The Gold Factory freeroll of January 2015 at Crazy Vegas, a €25,000 slot tournament
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+.
A pool of €25,000, no entry fee, ten days of play on Gold Factory and €5,000 to the winner. That was the multiplayer "FreeRoll" (a slot tournament that costs nothing to enter, with the prizes put up by the house) with which Crazy Vegas opened 2015, in a release of January that this page keeps. The casino no longer trades under that name, and the figures, also given in dollars and in pounds, are kept as they were printed.
Ten days, one slot and a pool of €25,000
Most players at Crazy Vegas, the release said, needed "little excuse" to play the highly popular Gold Factory, and a €25,000 pool with no entry fee was likely, it added, to have every gamer shining with excitement, a sentence we keep for the record. The tournament was open to every member, it ran for ten days, and the overall winner took "a whopping €5,000" (a fifth of the pool).
Registration opened on 8 January 2015 at 17:00 GMT, the tournament started on 10 January at 17:00 and ran until 20 January at 23:59 GMT, and the prizes went to the "leaderboard" (the ranking by score), so that the price of entry was volume. A player who spun fifteen times a minute for an hour a day placed nine thousand bets in ten days (fifteen times sixty times ten), at his own stake!
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Gold Factory was set in a factory churning out gold ("think Willy Wonka's chocolate factory but with riches", the release suggested), with five reels, fifty paylines, bonuses and free spins "that offer untold rewards", the untold being the right word, since the release told none of the figures. The paytable was in the help panel, where the players of 2015 could read it, as you can today.
Harry von Schlussel (manager and spokesperson) remarked that it was "the first tournament of a brand new year", promised the players a treat and asked, rhetorically, whether anyone could go wrong "playing a factory that makes gold". A factory that makes gold for the house is the definition of a slot, and the leaderboard added a race to it, which is what a tournament sells.
The package offered to the newcomers of January
Whoever was new to the casino "need not feel intimidated", the release went on, because "royal treatment" waited for him there. It was a welcome package of €500 across the first three deposits, the first matched in full up to €150 (100 per cent), the second twice over up to €100 (200 per cent), the third by half up to €250 (50 per cent). Three tiers, three percentages, one small print.
The other door was the FreePlay, €3,000 of credits for sixty minutes with "part of the winnings" to keep, and the "wagering" (how many times the bonus had to be bet before any withdrawal) of the three tiers lived in that small print, which nobody can consult today. Royal treatment has its arithmetic: €150 plus €50 plus €500 makes €700 of the player's money for €500 of credits, a ratio that the release did not print.
Under the tournament came the usual paragraphs, more than 650 games of Microgaming, an encryption of "128-bit", the web wallets, a support desk that never closed, all of it repeated here as the casino wrote it and none of it checked by us, because Crazy Vegas was never among the houses we tried. The release also named the other houses of Vegas Partner Lounge (VPL), Maple Casino, Casino-Mate, River Nile, 777 Dragon and Golden Riviera among them.
The freeroll, eleven years on
Crazy Vegas, Golden Riviera, Casino-Mate and Maple Casino no longer trade under those names, no casino of that group is on our list in 2026, and the freeroll, the three tiers and the hour of FreePlay went with them; Gold Factory itself passed, with the rest of Microgaming's catalogue, to Games Global, which has published it since 2021-2022.
The same slot had made a winner at Golden Riviera a few weeks earlier, as our page on the win of December 2014 at Golden Riviera tells.
What survived is the format. A "freeroll" of 2026 works as the one of January 2015 did, with a free entry, a ranking by score and a pool put up by the casino. It is paid for in the same coin, the hours at the reels and the bets that lift a name up the table; the rules of the ranking (which spins count, and over how many of them) are worth reading before the prize, if you mean to enter.
The screenshots open Platinum Play, a Microgaming house of another group that is still on our list (an affiliate link, as the disclosure box above says); its offer of today is in our review, written after a trial in "demo" mode (free play, no deposit), and the terms on its own page overrule anything printed here.
For the offers of 2026, the no-deposit bonuses sit on our world list and the "free spins" of the moment on the free spins page, both counted in figures rather than adjectives. The Break Away freeroll of June 2014, the pair of slots that Golden Riviera launched in March 2014 and the other releases of those years wait in our news archive.
By the Online-Casinos.ws editorial team · Online since 2002 · Last updated: 9 October 2026