Free play can work in various ways in a casino, and the way it works at particular casinos can create issues if you’re not careful, as this player learned:
I inadvertently left some free play in a machine. I don’t know how this happened. I pulled my ticket. A short time later two casino representatives approached me to inform me of this issue. The amount was only a few dollars. How did they know of this incident, and why the concern? How could the machine miss the comp amount on payout?
Karol D.
There are broadly two ways free play can operate. In one scenario, you have to put money in the machine. You place a wager, the spin completes, and the casino “rebates” your spin back from your free play balance. When you run out of free play, the rebates end. If you choose to cash out and move on before you’ve used all your free play, your balance remains on your players card to use on a different machine.
However, in a second variation, you can load a balance of free play onto the machine. The machine will generally display it as part of your balance – if you had money in the machine, your balance could be a mix of free play and cash. You have to spin through it completely once before what’s remaining is a cash balance you can do what you want with.
The challenge is when you don’t finish spinning through your entire free play balance. If you attempt to cash out, the machine will cash out what you have in cash, but your remaining free play balance will stay on the machine.
What happens from there can vary. We’ve seen casinos where a second cash out button will print a ticket that is a free play voucher. In other cases the casino won’t let you cash it out, meaning you have to play through it. And if you opt to walk away from the machine without doing so (or perhaps noticing it’s still got a balance), it could be left behind for someone else to play through.
There are some ways to tell if you have free play in the machine (the cash out test being one – if you still have a non-zero balance, you still have free play) but this is a good opportunity for us to remind players to not load more free play on a slot than they want to put at risk, because moving on may not be so simple if you load $100 and want to move on after $50.
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You always want to make sure you pull your card before you cash out and leave the machine. It probably varies from casino to casino, but at the racino I play at, when you pull your card and have free play left, it moves it to your comp cash as a separate balance which can be downloaded again.
You go to one of the casinos with a bit more foresight on that situation! We’ve unfortunately seen ones where pulling your card does not push the remaining free play back, hence why checking for a zero balance after cash out is still the foolproof recommendation, in case you’re at a casino where it doesn’t work that way. (The ones that rebate the money back are probably easiest of all, because nothing gets transferred to the machine until you begin making wagers, in which it just refunds them.)
The Hollywood properties, which are owned by Penn National, don’t auto-refund. When you re-insert your card, you have to navigate to the Penn Cash menu and re-download the remaining balance.