Bonus Chum Review: Is it Worth the Money?

Bonus Chum is software that was made by Daniel White in 2015 after he was unsatisfied with the number of features available on existing simulators and he decided to make his own.

It was one of the first fully fledged casino simulators to hit the market and has been the inspiration for other casino simulator software.

Today we are going to take an in-depth look at Bonus Chum to see if its still the daddy of all casino simulators.

 

What is Bonus Chum?

Bonus Chum is an advanced simulator for casino offers that makes it easy for you to accurately calculate whether an offer will be profitable or not.

The program itself has many extra features and power user options which we will address later in the review, but for now we’ll take a look at the most used features of the simulator.

It differs from a regular calculator as it allows you to enter any and all details for the offer you are going to do, since the simulator can adapt to nearly every type of offer imaginable.

For offer details, the main information you can enter is:

• Deposit and bonus amounts
• Wagering Requirement
• Bonus Type
• Bonus Sub-type
• Max cash outs (some casinos limit your winnings after you complete wagering)

For slot details, the main information you can enter is:

• Game Type
• House Edge
• Risk/Variance Level
• Bet Sizing
• Time taken per spin

Bonus Chum also gives you the option to use two-tier strategy – the practice of using a higher variance slot/stake to hit a big win before switching to a lower risk slot/stake to grind out the wagering requirement. Always be wary that this doesn’t break a casino’s Terms and Conditions though – it often does, but not always.

Once you have entered all the required information, you just need to select the amount of times you want the program to simulate the offer, using ‘Sessions’ or ‘Universes’. You will also need to specify your bankroll as this is used in bankruptcy calculations.

This allows you to get very accurate results as you can, for example, set it simulate the offer one million times and it will finish in around 5-20 seconds depending on the size of the bonus.

The results are given to you in real time and will update until the simulation is complete.

Bonus Chum will give you a lot of information from the simulation but here are the important ones:

• EV – The expected value and profitability of the offer.
• Bust-rate – The percentage of times you will bust out and lose your deposit.
• Bankruptcy-rate – The risk of going bankrupt if you did offers like this repeatedly.
• Time – The average length of wagering.

 

Whats the Difference Between EV Calculators and Simulators?

You’ve probably come across a basic EV calculator if you have already done casino offers, primarily the low-risk variety.

While these calculators are fine and dandy for offers where you wager a certain amount and get a reward (known as post-wagers), they don’t come close to being suitable for high-risk offers, as they get some things very wrong and are missing vital information for deposit bonuses.

On most basic of EV calculators you’ll be asked to input three values:

• Deposit/bonus amount
• Wagering required
• The ‘house edge’ i.e. the return-to-player or ‘RTP’

With that in mind, let’s try an example of a high-risk offer a go; a 100% up to £50 with 30x deposit and bonus wagering requirement.

For the house edge part, we’ll go for a random 96% RTP slot which is the most common one you’ll find in today’s slot offerings.

The calculation shows the EV of the offer to be negative at -£70 and therefore would be considered massively unprofitable.

However…

The obvious mistake that you can see above is that the calculator thinks that we can lose more money than we actually deposited.

This is because the calculators do not factor in busting out or variance.

Due to this, the calculation is not right and will never be right.

Another reason they are incorrect is due to how deposit bonuses work.

Using the previous offer example, we note that we will only be able to lose a maximum of £50 if we bust this offer, but it is possible to be able to change how much you win when you do win.

Slot choice is really important for this.

Not only is the choice of a good RTP cruicial but perhaps even moreso is the variance of the slot; with low variance generally having frequent-but-low payouts and high variance having infrequent, but high, payouts.

While your losses are capped, higher stakes and/or higher variance slots can allow you to increase the size of your wins when you do win, allowing you to make more per offer on average.

The downside of increasing your win size is that they will be less frequent and therefore you will have a higher chance of busting out and losing your deposit.

The higher stakes will also allow you to complete offers faster and allow you to make more profit in the long run as you can do more offers in a set amount of time.

We can simulate this in bonus chum to figure out the difference:

             £1 spins on a low variance slot                                      £5 spins on a high variance slot

                             

There’s a very big difference as you alter the offer profitable by changing the variance and/or stake.

As you can see it does come at a cost of your bust rate as you will only win about 1-in-10 offers on average when you up the variance compared to the previous 2-in-10.

The increase in EV is evidently worth the increase in bust rate but we advise you to mess around with the variance and stake and figure out what bust rate and EV you are comfortable with, becuase long busting streaks can affect the mind as well as the bankroll.

 

Pros of Bonus Chum

Tooltips

This feature of Bonus Chum is very handy, especially so for people new to the high-risk casino arena – all the complicated words are simplified into easy to understand paragraphs making it clear how and why you use each part of the program.

The tooltips are extensive and appear on everything, so you should have no trouble figuring out how to use Bonus Chum.

 

Adaptability

While not all the features are available in the cheapest version of the software, you will find nearly all the different modes and features in the ‘Basic’ version that are necessary for the most common types of offers. It will be hard to find an offer that this simulator can’t tackle.

 

Time Calculation

A useful bit of information generated by the simulation is the average amount of time it will take to do the offer.

Even if an offer had an EV of £50 and a bust rate of 70%, if the time it takes to do the offer is something stupid like 10 hours or more then it probably isn’t worth your time to do it.

A regular casino EV calculator won’t provide you with this information.

 

Customisation

The level of customisation in Bonus Chum, when compared to other simulators available, is unmatched.

There are tons of extra toggles and options you can use for an offer to represent it in the simulation as accurately as possible.

It has presets for several types of games such as slots, blackjack and different roulette bets.

This is most true with the most expensive version but the ‘Basic’ and ‘Bronze’ have most toggles and options mentioned directly above.

For example, you can set the bonus type to cashable (non-sticky), sticky, post-wager and cashback. Additionally, using the ‘Platinum’ version you do early withdrawal (parachute) bonuses. This may all seem like gibberish if you’re not a member of Profit Maximiser, which is the service we recommend for taking advantage of casino offers.

Bonus Chum allows you to setup custom games and pay tables as well has having an advanced mode where most of the extra features are kept.

 

Accuracy

The software allows you to simulate an offer millions of times very quickly giving you accurate figures that you can trust.

Many people flat-out ignore casino offers because their regular calculators are telling them they aren’t profitable and thus miss out on mountains of EV.

Being able to get an accurate figure for how much an offer should pay you on average is the most important thing a casino simulator can do, and Bonus Chum excels in this area.

 

Bust-Rate Calculation

Unlike a regular casino calculator, Bonus Chum will allow you to see the bust rate – or how often you should expect to walk away with some winnings after doing an offer. This allows you to have reasonable expectations when it comes to losing streaks as that can the hardest part of doing high-risk casino offers.

Additionally, it will show you very clearly if an offer is safe or very risk by highlighting the bankruptcy information in green and red respectively.

It is important to track your offers, EV and profit/loss so you can keep on eye on how you well you are doing compared to the expected profit.

 

Cons of Bonus Chum

Feature Paywalls

The ‘Basic’ tier of Bonus Chum costs $159 (~£120) and has most of the features you will need to calculate accurately, safely and quickly.

However, the more expensive tiers have additional features and increased bankroll and deposit limits.

We found that while the deposit limits aren’t too important in the higher tiers, the maximum bankroll is severely limited in the ‘Basic’ version at £5,000, while the ‘Bronze’ version has an accommodating £25,000 limit. The bankroll feature is used for bankruptcy calculations so as long as you know what you are doing the limit shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

While most of the extra features from more expensive tiers are quite niche and rarely necessary, we do think the developer behind Bonus Chum should re-think the placement of the ‘early withdrawal mode’ in the tier system as it is locked behind the ‘Platinum’ tier which costs an eye watering $2599 (~£1950).

We think this is necessary because of the recent surge of early withdrawal bonuses (known as parachute bonuses) in the industry, caused in part by new regulations and taxes.

 

Outdated Appearance

While the application looks very much outdated and a bit like a student’s visual basic project, it is far more important that it is feature packed, quick and accurate – rather than pleasing to the eye.

 

Conclusion

Overall, we can whole-heartedly recommend Bonus Chum to anyone who is looking to make the leap into higher risk casino offers and would like to do it in a safe and accurate way.

The only caveat being that we believe early withdrawal should be available at the ‘Bronze’ tier.

We believe that the best value tiers are ‘Basic’ and ‘Bronze’ and they can be purchased for £120 and £240 respectively.

This might seem like a lot of money, but you could reclaim the cost in just one lucky casino offer (that you probably wouldn’t have attempted without software like Chum).

You can check out Bonus Chum here.

We award the product a rating of 4.5 out of 5.