Saturday, August 09, 2008

Gambling: Golden Tiger online casino

Last week I got a "gold" CD through the post from Golden Tiger online casino.  I am normally skeptical about these sorts of "offers" but this introduction offer seemed to be offering me £1500 for free.... surely too good to be true, but my curiosity got the better of me :-)

On further investigation, you actually get £1500 PLAY chips to spend on their casino games and have one hour to use these chips to try and increase your stake... keeping anything over the £1500 that you win (although it turned out the maximum win was £200)

I thought "why not, its a bit of fun" so had a go at the roulette.   I fired up the software on Monday and was pretty lucky,  ending up winning £200 so seemed like I was quid's in.

Of course on reading the full terms and conditions, you can't just withdraw the £200 bonus, you have to deposit at least £40 and then cycle through the bonus 30 times before you can withdraw it (actually more times than this if you play anything other than the slot machines!!)

Having won the £200 it seemed silly not to continue, despite the restrictions.... so tried to deposit £40.   Unfortunately it wouldn't allow me to register a debit or credit card... apparently I am some sort of risk !    After talking to Support online and emailing various people, they ended up telling me a couple of days later that I couldn't use a card, so would have to use an e-pay method, such as Neteller.   I wasn't particularly impressed but on Friday (yesterday) went ahead and setup a Neteller account and made the deposit there.   

The next twist in the tale was that when trying to deposit in the Casino using my Neteller account I still couldn't make the deposit, although soon realised this was because of Neteller's security processes so had to talk to Neteller's Support to get my account properly opened.

Phew, now at last I have got my deposit into the Casino, but wait a moment, where is my £200 bonus ???!!!  Another conversation with Support later, and it turns out it can take up to 2 hours for the bonus to be registered in your account, rather than the 30 minutes advertised....   After an impatient wait, finally my account gets updated with my £200 bonus and at last can start playing some games for real money to capitalise on my "free" funds!!

As it had taken about 2 hours of waiting and calling, I only spent a little bit of time playing roulette again (this time for real!)   After a bit of losing and a bit of winning, ended up logging off after about 20 minutes play, with exactly £240 - the same as I started with... on well, at least it is mainly their money and I'm having fun :-)

Today (Saturday) I had a quick 15 mins playing the 5 card poker and after a bit of losing and a bit of winning logged off with £241... a profit is a profit....

So has it all been worth it so far ?      I was wondering at one point whether I would ever get to see my bonus, but I normally judge the quality of an organisation by the service you get when things go wrong.... and in fairness both Golden Tiger and Neteller their Support and response times were prompt,  professional and were able to solve the issues being experienced - so I am happy and confident to use these organisations

As far as the gambling goes, I am realistic enough to expect that I will probably blow my £40 and leave it at that, but you never know...  I might double up and then be able to make a sizeable withdrawal... either way I am sure I will get many hours of entertainment from the games.   Lets see what happens.......

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