New Zealanders might not gamble as much as their Aussie neighbors, but only because the laws on gambling are a little stricter here. Still, when it comes to online gambling, and online casinos in particular, they are as legal here as they are in Australia.
Over the past few days we have been testing and reviewing a number of casinos that accept players from New Zealand, hoping to find the best one out there for the sake of this review. There are many great casinos around and many substandard ones, but in the end we found the perfect real money casino for Kiwis to enjoy, and the result might surprise you.
Silver Oak Casino
The reason that this choice might surprise you, is because Silver Oak Casino has mainly been considered as a casino for US players. The gambling market is huge in the US and many online casinos are simply not legal there. You can therefore understand just why Silver Oak Casino targeted this market, and because Silver Oak Casino is based in and regulated in North America, everything it does is legal.
However, Silver Oak Casino isn’t just available in North America and in the last year or so it has done a great deal more to target players in other countries. Players in most countries are allowed to play on Silver Oak Casino, and that includes New Zealand.
The Basics
Silver Oak Casino has been around since 2009 and is part of a brand that has been involved with this industry much longer than that. It uses the Realtime Gaming software, which is almost as old as Microgaming, having been established way back in 1998. This was one of the first casino software packages to make it onto the market and it has focused on providing high quality slots and table games ever since. They don’t release a huge amount of slots every month, certainly not as much as Microgaming do, but the ones they do release tend to be of a very high quality. Realtime Gaming has a huge following, which is in part thanks to its many slots, and in part thanks to its great blackjack and roulette variants.
Tournaments
One of the things we enjoyed the most about Silver Oak Casino were the slot tournaments. Such things were unheard of just a few years ago, but as online slots become more and more popular, they have been introduced on the biggest casinos. These occur on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, the latter of which tend to offer the biggest prize pools.
The slot tournaments can be accessed via the Silver Oak Casino software. These play-out much like a blackjack or poker tournament, but the emphasis here is on luck. There is no skill involved here, but if your luck is in then you could win thousands of dollars. The individual slot machine used for the tournaments tends to change, but the details are displayed on the tournament screen and can be viewed before you sign-up. As far as the buy-in goes, this ranges from around $5, all the way up to $20, which pretty much makes these tournaments accessible to all players.
Bonuses and Promotions
There are two new member bonuses on Silver Oak Casino. The main one is the Free Casino Welcome Bonus, where all new depositors to Silver Oak Casino can earn up to $10,000 in free cash, which can be used on any of the slots or table games. This is paid out over the course of your first ten deposits and you will need to make sure that you use the correct bonus code not just when you sign up, but when you make each of those deposits.
If you want to pickup some free cash and try Silver Oak Casino without depositing any money, then you should opt for the No-Deposit Casio Bonus. This bonus ranges from $15 to $100, but this is free money so even if you end up with just $15 or $20, you really can’t complain. That’s enough money to get you started and can help you to get accustomed to Silver Oak Casino before you make your first deposit. However, this bonus might stop you from using the Free Casino Welcome Bonus mentioned above, so you should be careful as the No-Deposit Casio Bonus has nothing on the Free Casino Welcome Bonus.
There are also a number of other promotions available on Silver Oak Casino. These are changing all of the time, but at the time of writing these include the Crewpon promotion, where teamwork is the name of the game; the Happy Hour bonus, where you can pick-up a deposit bonus if you deposit and play at certain times of the day; the $10k Draw, where you can pickup a single casino chip worth $10,000: and many more.
Best Offer of 2019 -$1200 Free Play-through Bonus
Royal Vegas is going crazy with their promos this month if you are a Canadian based player. They are a serious operator and accept a host of easy deposit options such as eCheck. Quick payouts, and highly recommended.