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April 16, 2026
A bonus hunt is one of the most popular formats in casino streaming and one of the most misunderstood concepts among players who have not tried one. The idea is simple. The execution requires more planning than most people realise. And watching one unfold live is a completely different experience to reading about it.
This guide explains what a bonus hunt is, how it works, how to plan and execute one yourself, and what separates a well-run hunt from one that goes wrong before the opening even starts.
A bonus hunt is a session format where the player or streamer collects triggered bonus features across a number of different slot games without playing them out immediately. Instead of opening each bonus as it triggers, you save it in the game and move on. Once you have collected a target number of bonuses, you stop hunting and open them all one by one, calculating the total result at the end.
The appeal is structural. A normal slot session is a series of individual moments, a bonus triggers, plays out, you see the result, you move on. In a bonus hunt, the opening phase is its own event. Thirty, forty, fifty bonuses are opened back-to-back. Some pay almost nothing. Some pay multiples of what they cost. The aggregate result against the total cost of the hunt is the outcome.
For streaming, the format is compelling because the opening is a sustained climax rather than a series of isolated moments. Viewers follow along, predict which games will pay, react to each result, and share in the final calculation. For players doing it privately, the appeal is similar. The hunt itself is a focused task, and the opening is the payoff.
When you trigger a bonus feature on a slot, a free spin round, a pick-and-click bonus, a respin mechanic or whatever it might be, the game saves your position. If you close the game or navigate away before playing the bonus out, the slot saves your pending bonus. When you return to that game, it resumes from the saved state and plays out the bonus from where you left it.
This is a standard behaviour across most modern slots from reputable providers. The game state is stored server-side, meaning it persists regardless of whether you close the browser or log out of the casino. When you return, the game picks up where it left off.
Not every game saves bonuses in the same way, and not every casino permits bonus hunting. This is an important point that is often skipped in guides covering the topic.
Before starting a bonus hunt, confirm with the casino that bonus hunting is permitted under their terms. Some casinos explicitly prohibit it, or restrict the practice in their bonus terms if you are playing with a bonus rather than real money. Others have no restrictions.
The easiest approach is to open live chat before depositing and ask directly: "Is bonus hunting permitted at your casino? Are there any restrictions on saving bonuses and opening them later?"
Get a clear yes or no. If the support agent is unsure or gives a vague answer, ask them to check with a supervisor or confirm in writing. A casino that permits bonus hunting will have no problem confirming it. If the answer is unclear, treat that as a no and find a casino that will give you a clear answer.
This step matters because opening a saved bonus that the casino has decided to void is an unpleasant experience. Do the check before you start.
Before you begin collecting bonuses, you need to make four decisions. Making them before the hunt rather than during it keeps the session controlled.
How much are you spending on the hunt?
This is your total hunt budget, the amount you are willing to spend collecting bonuses before the opening phase begins. Be specific. If your budget is €300, the hunt ends when €300 has been spent in the collecting phase, whether you have hit your target number of bonuses or not.
Having a hard budget prevents the common mistake of chasing your target number of bonuses after the hunt has already cost more than planned.
How many bonuses are you targeting?
Common targets range from 20 to 50 bonuses depending on budget and bet size. DomiNate typically targets around 20 to 30 bonuses on a structured hunt, which gives a meaningful opening phase without requiring an enormous budget to collect.
More bonuses means more variance in the opening, and individual poor results can be smoothed out by the rest of the collection. Fewer bonuses means individual results have more impact on the overall outcome.
What bet size will you use?
Your bet size during the hunt determines both how quickly you burn through budget and what each bonus is worth when it opens. Consistency matters here. If you collect bonuses at different bet sizes across different games, the opening results are harder to compare and the overall accounting is messier.
Pick a bet size that is sustainable relative to your budget. A common approach is to keep the per-spin bet at roughly 1/500th to 1/1000th of your total hunt budget. On a €300 budget, that suggests a bet size of €0.30 to €0.60 per spin. This gives you enough spins to collect the bonuses without burning through your budget before you have hit your target.
Which games are you hunting?
This is a matter of preference and strategy and we will cover game selection in its own section below.
The collecting phase is the hunt itself. You are spinning through games at your chosen bet size, looking for bonus triggers. When a bonus triggers, you close the game immediately before the bonus plays out and move to the next game on your list.
A few practical points for the collecting phase:
Keep a record as you go. Note which game each bonus was collected on, the bet size it was collected at, and a running total of what the hunt has cost. This makes the opening phase easier to track and gives you the full picture of how the hunt performed.
Set a spin limit per game. A common approach used by DomiNate on stream is around 50-100 spins on a game before moving to the next one if the bonus has not triggered. This keeps the hunt moving rather than grinding endlessly on a single title waiting for a trigger. High volatility slots with infrequent bonus triggers can absorb a large portion of your budget if you give them unlimited time. Set a limit and move on.
Rotate through your game list. Rather than exhausting one game before moving to another, many experienced hunters cycle through their list with a stint on each game, then back around. This distributes spend more evenly across the collection and prevents any single game from consuming a disproportionate share of the budget.
If you exceed your budget before hitting your target, stop collecting and open what you have. The budget is the hard stop. Extending it because you want five more bonuses is how hunts get expensive. Whatever you have collected at budget is what you open.
Choosing which games to include in your hunt is part strategy, part preference, and part knowing what makes an opening phase interesting to experience.
High volatility slots are the natural home of bonus hunting. The bonus features on high volatility games are where the big variance lives. When a high volatility bonus pays well, it pays significantly above the collecting cost. When it does not, it pays very little. This spread is what makes the opening phase dramatic and what makes the aggregate result meaningful.
NoLimit City games are a natural fit. Fire in the Hole, Mental, Tomb of Akhenaten. Hacksaw Gaming titles like Chaos Crew and Stick'em. Push Gaming's Fat series. Big Time Gaming Megaways slots like Bonanza and Extra Chilli. These are the games that appear repeatedly on bonus hunt streams for a reason. Their bonus features have the range to produce results from near zero to multiples of thousands times the stake.
Include a range of games rather than hunting a single title. Concentrating your entire hunt on one game means your result depends entirely on the variance of that game's bonus. Spreading across ten to fifteen different titles means individual poor results are less impactful on the overall outcome.
Be aware of buy feature options. Many modern slots offer a bonus buy feature that lets you purchase a bonus round directly rather than waiting for it to trigger in the base game. Bonus buying is a faster way to collect bonuses for a hunt, but it costs significantly more per bonus than triggering naturally, typically 50x to 200x the bet size. Some casinos restrict bonus buying during promotional play. Factor this into your budget calculation if you plan to use it.
Consider the bonus type. Free spin rounds with multipliers (Gates of Olympus, Sweet Bonanza) behave differently from pick-and-choose bonuses, respin mechanics, or hold-and-win features. A varied selection across different bonus types produces a more interesting opening phase and a more diverse variance profile.
This is the payoff. You have your collected bonuses, your record of what each cost, and your total hunt spend. Now you open them one by one.
Open each game in turn and let the bonus play out fully. Record the result for both the win amount and the multiplier relative to your bet size. After all bonuses are opened, total the winnings and compare against the total hunt cost.
The outcome is expressed in two ways. The raw profit or loss, meaning total winnings minus total hunt cost. And the average multiplier, total winnings divided by (number of bonuses × bet size per bonus). If your average multiplier is above the average cost per bonus in multiples of your bet size, the hunt paid. If it is below, it did not.
Common benchmarks used in the streaming community: an average multiplier of 50x to 100x on a well-selected set of high volatility bonuses is considered a reasonable expectation in terms of what the games are capable of producing. A hunt that averages well above this has gone very well. A hunt that averages below it, particularly well below it, has been a losing session from a pure financial perspective.
If you are playing through a casino welcome bonus while doing a bonus hunt, there are additional considerations that make the session significantly more complicated.
Most casino bonus terms include a maximum bet restriction, commonly €5 per spin, sometimes lower. This applies throughout the entire period your bonus is active. If you are collecting bonuses at €1 per spin to stay within the maximum bet limit, each bonus is collected at that stake and opens at that stake.
Some casinos also have specific terms about whether bonus hunting is permitted during promotional play. This is separate from whether it is permitted in general. Even if the casino permits bonus hunting as a format, their promotional terms may prohibit it. Read the bonus terms specifically on this point before combining a bonus hunt with a welcome offer.
The safest approach for your first bonus hunt is to do it with real money rather than bonus funds. You have full flexibility over bet sizing, no maximum bet restrictions, and no risk of having a bonus voided for terms violations. Once you are familiar with how the format works, you can assess whether combining it with a promotional offer makes sense.
The single best preparation for doing a bonus hunt yourself is watching one from start to finish on JustCasinoTV. DomiNate runs regular structured hunts on stream where the collecting phase, the record keeping, the opening, and the final calculation are all done transparently on camera.
Watching a real hunt gives you a feel for pacing, game selection in practice, how bet sizing decisions are made, and what the opening phase actually looks and feels like across a range of different bonus types. It also gives you a realistic picture of variance. You will see hunts that go very well, hunts that break even, and hunts where the numbers simply do not come in despite a well-structured approach.
The difference between reading a guide and watching fifty bonuses open live is the difference between knowing how something works and understanding what it feels like. If you are planning a hunt, watch a few first.
You can find DomiNate's regular sessions on Twitch, YouTube, and Kick via JustCasinoTV. Hunt sessions are among the most requested formats from the community and run regularly.
Starting without a hard budget. The most common and most costly mistake. Decide your budget before you start and treat it as a hard limit, not a guideline.
Choosing too few games. A hunt across three or four titles is high variance on the overall result. Ten to fifteen games gives you a much more meaningful sample.
Playing through bonuses accidentally. It is easy to forget you are in hunting mode and let a bonus play out rather than closing the game. Stay focused during the collecting phase. If you play through a bonus by accident, note it and adjust your target count accordingly.
Opening bonuses before the collecting phase is complete. The format works because the opening is a sustained event rather than a series of isolated moments. Opening bonuses during the hunt breaks the structure and makes accounting harder.
Not checking casino terms first. Covered above but worth repeating. Confirm bonus hunting is permitted before you start, not after.
A bonus hunt is a structured session format where you collect triggered bonus features across multiple slots before opening them all in sequence. The concept is straightforward. The execution requires a clear budget, a target bonus count, a consistent bet size, a varied game selection, and the discipline to stop collecting when your budget is reached regardless of whether you have hit your target.
The format is compelling because the opening phase concentrates the variance of a long session into a sustained sequence of results. Done well, it is one of the most engaging ways to play online slots. Done without a plan, it is one of the fastest ways to spend more than intended.
If you want to see what a well-run hunt looks like before trying one yourself, come and watch on JustCasinoTV. DomiNate runs regular hunts with the community where the planning, the collecting, and the opening are all done live and transparently. There is no better way to learn the format than watching it in action.
About the author Oliver is a Casino & Sportsbook Specialist at JustCasinoSites with a background as an active casino player. This article was written in collaboration with DomiNate, JustCasinoTV's lead casino streamer, who has run hundreds of bonus hunts on stream since joining the channel. All content is verified by Freddi Nilsson before publication. [View full profile →]
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