Here’s a question we’ve received a few variations of already:
My sister always asks to use my Players Club card. What happens if she gets a handpay? Will we both be banned from the casino?
Karen
We’re going to break this question down into two parts. The first involves using someone else’s card, and the second around what happens if you’re “caught,” such as a handpay.
First, casino rules vary about sharing players cards. Some are more open than others to the idea. Some will let you link two cards together for the purposes of pooling play for offers, but then only one card (the primary one) will receive offers, so keep that in mind if you opt for that approach.
Some casinos have very strict rules that say that players cards should never be shared. Whether they will know if your sister will use it or not generally will come down to if an event occurs that requires intervention, such as a handpay, where they will see that the player using it was not the owner of the card in the machine.
So that leads to the second question about what will they do. Casinos vary on this one too. It has to be expected that once in a blue moon a player will sit down and play when a previous player’s card was accidentally left in a machine. But purposefully using another person’s card is a different situation, and they have the data to be able to tell the difference.
Whether you get in trouble or not really will depend on the person you’re working with that comes over and the strictness of the casino.
We’ve certainly heard examples that everything was processed as normal, except the jackpot was unlinked from the card. On the more extreme other end, if you’re using free play that wasn’t issued to you, they could deny the handpay since you were using an offer that didn’t belong to you. And we’ve definitely heard of examples of people being banned for using other peoples’ cards and offers that didn’t belong to them.
So we definitely advise against claiming free play or other complementaries that don’t belong to you. We do recommend checking with the players club desk at the casino you frequent to see what the policy is on someone else using their card; many casinos don’t care that much, even if the rules say so, but it helps to play by the rules to avoid any unpleasant surprises.
Will your sister’s using your card lead to any long-term consequences? Probably not, but casinos can ban you for any reason, so if you’re feeling skittish, it might be best to take her over to the desk or kiosk and get her one of her own.
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Is there a way to know if a machine has a shaky, shaky before playing ?
Hi Dana – we answered this question on this post!
https://fliptheswitch.com/how-can-you-tell-if-a-machine-does-the-shaky-shaky/