01
The headline figure
is the least useful part.
Two offers advertising the same match percentage can differ by an order of magnitude in what they actually cost you to clear. The variable is never the percentage. It is the wagering multiple, what it applies to, which games count toward it, and what you are allowed to keep at the end.
This matters more with crypto than with cards, because deposit friction is gone. A bonus you would have thought about overnight while a bank transfer cleared is now a decision made in the same minute you saw it.
So the useful skill is not finding the biggest number. It is being able to convert any offer into the one figure that matters: how much you have to turn over before the balance is yours.
04
The cost of a bonus
is not only money.
An active wagering requirement changes what your balance is. Funds that were withdrawable become funds that are not, and that is true of the entire balance in most implementations rather than only the bonus portion.
That is worth understanding before accepting rather than after, because it converts a decision about free value into a commitment to keep playing. An unfinished requirement is the most common reason a withdrawal that should have been simple is refused.
The honest framing is this: a bonus is the operator buying turnover from you at a discount. Sometimes that is a fair trade and worth taking. It is never free, and an offer that has to be described as free is describing itself inaccurately.
05
Reading an offer
you were shown, not sought.
Advertising standards in several markets — the UK's CAP Code among them — require gambling promotions to state significant conditions with the offer rather than behind it, and to avoid presenting an offer as risk-free when it is not. Operators outside those markets are not bound by them, and many of the operators accepting SOL are outside them.
That gives you a usable heuristic that does not require knowing the operator's jurisdiction. Compare what the banner says with what the terms say. If the significant conditions are only in the terms, you have learned something about how the operator communicates, and it will not be limited to the bonus.
The other heuristic is time. An offer engineered to be taken immediately — a countdown, a limited allocation, a prompt at the moment of deposit — is engineered that way because consideration reduces uptake. That is precisely the reason to take the consideration.