An Australian player's A$327,000 win at Casino-Mate in 2015
This article was written in 2015 and we keep it as a record of how the online casinos of that time presented their games and promotions. The operators, offers and figures it mentions may no longer exist or may have changed, and nothing on this page is a current offer. 18+.
In early 2015 Casino-Mate, a casino which addressed the Australian market and which is not among the operators we work with today, announced the run of wins of a regular player, known by the initials D.C., who had closed it with 327,000 Australian dollars (A$) in his account. The largest part, A$298,000, had come from one session on the slot Burning Desire, a title of Microgaming.
What the casino announced
The release described D.C. as "one of our most faithful members", a player who had collected wins on several games before the big one, and added that he meant to spend the money on travel and on "general spoiling". The winner never had a surname in the announcements of the period, and the sum always had two decimals (A$327,000.00 in the original text).
Carla Harris, presented as casino manager and spokesperson, was quoted as saying that the casino celebrated every big win but that this one was "particularly special", because D.C. was one of its most loyal members. The quote ended (as they all did then) with the remark that the player had chosen the right casino.
Burning Desire was a slot of Microgaming with five reels and 243 "ways to win" (the system in which a combination pays whenever the symbols fall on adjacent reels, whatever the row) and a "free spins" feature in which the winnings were multiplied by a fixed factor. The release praised its "hot features" in the glossy language of the brochures of the time.
We would add only what the brochure never said: a win of A$298,000 on a slot of this kind is the rare tail of a distribution whose average is the "RTP" (the theoretical return to the player) printed in the help panel. It is worth reading that figure before you read the press releases of any casino, old or new.
The catalogue and the welcome bonus of the time
Casino-Mate claimed more than 650 games, all from Microgaming (the Isle of Man developer whose games business is today Games Global, as our page on Microgaming becoming Apricot tells), from the slots to the table games and the "progressive" jackpots. New titles arrived every month, and the welcome offer was a "4-tier" bonus of $1,400 over the first four deposits, plus thirty "free spins" on the slot Game of Thrones.
The four tiers were 100 per cent up to $100 on the first deposit, 200 per cent up to $50 on the second, 25 per cent up to $500 on the third and 50 per cent up to $750 on the fourth, and the arithmetic deserves a line. A player who wanted the whole package had to deposit, in order, $100, $25, $2,000 and $1,500 (the amounts at which each tier reached its ceiling).
That is $3,625 of his money for $1,400 of bonus! The percentages that impressed at first sight, like the 200 per cent of the second tier, were capped at the smallest sums, while the tiers that carried the money asked for deposits of thousands; it is a structure still seen in 2026 on many welcome pages.
The release said nothing about the "wagering" (the volume of bets required before a withdrawal), which was in the terms of the time and which nobody can read today. The real value of the $1,400 is therefore unknown, and certainly lower than the headline, as with every "match" bonus (the bonus proportional to the deposit).
The rest was the boilerplate of the period, with the "128-bit" encryption, the support "24/7" by chat, e-mail and toll-free telephone and the "swift and efficient banking options", claims that we report as the casino made them, since we never tested Casino-Mate. The casino belonged to Vegas Partner Lounge (VPL), the group of Golden Riviera, Crazy Vegas, Maple Casino, 777 Dragon and River Nile.
Seen from 2026
Casino-Mate, Crazy Vegas and Golden Riviera were Microgaming casinos of the Vegas Partner Lounge group, and none of them is among the operators we work with today; the 4-tier bonus, the spins on Game of Thrones and the figures above no longer exist. The games of Microgaming are now published by Games Global (since 2021-2022), and the images on this page lead to Platinum Play, a casino of that family still listed on this site.
Two things remain from the story. A big win is news because it is rare, and the bonus attached to it was the price of the publicity rather than a gift, as the page on no deposit casinos explains with its calculations for today's offers. The other announcements of those years, including the A$30,000 win of a new Casino-Mate player in December 2014, are kept in our news archive, where you can read them in the same tone.
By the Online-Casinos.ws editorial team · Online since 2002 · Last updated: 9 October 2026