The long-awaited amendment to the Gambling Act comes into force on 1 January 2020, and at long last the final legal text is now ready. In addition, the parties behind the Finance Act 2020 have decided that the tax for online casinos will rise from 20% to 28% of the gross gaming revenue from 1 January 2021. Both parts will have a big impact on Danish casino bonuses. We’ve looked at what the biggest improvements and deteriorations will be for players.
The biggest improvements for players:
1. Winnings from Free Spins are without turnover requirements
In Order on online casinos §29 subsection 6 it says:
There must be no wagering requirements attached to winnings won through sales promotion measures.
The promotional measures here include Free Spins and whatever else the casino can think of to give to make it more interesting to play, and winnings that are won from this must therefore not have playthrough requirements. If you’ve tried landing a Bonus feature while playing a handful of Free Spins or two, you know what that means: You can be lucky to win hundreds of kroner, sometimes thousands, on even a single spin, and after In the New Year, you will therefore be able to withdraw these winnings as soon as you have finished playing your Free Spins.
2. The wagering requirement on bonuses will be lower
In paragraph 4 in the same paragraph it says:
Play-through requirements associated with a promotional measure may not exceed 10 times the value of the deposit on the game account or the bet in the game combined with the amount awarded[..]
We read this as the casino must require that the bonus AND deposit must be played through 10 times before you can withdraw winnings, i.e. that deposit bonuses must be played through up to 20 times, while free bonuses must be played through a maximum of 10 times. However, the phrase is so unclear that one may have to wait for an interpretation before making definitive conclusions about what it means.
At the same time, it is stated in subsection 3 that a deposit requirement in connection with a bonus MUST be 100% of the bonus’s value [rewritten to general language], so therefore a wagering requirement of 10 times (deposit+bonus) will always be the same as a wagering requirement of 20 times the bonus.
3. The bonus rules will be simpler
This should be taken with a grain of salt as the casinos have employed some creative people and we have yet to see what they can come up with to circumvent the rules that are now coming into effect. But some of the current tricks will be illegal:
All games that count towards the completion of playthrough requirements must count at 100%. This means that it is now over with long lists of slot machines that count only 50%, and that roulette and blackjack only count 20, 10 or 2%. Unfortunately, the result will probably be that far more games are not counted at all in connection with bonus games, and that we will increasingly see separate offers with significantly smaller bonuses for table games. But it should become easier to see how much you have to play in connection with a bonus.
All deposit bonuses will be 100%. This is both good and bad, as it is now over with 200%, 300% and 500% deposit bonuses, while there will be longer between deposit bonuses for existing players, which are often only 50% and will therefore be too expensive for the casinos to offer. But the bonuses that they still offer are on the other hand at 100%.
