This question was submitted to my site recently as a comment, and felt like something that made for a good separate post. The topic is around receiving an offer but not playing the day it’s picked up:
The Caesars 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 free play promotions?
What if I have a free play offer, I come in and accept the offer but then bank the free play and leave without gambling, then come back the next day (or within the 72 hour period the banked free play is valid) and THEN gamble?
What if I accept the offer and then only gamble on freeplay?
Great questions, and I appreciate your asking!
First off, a reminder for those who aren’t familiar with how casino offers work – they’re generated based on your previous play, and are usually derived based on your average play per visit. The more data they have to work with, the more precise an offer will get, as a general rule, and more frequent and recent visits can help too.
Offers are designed to encourage a repeat visit. The casinos are expecting in return that the offer will encourage play equivalent to what they see from you, on average, in return for being given such an offer.
Whether the offer is free play, a gift card, a physical item, food and beverage, a room offer – none of these are because they like you and just want to say thanks – they’re expecting something in return.
As such, coming to collect a gift and then not playing is considered a “no-play day.” If you do anything with your card on the casino’s property, whether swiping for a promotion, making a purchase or gambling, you generally trigger a visit in the casino’s system.
If you don’t play, or play way below average, that will impact your offers in the future. If you don’t care about this, that’s fine, but many players care about getting persistent offers in the future.
No-play days in particular irk casinos the most, because they literally got nothing from your visit, and spent money via the gift for that privilege. Some casinos may offer some or all players a pass once, depending on how they calculate the formula, but do it repeatedly and they’ll simply blacklist the player from future marketing offers because they don’t trust the player to play in return for their offer. Your previous play earns the offer you get – no play means no offer.
If you accept the free play on day one, and go play it on day two or three, that will trigger multiple gaming days and will water down your daily average. That will hurt your offers, but not necessarily cause them to go away. It effectively divides your gambling across two days for the average instead of one, and that would likely drive your offer down pretty significantly.
That’s not the case for all casinos – some do a trip measurement, which can group multiple days together and such. However, Caesars is pretty well known to do an Average Daily Theoretical calculation, which calculates based on the games you play and what the house edge is, what they would expect you to lose in a daily measurement.
So you’d have two days tracked by visiting on day one to claim, and playing on day two. It would therefore be best to play the day you claim, and contain it to a day, for best results.
What if they give you a bunch of good freeplay offers but you don’t use them?
Are you more likely to get fewer/worse or more/better offers the next month (or no change)?
Generally speaking, your offers are your offers until you put down new play that could change things. However, as some casinos use a range of time to calculate an offer, if old play drops off, your offers could improve or shrink, change frequency, based on the play they’re now evaluating. Some casinos will cut off offers if a certain amount of time without a visit has passed (6 or 12 months are common window, but not an absolute number). So things won’t change often, but can, based on a given casino’s offer structures.