Caesars Rewards is one of a few national comps programs available. Caesars Entertainment owns a variety of properties across the country, and with the merger with Eldorado resorts, there’s more than 50 casinos in the program now.
Caesars maintains a consistent policy across the country in terms of how it runs its program, which also helps to make it understandable. For instance, Caesars tends to have consistent policies nationwide for things like tier matching.
So today I’ll share the basics about the program and things to know, so when you step into one of their properties you have a better understanding of how to make the most of it.
Earning Tier Credits and Comps
The basic program is pretty straightforward. For every $5 in slot play, or $10 in Video Poker (with exceptions), you earn a tier credit and one Reward Credit, which is the comps part of the program. 100 Reward Credits are the equivalent of $1. Table play is rated based on your bet size and the house edge on them, so there’s no clearly published numbers on what you can earn.
You can earn tier credit bonuses based on the amount of tier credits you earn in a day, and sometimes there are multipliers to amp up one of those stats, but that’s a reliable baseline regardless of where you are in the country. You won’t find your earnings to be any different in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, for instance.
You also can earn tier credits for spending, so if you don’t get comped rooms, or opt to pay for an upgrade, you will get some additional credit for that now too that helps you build your tier
Tier Levels Based on Play
Caesars tiers are pretty easy to understand as well:
- Gold: The base tier you get for joining the program
- Platinum: Earn 5,000 tier credits and you’ll earn their second tier.
- Diamond: Get to 15,000 tier credits to reach this one, and some helpful perks begin to flow at this point, such as resort fee waivers and line cuts in certain markets.
- Diamond Plus: At 25,000 points, the Diamond Plus sub-tier gives you complimentary access to the Laurel Lounges that are open across the country. The number of these nationwide have shrunk since the pandemic, including the closure of all the ones in Las Vegas. Others have been converted to Seven Stars lounges which require an even higher tier. Right now this tier also qualifies for four free drink vouchers daily in Las Vegas.
- Diamond Elite: At 75,000 points, the Diamond Elite sub-tier grants you a reimbursement of up to $600 in airfare for a trip to Las Vegas, limit one per year.
- Seven Stars: The top tier that is achieved in any regular sense is Seven Stars, which is achieved at 150,000 tier credits.
Once you achieve a level, you keep it for the remainder of that year, the entire following year, and through January 31 of the year after that. That following year, if you renew, it extends another 12 months beyond the previous expiration.
Tiers must be achieved or renewed by the end of the calendar year, as tier points reset to 0 every January 1.
Tier perks build pretty fast (there were more that made it even better, but they’ve been scaling it back over the years). However, the Diamond level is where it’s pretty much at, with a number of very valuable perks that can save you hundreds of dollars a year.
The reality is even lower level players can likely achieve Platinum on the back of tier bonuses, special promotions, and regular play. If a Caesars property is your local, Diamond is probably within reach too, even without betting big.
Caesars Offers: Focused on Rooms
Caesars Rewards offers tend to favor room comps over throw-ins. Most of the time your offers will be free rooms, and small amounts of freeplay, but you can certainly see the freeplay offers grow depending on your level of play.
If complimentary rooms is a primary comp goal, you won’t be disappointed with Caesars Rewards as things stand today – even lower level players have a decent shot at rooms.
There will be free play offers given, with some markets more generous than others – in my case, I’ve found the offers from Atlantic City more aligned with locals markets, with the opportunity for free play and gifts regularly popping up. In Vegas, most free play offers are tied to comp offers with larger restrictions than the standard comp calendar for booking rooms. So you’ll have to decide what makes more sense for you.
Caesars tends to base offers on ADT, or Average Daily Theoretical loss. It’s casino math that effectively calculates your bets and the house edge on what you’re playing. Caesars doesn’t tend to penalize you when you win, as they expect the math will work out over time. So winning trips won’t knock your offers down.
Atlantic City offers “Return Rewards” which are bounceback offers based on your play. Return within 60 days and additional free play will be made available to you.
Your Play is Rated by Market
Based on your play, you will receive offers in the mail for your market. You will sometimes receive teaser offers from other markets that you haven’t played, based off your play in other markets.
Your play in each market is rated differently, so if you play heavily in Vegas and less so in Atlantic City, your Atlantic City offers will reflect the lower play, and the Vegas offers the higher play.
This is great if you have a local and play there, and have never been to Las Vegas or Atlantic City – you might have the opportunity to get offers. Based on my play in other markets, I got a free room in Laughlin for my first visit, for instance, and now get more offers there since I established play. So it’s nice to not to have to start over.
Summary
Caesars Rewards is a straightforward program with national reach in a variety of markets. Earning is the same everywhere, so it’s dependable and predictable. The ability to earn free rooms with waived resort fees (in the case of Diamond-level and higher players) is a highly attractive component of the program, and room comps tend to be generously available with even a little bit of play.
Are you a fan of Caesars Rewards? What’s your favorite perk? Share in the comments!
The Caesar’s Rewards kiosks at Horseshoe Baltimore have stickers on them that say “Redemption without additional play may lead to exclusion from future offers”.
Can you explain exactly how that works?
Does that mean if they’re having a gift promotion, and I come get the gift and leave without gambling, I won’t get anymore gift or freeplay promotions?
What if I have a freeplay offer, I come in and accept the offer but then bank the freeplay and leave without gambling, then come back the next day (or within the 72 hour period the banked freeplay is valid) and THEN gamble?
What if I accept the offer and then only gamble on freeplay?
Great questions! Your offers are based on your previous play. If you show up, accept an offer and don’t play, you have a “no-play day” which waters down your average. Many systems will also watch for these and potentially penalize a player for this. If you swipe your card on day one, accept a free play offer and play on day two, you’re showing activity in the system for two days, so you’re still watering down your average. So it’s not recommended.
If you only gamble on free play, it depends on what happens with it. Once you play your free play through, it’s now cash and the cash play counts as gambling activity towards your daily average, a good thing. If you have an epic run on free play, that’s fine, as they see a lot of cash gambling and it counts towards your average. If you bet big, get almost nothing out of it, and leave, it’s nearly a no-play day and will reflect that in your future offers accordingly.
There’s enough good stuff here to flesh out that you’ll likely see a post on the site based on your question soon. Thanks for asking!
I dropped a whole lot of cash at Horseshoe (Caesar’s) on July 31.
I think I already had my offers coming in for August.
I haven’t been back yet.
If I stay out of there for a month, will I likely get good offers because that day brought my average up or is it just kind of wasted because it was in July?
Your play is never wasted! But the timing of the play will impact when it folds into the offers. Some casinos are faster than others, so it could show up in September or it might even take until October. Being your most recent play, it should have an impact on offers, but if it’s one session of like 20 it might not move the needle all that much – just depends on how often you go.
They’re giving me $240 Return Rewards freeplay through next Monday because of those last couple of days I was in there that I mentioned in my previous post. I haven’t been back in there since, and I’m tempted to go back in and use the Return Rewards, but this month’s offers are really lame, so I think I might just stay out of there and see if I get better offers next month or October.
It’s a gamble, as it were, but definitely your choice! Return Rewards calculate on a different scale from regular offers, in my experience, so it’ll be interesting to see what you end up with on the actual offers.
Hi Joshua,
Love the insight on of this! I have been searching out a place to ask this question because I received a lot of free play at a casino I tried for the first time this year. I have always been an M Life patron but discovered a Harrah’s casino in Metropolis, IL about 2.5 hours from Nashville. I played slots there in January for an over-night trip and probably lost $1,200. I played again a month or two ago and lost maybe $900. They sent me offers for August and September of $165 Mon, Tus, Wed, or Thu, $325 Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Total of $1,140 each week or $4,900 per month. I went each weekend in August and cleared around $8,000 in winnings. I played with my money and did spend around $800 one night but the rest of the time I literally only played free play. I have never had this much free play before!! Especially after I had only played two times there. It really makes me wonder about the aggressiveness of my play and if that factored into the high comps. I am wondering if they will uninvite me though after I do the same thing this month…
Caesars-owned casinos tend to calculate your offers based on what they call Average Daily Theoretical, or ADT. They don’t care so much about wins and losses as they do coin-in and the house edge on the games you play. If you lost $1,200, you may have done many more times that in actual wagers, and they would like that, so the offers sent over would be generous accordingly.
Normally a casino offer is anywhere between 20 and 40 percent of your expected losses, so if they sent you that much freeplay against $1,000 in losses per visit, on average, that’s around the middle of that range with a $325 free play offer, perhaps a bit generous but since you haven’t played there much it could be a teaser offer to encourage more play.
Whether your cashing out on those free play offers in August will gut your offers will simply come down to whether you played as hard as you did on the trips that encouraged those offers. If you just caught some good luck and still put in a similar amount of play, you may very well find the offers hold as the casino expects over time they’ll come out ahead. Or if you cut and run after a big win and your coin-in dropped a lot, you’ll probably see the offers drop accordingly.
The wild card is Caesars is now owned by Eldorado (even though they kept the name Caesars), and they tend to be much less generous with comps, so you may see the offers cut even if you did everything exactly the same. I’m already hearing of this from some Caesars players. Eldorado may favor a different formula that factors in wins/losses and that could hurt you too. So as you can see it’s a bit of a moving target, but ultimately the comps you got in August were earned by your previous play, so enjoy it, and if they keep it up, great, but if not, it sounds like you got a lot of good stuff out of it!
(Just as an FYI, I’m going to turn this into a post as well; I think it’ll help others.)
Awesome! Thanks for the reply! I really don’t play much anymore (other than taking advantage right now) so I’m anticipating the offers will dry up.
What if I average $100 once a week for three months, then spend $8,000 in one evening the last week of the month right after offers are sent out and end up with lame offers?
Would it be better to just not go in at all until the following month’s (hopefully better) offers are revealed?
I think I’m missing a component to this question – are you saying you’re going to go back to the $100 a week, and so it’d be better for the better offers to hit first?
If you play way out of your range once, but have an otherwise consistent average, that might be looked at as an aberration. When I began playing higher at a casino I had previously played much lower, it took awhile for my offers to balance back out at my new level – probably six months and 10 visits or so, in fact.
I would presume the offers would move more if that was your most recent visit, especially so if you planned to resume $100 a week play after that, further watering it down. If that’s not what you’re asking, feel free to clarify and I’ll do my best to answer!
I’m not sure if my (atypical) $8,000 loss was factored into this month’s mediocre offers or not (because it was near the end of the month and I’ve had better offers in the past), or whether I should accept the freeplay offers and then gamble as little real money as possible to try and recover some of my losses (which will lower my average) or skip the offers all month hoping that I’ll get better offers next month because of the date where I lost $8,000.
I was getting like $800 a week in freeplay offers at a Caesar’s-owned casino in 2020 after my first 4 visits (in which I lost about $6,000 all in the same month).
(Those were the same visits I mentioned in the other post on this page; I went back and checked my records, those visits all happened in December).
Sorry if I’m posting too much here, but I’d like to further clarify that the December losses I referred to occurred in 2019 and resulted in several months where I received a few hundred dollars worth of freeplay each week (and won my money bavk), whereas the $8,000 loss I referred to occurred at the same casino on February 18 of this year. I haven’t seen a dramatic increase in freeplay offers for March.
(I also spent a few thousand about a week before that at a different casino, but that visit resulted in my hitting a Major progressive on $1 denom Mustang Money 2 for a sizeable session win, which was why I had so much cash on hand at the other casino).
(I haven’t seen a large jump in offers there either).
February 18 would have happened too late to reflect on March offers, so probably April would be my guess. Many casinos are already prepping offers for the following month by the early part of the previous month (takes time to print, mail, etc., which many still do.) Thanks for clarifying!
I had kind of a similar experience…
I visited a Horseshoe (Caesar’s-owned) casino at the end of November, 2019 and spent probably a little over $5,000 on one day, a small amount on a second day, and then a day or two in December where I spent maybe another $2,000, then I stopped going in there.
Around February 2020, I started getting mailers with like $800 a week worth of freeplay offers, which, at the time, were good for 72 hours. I didn’t realize that at first, and didn’t bother using them, but once I figured out I could do that, I started driving up there to activate the offers and then using a few hundred dollars freeplay on the 4th day. I was able to my recoup my losses that way. They did reduce the offer amounts a little bit every month because I was mostly using freeplay and not spending the excessive amount of cash I was before.
I wasn’t even spending my own money a few of the times I went up there, but then I saw a sign that said you can be excluded from future offers if you accept an offer and don’t spend money gambling the same day, so I always made sure to spend a little bit of real money each time.
It seems they now limit freeplay offers to 24 hours. I don’t know if I had anything to do with that or not.
Free play offer changes can happen for many reasons – marketing changes, new ownership (Eldorado bought Caesars in 2020), or even your grouping (some casinos cluster players differently at different times, and that can include how long an offer can be active). For example, at one casino, I get offers 3x a week. Previously, I got one offer that lasted six weeks but could only be claimed once. Before that I got offers 3x a week. So how they group you in the offer buckets can have something to do with frequency and offer window sizes.
At my local Harrah’s they used to have free play offers by the calendar day so it was commonly known to stop by just before midnight, play the quick hit for both days, and leave. Since then the free play offers start at 6 am.
I’ve noticed many casinos now leave a gap between midnight and 6 a.m., probably at least in part to avoid double dipping like that! But also many casinos the gaming day doesn’t reset at midnight, so having the offers better align with the gaming day ensures that only one offer is available per gaming day.
Is this just happening to me (likely because my ADT has reduced in the past three months compared with prior activity), or is it that Caesar’s in general has become more stingy with respect to comp’d room offers? I used to routinely get local offers for a couple of comp’d nights per week at my local Caesar’s properties, but the past three months I’ve seen the comp’d offer decrease from 2 nights/wk to 1 night/wk to now no comp’d rooms. If this is a general trend and not my fault for less coin in than in the past, then that is disappointing.
Hi there! A few thoughts based on your question:
–Right now casinos are seeing surging demand as everything reopens. They’re also struggling to staff back up in many cases. This combination means some are easing up on comps because they don’t have to try as hard. Offers are designed to drive demand, and if the demand is already there, they will understandably throttle back the offers.
–Caesars was acquired by Eldorado, and Eldorado has a history of cutting comps. Some believe this is part of it, but it’s unusual times so it’s truly hard to compare apples to apples right now. If the offers don’t rebound when things start getting back to normal, we’ll have a better idea of why.
–It’s also helpful to check the Caesars calendar when logged in to your Caesars Rewards account. Many times the offer they send you won’t necessarily be the best room offer. I get offers for two nights and $20 free play for Vegas, but if I log in and check the calendar I can many times get a 4-5 night string of nights together if I’m willing to forego the $20 free play (which I definitely will for more nights).
Weekdays are almost always easier to get then weekends, of course, but the calendar usually offers something. I have noticed it’s harder to get a room in places like Las Vegas right now, but I’ve also seen reports that demand there is high right now, particularly on weekends, so that can be pushing the rates up out of comp territory in many cases. But I also see these numbers updating constantly, and strings of dates I couldn’t get comped one week, I was able to a couple of weeks later. So it’s also worth checking back in regularly as people can/do cancel and it can change things quickly.
Hi there. Quick Q – me and my gf want to become Diamond members. We currently have 5000 tier credits. Does it make more sense to get the extra 10,000 credits before the year is over, or to wait until Jan 2022? From your explanation, it seems that if we become Diamond in Jan 2022, we will have the status until Jan 2024. VS. if we get Diamond now, it will expire in Jan 2023. Sorry if this is confusing – let me know if you need any clarification. Thanks in advance
Hey James! I’m going to do a full post on the question coming up, but didn’t want to leave you hanging too long. The most important thing to remember is you’ll lose the 5000 tier credits come January 1, so it’s a question of earning 10k now vs. 15k later.
The other question would be how much you’d benefit from the perks. For instance, getting Diamond this year gets you a $100 celebration dinner to use this year, and another one next year when your tier renews. You get no resort fees instantly from the time you reach Diamond – so if you have a number of stays planned that’s cash in the bank saved (or more bankroll for gambling to renew your tier). I’d simply weigh all of those since you’ve only made it 1/3 of the way there.
I actually first earned Diamond in September myself, so I’m not afraid to complete the tier later in the year knowing I’ve got another year ahead of me; if you’re going to go for it, don’t forget Caesars also offers bonus tier credits when you earn enough in a single day, so it can reduce how much you have to gamble to get the tier. The sweet spot is 2,500 in a day gets you 5,000 as a bonus (if you do 5,000 you get 10,000 as a bonus, or Diamond in a Day as it’s known).
I saw a post somewhere on the Internet from a guy who said he signed up for casino credit somewhere and they started sending him huge freeplay offers.
Is that typical?
(I don’t know which casino it was).
I asked a host at Horseshoe Baltimore what the benefits of opening a casino credit account were and he just told me the basics of what casino credit does. I didn’t ask him specifically about freeplay because I felt that might make them suspicious.
Would it be worth applying just to see if they offer freeplay perks? I have good credit…
That doesn’t sound typical to me. Generally offers are generated based on previous play, not a credit line that may or may not be used, for a level of gambling that is simply unknown. You could pull $500, play three hands of Blackjack, stop, and pay it back, or you could play for hours, putting a lot more wagers against the house edge, which is generally what casinos want to see.
So generally speaking, lines of credit don’t tend to have an impact on offers, and it’s highly unlikely signing up for one will have any other impacts.
Could a specific casino be doing something unusual or taking that risk? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t expect that to be the norm.
I have a free play offer for 6/5 but I will be there 6/4. Do you know if they will let me use it a day early?
Generally speaking, casino offers are only valid for the day they’re issued. It’s rare that they’ll be honored for a day they’re not for.
How does online gambling/sports bets effect ADT? We visit Tropicana AC (Caesars) several times a year with a consistent bankroll. My offers have remained fairly consistent. Recently Caesars has been approved to offer online gambling in the state I reside. If I play slots online occasionally with a much smaller bankroll will this decrease my ADT and therefore effect the offers I get from Tropicana?
Hey Kevin! I haven’t specifically tried sports betting in New Jersey myself, but online gaming I did there was treated separately from in-casino play, in that my online play wouldn’t impact my physical casino rating and offers. So I would presume with mobile sports betting it would be the same. Now, making a wager at the casino itself would be on-site play and likely treated as such, so I think that would be different.