stories of hunters have been openly told. PwC’s new study of over 1,000 senior, globally mobile executives reveals how it can be dangerous to make sweeping assumptions about executive attitudes to pay and incentives. For instance, the size (or quantum) of pay is rightly an issue of public debate, but to assume that executives are solely aiming to maximise their total reward is a mistake. In fact, they’re less worried about their own deal than what their peers are bringing home. If you want long-term success (and no frozen accounts), it’s smarter to play within the system instead of trying to outwit it.

Ethical strategies, real bonuses, and proper bankroll management—those will take you further than a dozen burner accounts, a VPN, and prayers to the casino gods. On forums like Reddit or niche gambling communities, players all share bonus calendars and alerts. There are also bonus tracker tools floating around that aggregate available offers, but don’t get too excited—casinos read those, too. Now that we know what bonuses they’re after let’s talk about how the more ambitious bonus hunters try to work the angles with a little subterfuge and strategy. There are players who would hit up multiple gambling sites, and they’d use the same strategy over and over—grab the $100 match bonus, complete the playthrough on low-volatility slots, cash out whatever’s left, and then move on to the next brand. Start the whole process again and hope they don’t get caught.

Providing a vast array of merchants that provide 5% to 10% cash back automatically to a customer is already proving that customers will use that payment instrument more times than others. The fintech winners will be those that provide the right offer, to the right person at the right time, and find the right way to celebrate savings with their cardholders. For example, financial membership platform MoneyLion knew these things to be true as early as two years ago when it started giving customers $1 cash back each day for opening the financial membership brand’s mobile app. And in February, Level, a challenger bank app, began giving customers 1% cash back on debit card purchases, which its customers have surely been appreciating since then due to pandemic-driven economic anxiety. Such brands understand that their customers not only have always been hard-wired toward cash back and rewards, but they are especially now during these hard economic times. I hope this book gives policymakers and the public a new and essential insight into the minds of hunters and their real motivations.

Subtract hours of grinding, account setup, and the danger of getting banned—it’s a glorified minimum-wage gig at best. And there are third-party firms like FraudGuard that specialize in sniffing out bonus abuse. Other research has shown that rewards not only reduce people’s interest in what they’re doing but also adversely affect the quality of their performance.

What’s the Safest Way to Use Casino Bonuses?

The answer is that you must engage in a variety of strategies to maintain and develop your self-image. For example, narcissists have a need to talk about any achievements or accomplishments in their lives to seek affirmation, indeed, wherever possible they need to broadcast them (and social media is the ideal tool for this) to seek the maximum amount of affirmation. They will focus on their physical appearance (amongst other things) but carefully select any images that they present on social media (or anywhere else) regarding their physical appearance. The selfie and photo-shopping are important tools in their lives. They will value material goods especially designer goods that can display and communicate instantly their social status relative to everyone else.

From this perspective, bonus hunting is simply a shrewd utilization of the resources provided by gambling operators. The interesting and pertinent question is to what extent trophy hunting and the display of dead lions, tigers, rhinos etc. at the feet of the hunter can be construed as part of a narcissistic strategy to elevate social status and maintain an inflated concept of self-esteem. And then again, trophy hunting is extremely expensive – the audience (on social media or wherever) are there to admire the ‘skills’, ‘courage’ and wealth of the hunter. These images are almost certainly designed to maintain a degree of narcissistic flow. Recent highly charged debate, reaching a peak with the killing of Cecil the lion in 2015, has brought trophy hunting under unprecedented public scrutiny, and yet the psychology of trophy hunting crucially remains under-explored.

Consider, for example, Kendall Jones, student, cheerleader, hunter, she is to many the pin-up girl of trophy hunting, a celebrity to her thousands of fans and followers on Facebook, lauded by the hunting lobby. She wears a lot of make-up in the African bush, her left arm sits nonchalantly on the animal’s rear. The writer of the piece sees no obvious irony in juxtaposing the comment that she likes to ‘help treat wounded animals’ with the fact that she evidently loves killing fit and healthy animals, as if these two statements can somehow fit together without further explanation or justification.

One Kind of Interest that Rewards Don’t Kill

I think there are very serious moral questions and psychological and social issues we need to address. Further findings should be of interest to paymasters everywhere, especially those seeking the nuanced path to best value and performance. But don’t kid yourself—the game has changed, and the house is armed to the teeth. What used to be cunning is now risky, tedious, and honestly, not that rewarding anymore. If your idea of fun involves algorithmic paranoia, Kafkaesque terms and conditions, and a profit margin that’s thinner than a casino owner’s patience, go for it (please don’t go for it).

Players go to great lengths to game the system, and it used to be a sort of reliable side hustle. Bonus hunting has morphed into a much risky, hyper-competitive man-against-the-house match—and as always, the house wins. Since I reviewed the first wave of research on the counterproductive effects of rewards, new studies have confirmed and extended the original findings. By now, with the exception of economists and a diehard group of orthodox behaviorists (who have restyled themselves “behavior analysts”), most social scientists acknowledge that incentives tend to backfire. Moreover, the problem isn’t limited to particular kinds of incentives or ways of using them. The trouble is inherent to the very idea of incentives.

Alas, too many parents, teachers, and managers persist in treating people like pets, offering the equivalent of a doggie biscuit to children, students, and employees in an effort to get them to jump through hoops. It’s not just that they’re manipulative, or even that they’re ultimately unsuccessful. For instance, more brands see increased revenue via rewards (36%) compared to discounts (28%). More specifically, my company Dosh — in a research partnership with The Center for Generational Kinetics — found that brands that offer millennial and Gen Z consumers at least 5% instant cash back will see even greater sales impact now and in the months ahead. According to global consultancy McKinsey’s research, these reactions entail context, habit, friendly influence, incentives, emotions, congruence, salience and other factors.

Machiavellians are, the researchers concluded, more ‘reality-based’ in their sense of self. Narcissists exhibited a strong self-deceptive component (with low insight) to their personality and Paulhus and Williams point out that the grandiosity and poor insight found in narcissists have also been noted in clinical psychopaths (Hart and Hare 1998). They also found that the measure of non-clinical psychopathy was the best predictor of self-report and behavioural measures of antisocial behaviour. Paulhus and Willams concluded that the Dark Triad of personalities are ‘overlapping but distinct’ constructs, each dimension in the triad presenting with its own particular problems. Other research has shown that rewards not only reduce people’s interest in what they’re doing but also adversely affect the quality of their performance.