DirectosWagering requirements that account for the house edge
Standard wagering counts every dollar you stake as one dollar of progress, regardless of what you play. That creates a problem operators solve with game weighting, and a few solve with something better.
The problem with flat wagering
If a 30x requirement counts all games equally, a player clears it on whatever game costs them least. On a 99 percent in-house game, 3,000 of turnover costs 30 in expected loss. On a 96 percent slot it costs 120. Same requirement, four times the cost, entirely determined by game choice.
No operator can allow that, so the standard fix is a contribution table: slots count 100 percent, table games 10, and the low-edge titles are excluded. It works, but it is blunt, and it produces the odd situation where the games that cost you least are the ones you are steered away from.
The weighted alternative
A smaller number of operators weight by house edge directly. Instead of a table of percentages by category, progress is scaled by how much margin the bet generated.
| Game | Return | Edge | Flat wagering | Edge-weighted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Slot | 96% | 4% | 100% credit | Full credit |
| Slot | 97% | 3% | 100% credit | About three quarters |
| In-house dice | 99% | 1% | Often excluded | About a quarter |
| Blackjack | 99.5% | 0.5% | 10% credit | About an eighth |
The logic is consistent: you make progress in proportion to the margin you generate, so the cost of clearing a bonus is roughly the same whatever you play. Nothing is excluded, and nothing is arbitrarily assigned ten percent.
Which is better for the player
Usually the weighted version, though not always, and the difference is smaller than it first appears.
The honest framing is that edge-weighted wagering makes the real cost visible. Under a contribution table, a 30x requirement on blackjack at 10 percent is effectively 300x, which nobody writes down. Under edge weighting the multiplier is applied openly.
Where it genuinely helps is low-edge games. They are usually excluded outright from standard bonuses, and edge weighting lets you use them at a proportionate rate instead. If those are the games you want to play, that is the difference between a usable bonus and an unusable one.
Reading a weighted formula
Look for three things. What the weighting is applied to, which should be the house edge rather than an arbitrary category. Whether the reference return is published per game, since the formula is unverifiable without it. And whether the effective multiplier is displayed anywhere, because the arithmetic is otherwise invisible while you play.
Operators publishing the full formula, including the weighting, are a minority. When they do, the requirement can be checked rather than estimated, which is what made it possible to state what a bonus really costs in our write-up of how Stake calculates wagering rather than quoting the rollover figure and leaving it there.
The practical test
Whatever the model, reduce it to one number: expected cost to clear. Multiply the bonus by the effective requirement for the game you will actually play, then multiply by that game's edge. Compare with the bonus. If the cost exceeds the bonus, the offer is negative, and it does not matter whether it got there through a contribution table or a formula.