Game weighting is the clause that multiplies a wagering requirement. Each wager is credited at a percentage set by the game you placed it on, so a target you read as one amount of play can cost several times that. This page covers the wording, the arithmetic, the failure modes and how to verify the rate yourself.
Pokies Cashout · Payments and terms referencePublished Last reviewed Promotion figures supplied by site owner: 5 October 2026
Clause type
Bonus condition
Applies to
Each wager, before crediting
Published in
Promotion terms and bonus policy
Operators
Offshore, not AU licensed
The clause, and the words it hides behind
Game weighting is one line in a bonus agreement, and it is the line that decides how much play a requirement actually costs. It never appears on the banner and it does not change the advertised multiple, yet it is the reason two offers with identical headline numbers can demand wildly different amounts of play. Before a wager is credited against the turnover target, it is multiplied by a percentage set by the game you placed it on.
The clause rarely calls itself game weighting. Common phrasings include games contribute towards wagering at the following rates, only a stated share of wagers placed on table games will count towards the wagering requirement, and eligible games and contribution percentages. In the shortest and worst version it is a bare table headed Contribution with no sentence explaining what it modifies. Search the terms for contribut, weight, count towards and eligible, then search the promotion page separately, because the table is frequently published on one of those surfaces and not the other.
Two formulations exist and they are not interchangeable. The usual one acts on the wager: the target stays fixed and each bet credits a fraction of itself. The rarer one acts on the target, so the requirement itself is stated as larger for certain games. The dollar outcome is the same for a single game played start to finish, but the two diverge the moment you move between games, and the fixed target version is what nearly every progress display in the account area implements. Establish which one you have agreed to before you try to read your own progress.
Three things get confused with this clause. A pokie bonus round is a game feature and has nothing to do with it. A maximum bet rule limits stake size while bonus funds are live and is enforced separately, in a single round rather than across a session. An exclusion list removes a game from the offer entirely, which is a different outcome from a game that counts at a low rate. Weighting is one of three inputs: the basis the multiple applies to, the multiple itself, and the rate at which your play counts towards it. All three sit in the terms, and a requirement means nothing in dollars until you have read all three.
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A divisor, not a discount
Required play equals the requirement divided by the contribution rate expressed as a decimal. The requirement itself comes from the basis and the multiple printed in your own promotion terms, so that first figure is always yours to read rather than ours to supply. Whatever credited turnover it works out to, a stated contribution of one hundred per cent means you need exactly that much play. At half, twice as much. At a quarter, four times. At five per cent, twenty times.
The percentage reads like a discount and behaves like a divisor. A reader who sees twenty per cent tends to price it as a fifth less when it is five times more. The error is systematic and it runs in the expensive direction every time.
The sensitivity is not even across the table. Dropping from full contribution to half adds one requirement worth of play. Dropping from a fifth to a tenth adds five. All of the damage is concentrated in the bottom rows, which is also where an operator has the most room to revise a published figure without the change looking dramatic. If the game you intend to use sits at the low end, the rate is the figure to screenshot, because halving a small percentage doubles your workload while changing the document by one character.
Zero is not a small number in this formula. It is a division with no answer, and no amount of play on a zero rated game clears any part of the requirement.
A divisor, not a discount
What the progress bar is actually counting
Across a session the quantity being tracked is credited turnover. For each round it is the stake multiplied by that game's rate, summed. It is not the money you spent, and the two figures drift apart as soon as you touch a second game. Two players can spend the same amount and sit at completely different points against the same target, so remaining work cannot be read off your balance or your deposit history.
Suppose the terms publish full contribution for one game and a fifth for another. Put five sixths of a budget through the first and the remaining sixth through the second, and credited progress comes to roughly seven eighths of everything you staked. Reverse the split, so the bulk of the money runs through the fifth rate game, and the identical budget credits exactly one third of itself. Same lobby, same money, well under half the progress. How the stake is distributed across the table matters as much as the rates printed in it.
Nothing in the client announces the change. Progress already credited is not taken back when you switch to a lower weighted game. What changes is the rate at which the bar moves from that point. A progress rate that falls off a cliff after a game change is the clause working as written, not a fault.
Distinguish slow from fatal. A zero rated game wastes the expiry window, while a prohibited game can, under the voiding clauses in most of these agreements, cost the bonus and anything won with it. Then check two mechanics the rate alone does not cover. Where a round has a base stake plus something extra, such as a side bet, an ante or a double up, ask whether the whole stake is credited at the game rate or only the base wager. Where a feature can be bought, ask whether the purchase price is credited at the game rate, at zero, or treated as ineligible.
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A game sitting in the lobby while bonus funds are active is in one of at least four states, and they are indistinguishable from the tile. It may contribute fully. It may contribute partially. It may contribute nothing while remaining permitted. Or it may be prohibited, so that playing it at all engages a voiding clause. A fifth case is worth checking for: a game that counts fully for wagering but restricts what can be withdrawn from winnings made on it.
The failure mode this produces is the most common expensive mistake in bonus play. A player spends an entire expiry window on a game at zero contribution, finishes with no progress, and only then reads the table. The cause is architectural rather than deceptive. The contribution table lives in the promotions engine and in the terms document, while the lobby is a merchandising surface that does not gate launches on either. The game loads, accepts the bet, pays its wins and credits nothing towards the requirement. The only signal available in real time is a progress figure that never moves.
Zero and excluded deserve separate columns in whatever note you keep. A zero rated game is a slow road to nowhere and leaves the bonus intact. An excluded game can end the exercise, and some agreements apply that consequence from a single round. If a game appears in neither the contribution table nor the exclusion list it has no stated status, and unstated is not the same as eligible. Do not fill that gap from a review site or another operator's table, because rates are set per operator and per promotion.
Conditions are published by the operator and change without notice. Read the live page before you act on anything here.
There are usually two tables rather than one. A site wide bonus policy carries a default contribution table covering the whole lobby, and an individual promotion may override it for that offer alone. Where the two disagree about your game, the promotion specific table normally governs, but only because a precedence clause in the agreement says so, so locate that sentence before you trust either table. If nothing in the documents resolves the conflict, the rate you are consenting to is genuinely undetermined at the moment you click accept.
Then check the granularity. Tables are published by lobby category, by software provider, by named title, or as an exclusion list with everything else implied. Category tables are where mismatches happen, because the label on the lobby tab is merchandising and the label in the terms is contractual. A title you reached through a pokies tab may be classified in the terms as a jackpot game, a progressive, a hold and win product, an instant win game, or a table style release from a studio with its own row. Match at the most specific level the document uses: a named title beats a provider, and a provider beats a category. Where your game is named nowhere, do not choose a category for it.
Keep the table, not the page. Screenshot the rows covering the games you actually intend to use, with the date visible, at the moment you accept, because contribution figures are republished on offshore sites without version numbers and often without a changed date. Safe Casino and WinCrown are both offshore, and with either one the contribution table has to be opened on the live terms page and read there before you claim, since whatever is on that page at that moment is what the engine will be crediting against.
Where the table lives, and which one wins
The highest rate is not the cheapest way to clear
The obvious conclusion, clear on the highest weighted game available, is wrong often enough to be worth checking. Clearing cost has two inputs rather than one: the play required, which the weighting sets, and the cost per dollar of play, which the house edge of the game sets. Cost is roughly the required play divided by the contribution rate, multiplied by that edge.
That gives a comparison you can do in your head. Two games are equally expensive to clear on when the ratio of their house edges matches the ratio of their contribution rates. A game weighted at a fifth of another is cheaper only if its edge is less than a fifth as large. Read each game's return figure from its own information panel, the paytable or info screen inside the game, which is where the publisher states it, and treat the edge as the complement of that figure. Do not take it from a category table or from a general article.
Two things blunt this in practice. The low rows of a contribution table are populated largely by the low edge games, and that is not a coincidence: the weighting is pricing exactly the advantage the arithmetic above is trying to use. Most of these agreements also carry a low risk play clause and a discretionary voiding right, so read the restrictions attached to that specific game before adopting it as your clearing game.
Five times the play at a fifth the edge is also the same expected cost spread over five times as many rounds. Inside a fixed expiry window that is a different proposition: more time at the screen, and more exposure to an early run of losses ending the attempt unfinished.
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Measuring the real rate before you commit the window
The document is the agreement. The promotions engine is what credits you. Those can differ, and the only disagreement you can realistically win is one where you can show what the engine actually did. The test takes a few minutes and is worth running on every game you intend to clear on, before you commit the window to it.
Find the progress display first. It is a wagering or bonus progress figure in the account or bonus area, usually phrased as an amount wagered against an amount required, sometimes as a percentage. Note the exact figure before you start. Place a modest, fixed number of rounds at one fixed stake, comfortably below any maximum bet limit in the terms. Note the figure again. The implied rate is the credit gained divided by the total staked. Compare it with the published table.
Use enough rounds that rounding cannot explain the result, and keep the stake constant, because a stake change mid test makes the division meaningless. Some displays batch their updates, so if nothing has moved after a handful of rounds, wait and refresh before concluding anything. You are looking for one of three outcomes. A figure matching the table, which lets you proceed. No movement at all, which means stop and ask support before placing another bet. Or a figure materially below the published rate, which means asking which clause produces it and keeping the answer in writing.
Keep the test: timestamps, the stake, the number of rounds, the before and after figures, and screenshots of both. No Australian regulator sits above an offshore operator's bonus engine, so nothing will audit the crediting for you. Escalation runs through the operator's own complaints procedure and then the licensor named in its footer, and your arithmetic is what gives that complaint a shape.
When the weighting kills the offer
Convert the requirement to dollars of play twice. Once at the best rate in the table, and once at the rate for the game you will actually spend the window on. Divide each by the days left before expiry. The first number is what the offer looks like, the second is what you have agreed to, and the gap between them is the figure to decide on.
Decline outright in four situations. The contribution table is not published anywhere you can read before accepting. The promotion terms and the general terms give different rates and no precedence sentence resolves them. Your intended game is not named at any level of the table and support will not state its rate in writing. Or every game you actually enjoy sits in the bottom rows, in which case it is not really an offer to you.
A missing table is not a neutral fact to be resolved later by support. It means the largest multiplier in the agreement is unspecified at the moment you give consent, and consent to an unspecified term is what makes a later dispute unwinnable.
The version that binds you is the one open in front of you when you accept, which is why the contribution table at a site like Safe Casino or WinCrown is worth reading on the day rather than remembered from a previous visit. A bonus you decline costs nothing. The required play is not a budget, it is not play you were going to do anyway, and the weighting makes this not worth starting is a complete and correct answer.
The clause, and the words it hides behind — at a glance
Questions people actually ask
What does game weighting mean in a casino bonus?
It is the percentage of each wager that is credited towards a wagering requirement, set by the game you played. A wager on a fully weighted game credits its whole value; a wager on a partially weighted game credits only a fraction. The rates come from the contribution table in the promotion terms, not from a general article.
How do I calculate wagering with game weighting?
Work out the requirement in dollars from the basis and multiple in the terms, then divide it by the contribution rate as a decimal. A rate of one fifth means five times the play. The requirement figure is whatever your own agreement states, and the division is the part this page gives you.
Why is my bonus progress not moving at all?
The most likely cause is a game credited at zero contribution. The lobby does not block those games while bonus funds are active; it will load the game and take the bet without crediting anything. Stop before placing another round and check the contribution table and the exclusion list, which are two separate lists.
Do pokies always count fully towards wagering?
No. There is no universal rule, and individual titles are often carved out of an otherwise fully weighted category. Check whether your title is named in the terms, and whether the terms classify it as a jackpot, progressive or instant product with its own row rather than as a standard pokie.
Which table applies if the promotion and the general terms disagree?
Whichever the agreement says prevails. Look for a precedence sentence stating that promotional terms override the general terms in the event of conflict. Without one, two contradicting tables leave the condition undetermined and the operator's reading is the one that gets applied, which is a reason to decline rather than to proceed.
Does a bonus buy count towards wagering?
That depends on the terms and it is frequently unstated. Ask whether the purchase price is credited at the game's contribution rate, at zero, or excluded entirely, and get the answer in writing before buying. A separate maximum bet rule may also treat the purchase price as a single large wager.
