Dutch online casino's October 1st 2021..now -- review

[vanHooff]

Holla all,

it has been a while, so good to be back!
Casinogrounds has been unavailable for Dutch for a while but apparently the problems have been sorted.
Great job well done to the people involved in making CG available again.

Starting on October 1st 2021, the Dutch online casino market has been regulated.
All casino's that are -not- listed on the following official link from our regulator Kansspelautoriteit, are deemed 'illegal' for Dutch players playing from the Netherlands.
https://kansspelautoriteit.nl/veilig-spelen/veilig-online-gokken/kansspelwijzer-online-gokken/

For new players: all casino's have a KYC (know your customer) procedure right at the start when signing up. The KYC includes scans of identity documents and registering the BSN personal number. Deposits can (at some casinos) be done from various banks/credit cards but withdrawing money only to a single registered bank account. Neteller/Skrill/Revolut/Paypal may be possible in the future but not at the moment yet.

When logging in for a casino session, a check is made at the CRUKS register for excluded problem gamblers.

The casino's have a plight to check for 'responsible gambling' that may get players restricted from bonuses and/or playing pretty fast.
Next to that, some casino's restrict players for 'bonus abuse', while others do not.

Autospinning is illegal, and bonus buying has been ruled out a while ago.

In my opinion the 15 or so licensed casino's have made many rookie mistakes.

In this thread I am sharing some of my experiences for the past 10 months of licensed gambling in the Netherlands.
My POV is one of someone who knows how to take advantage of promo's and bonuses, but with quite a bit of degen and a lot of love for playing. 

I am starting with sharing experiences with casino's that can be signed up to through CG links from the Casino section.

First up: Toto Casino

 

[Hans-Martin]

EEEEJ! How's it going ? ^^ Welcome back mate

 

[vanHooff]

Good to see you Hans-Martin, Skylined!

Toto Casino

is one of two huge state-run casino's that are licensed.
Toto has been around for decades as our national bookmaker. 'Legal sportsbetting was done through Toto at 'cigar shops'. 

All Dutch gamblers should have an account at Toto because in many ways this has been the best licensed casino up till now, and because the value of some promo's is insane. 

As mentioned, Toto has a background in sports betting.
- sports and live betting: Toto has its own odds provider (?) which can probably be beat by savvy bettors on some markets.
- casino/slots: Toto has many game providers and is quicker to release some of the newer games than the competition, for example the Nolimit City games.
- live casino: Dutch speaking live casino games from Malta (Evolution) , Dutch speaking live casino games from Eindhoven Netherlands (Stakelogic), as well as international games. Dutch version of Evolution lightning roulette, probably more to come.

Promotions: the signup bonuses are semi-decent.
Ongoing promotions: weekly wager-free free spins, weekend slot tourneys, 'lekker man special' boosted sports odds,  sports promotions, live casino promotions, giveaways, crazy value and many mistakes.

Try not to get bonusbanned.
So far, taking advantage of all bonuses and promotions while not playing much else has not been 'punished'.

However, playing high stakes and/or long time, depositing often and much, playing at night, losing much are all things that trigger the 'responsible gambling' detection systems. You will get bonusbanned for any of the above pretty fast. (trust me on this one) 

Next up: experiences at Toto 

 

[vanHooff]

Some highlights about Toto: IIRC , playing at Toto started nice and quiet.
For slots, autospinning and bonus buying were still allowed and there was no maximum time limit for playing , so I must not have made much money in the first few months.

Around Christmas came the first 'lucky break': a live blackjack promo.
The two players that collected the most blackjacks on December 25st and 26st, would get an iPad.

Now I don't care for gadgets but my (ex) girlfriend is happy for getting stuff like this (goes for Amazon vouchers as well!)

 

Fast forward to February 2022, another blackjack promo: 3 bonuscards of EUR 50, 25 and 15 shuffled into shoes of selected blackjack tables.
Receiving the bonus card was rewarded with getting the amount in cash. Multi seating up to three seats allowed, and so was playing behind!
I was (one of) the first to see the value of the promotion, and opted to play three seats. Other players were erratic but I played behind with all others.
On the first day of this promo I got something like EUR 1200 in bonuscards. The week after the promotion had not been changed yet, and up to 150 players were 'betting behind' for EUR 5 per box. Sadly I did not run very well on own boxes and managed to get only a couple of hundred in profits.
Optimal strategy was to only bet behind and switch tables when the biggest bonus card was out, and when manual shuffling was done.
Hindsight is 20/20.  This promo must have cost Toto a couple of hundred thousand?

In april 2022, Toto introduced a slot tourney calendar .
One for Monday+Tuesday (5K in prizes), one for Wednesday/Thursday (5K in prizes) and a big one for the weekend (25K in prizes)
Most of these tourneys were collecting points for leaderboard, i.e. who wins/spins the most, wins. In some tourneys, trickery was possible.
Before these tourneys started, I contacted customer support to warn that the same players were going to top the leaderboards every time.
Also I tipped them to run prefab slot tourneys run by ELK , Yggdrasil or other gaming provider. Some of those tourneys are more luckbased.

In April I won all of the weekday tourneys (place 1-3 got the same prize) and a weekend tourney  but at the end of April I was effectively bonus banned for playing much,  although I have never been informed properly. 

The weekday tourneys have been scraped from the calendar and only the weekend tourneys are still live. Most of these are ELK tourneys with '50 spin' sets for scoring and mostly luckbased. Now and then a Play'n'Go spin-to-win tourney is run.
I know how to win these, and know who wins these in my absence. Not for amateurs.

Sports: Toto is supposedly good in bookmaking soccer, cycling, other sports that are big in the Netherlands, and have an own odds provider (?)
Now I like to bet on American sports, specifically on outrights. These are high-margin markets and tough to beat.
For these I track the odds and follow the news, and I am sometimes quicker to act than the bookies.
Also I can calculate the value of most prop bets and 'specials' (boosted odds mostly)

My best bet on an outright was on the Buccaneers to win the 2023 Super Bowl. Bet inspired by the news of Tom Brady to return to play.
I bet the Bucs to win at 31,00 odds. The odds dropped to about 8,00 and I got offered a decent cashout value.



Please note that the EUR 200 bet already triggered a manual approval. 
After this bet Toto restricted the maximum bet for me on 'lekker man specials' from EUR 20 to 50 eurocents, very childish if you ask me.

Canary in the cole mine: most of my bets are now up for manual approval when the return exceeds EUR 50.
I mess with Toto for this now and then by sending bogus bets for approval. In a few cases they lowered the odds for all players after one of these.
This includes a freebet on Tammy Abraham to score 2 goals or more against Feyenoord. The odds at Toto were already lower than at the competition and dropped even lower. 

I played quite a few special odds bets for premier league darts and on NBA, and also on enhanced odds for PSV (21,00)  Feyenoord (25,00) to win the Conference League and on the Netherlands (25,00) to win the next World Cup.
Most of these for a couple of hundred euro's each, which may well have contributed to getting restricted.

Slots promotions continued: after effectively not getting any promo's anymore, I still got like these:








That is EUR 100 in cash that I did NOT receive each time, bummer. IIRC I got like 5 of these.

My experiences with customer support at Toto have been terrible. 
I think this is probably because it is designed to handle simple issues only. For any issues that are a bit more advanced, there is no apparent 'second-line' support or VIP-service. I have to say that once or twice one of my (many) support issues has ultimately been handled adequately by someone named Arjan. I have been real close to escalating a couple of issues to a judge .  

Next up, conclusion of my experiences at Toto , this may be up to a week from now. I am waiting to have one particular issue settled with Toto.

p.s. Toto if you are reading this: I love playing at your site.
Please lift the bonus ban, I am not gambling irresponsibly and I am much cheaper that consultants for bringing (promo) issues to light  

 

[LetsGiveItASpin]

Welcome back mate