vinylweatherman
You type well loads
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2004
- Location
- United Kingdom
The terms are better but I still really hate T&C's which carry scapegoat clauses. Notice how they've put "Includes but Not limited to" in there which again gives them the right to confiscate winnings "At their discretion". Don't get me wrong I don't expect casinos to list in their terms every form of bonus abuse going but when reading terms like this you do feel a little cheated, particularly when you hear of casinos invoking terms like this to the maximum extent possible and taking peoples winnings. I am starting to think the safest bet is to not accept bonuses at all because its like signing up for a bank account or a credit card all the legal blurb you have to accept.
And to be honest a fairer approach when dealing with bonuses would be either to either take the bonus off an abusing player, refuse any further bonuses or in extreme cases divide the win into the percentage of the bonus and pay them the win on the portion of their deposit.
For example:
Player deposits 100, player recieves 100 bonus
Player bets 200 on a 35x bet and wins 7000
The player is not allowed by the terms of the bonus to bet the full deposit+bonus balance on a single stake so the bonus and winnings from the bonus are confiscated. The player is returned 3500 which is a 35x win of his original deposit of 100.
This scenario would be a fair approach to both the player and the casino, but again any good casino group should not take confiscating winnings lightly and should try to resolve things with the player so they don't lose what might be a good customer and others through the bad press.
Back to the original player who has had his entire winnings confiscated I still feel he should be given his entire win, from my point of view he clearly did not set out to abuse the bonus in his play, the initial terms weren't worded properly and he just got very lucky on his last bet.
I would hope that Spin Palace would do the moral and decent thing.
Not so. When you sign up to such things you actually have LEGAL RIGHTS over the fairness, or otherwise, of the contract.
The credit card companies had for a long time had contracts with outrageous "penalty charges" for going even 1p over your limit, and resorted to all sorts of tricks. They would meet any complaint with "well tough, you agreed to it".
Unfortunately for the banks, complaints lead the Office of fair Trading to use the Consumer Contract laws to determine that such "penalty" charges were unfair, and were thus legally struck out of contracts RETROSPECTIVELY. This resulted in the issuing banks having to repay MILLIONS of ill gotten profits, and also being forced to make several changes to the terms.
Vague terms, such as the one being discussed, would be deemed unfair in the UK, since it is impossible to comply with a term that fails to specify what does, or does not, apply in a given circumstance.
Credit card terms also have to have a prefix defining the "jargon" used in the main terms. In the casino sense, the words in "equal, zero or low margin bets or hedge betting" are also "jargon", since they are clearly not being used in context of their literal meanings. In fact, they could cover EVERY SESSION at a casino, and taken literally, "zero" means you don't bet at all, which is ALSO now "irregular play".
"hedge betting" is the ONLY one that I can interpret from experience, and come up with it meaning "you can't bet simultaneously on all possible outcomes". An example of "hedge betting" might be 100 chips on red, and 100 on black for Roulette, or 10 chips on each number.
"equal" - equal to what
"zero" - meaning of the word is clear, but NOT it's appearance here, a "zero bet" means you haven't played at all, so this CANNOT be "irregular play"
"low margin" - do we interpret this as meaning games with a low margin, such as blackjack - yet these games are allowed. "margin" itself has a meaning in business, and refers to a margin over cost of a product, which usually means "profit", so it looks like "low margin" betting really DOES mean that if you select the low house edge games, your play is "irregular", and you will have winnings confiscated.
No bet over 30% of the bonus credited - now this IS clear. It is possible to work out your maximum permissible bet by seeing the bonus you have been given, and multiplying it by 0.3 - remembering to round DOWN to the next available bet size available in the software.
I believe the intent is that this term applies to the SUB, rather than the regular offers, and if this is so, there will never be a problem with the lower 25% bonuses offered creating very small permitted bets.
200 on 3 card poker and 500 on Blackjack seems to be MGS standard, and does NOT seem to reflect any lowering of limits due to there being a bonus in play. I have never seen higher limits, but a few casinos have lowered them.