How much you pace in wagers at a casino is generally a key input into your free play and casino offers.
In a recent video, Brian Christopher had $1,400 in free play, which he used to play a game. A player wondered what happens if you don’t ever reach into your wallet:
Let’s say you have $1,400 free play and keep spinning up and down until you are at $1,400 at the end of your half hour session. And lets say you ran $4,000 of total spins through the machine. Does the casino count it against you for upcoming free play calculations if you didn’t put a single dollar of your own money in?
Lawrence C.
No, the casino isn’t so much worried about whether you put your own money in (and for practical purposes doesn’t know for sure if you ever accessed your wallet). They’re going to look primarily at coin in and coin out.
The first $1,400 would be with the free play, so your actual coin-in in your example would be $2,600, definitely low relative to the $1,400 in free play, and that is what they’ll evaluate on the next offer (which we would expect to go down).
On the other hand, if it was $40,000 in coin-in, of which $1,400 is free play, and the player managed to leave even, the casino would see $38,600 in coin-in, which would be a great number, and probably would chalk it up to a lucky run by the player.
Most casinos don’t factor actual loss into offers (unless your actual loss is large, and disproportionately high to what would be expected for the amount of play you did). Instead, they look at theoretical loss, or theo. Based on the total amount being wagered over time, and the game’s house edge, in the long term you’d be expected to lose a certain amount – the theoretical loss.
For example, if you played a slot with an expected payback of 90 percent over time, that means the other 10 percent would be the loss expected. If you wagered $1,000 on that slot, in the long term you’d be expected to lose 10 percent, or $100.
Of course, in a single session you could come out ahead, in the example of not losing any of the $1,400 in free play. But you could also never get a bonus and lose a lot. In the end it averages out to that expected loss in the long run.
Now, there are casinos that will flag players who consistently walk away with extra money, and consider pausing their offers until they give some back. The term they sometimes use is “self-comp,” in that hey, you won enough money, so you can pay for it yourself. This tends to be the exception to the rule, however, so in the end, casinos won’t look negatively at you walking home with the free play as cash, as long as there was enough play to justify the visit. Otherwise, the offers will likely get reduced or removed if not enough play was completed to maintain it.
In Brian’s case, the 30-minute video had bets anywhere between $10 and $50 a spin. Let’s presume the midpoint of $30, and an estimate of 250 spins during the video. That works out to $7,500. That’s not enough play for the free play either, but Brian films multiple videos in a day, so in total his play would definitely cover the free play (and likely in another video from the filming day, he very well may have given the free play money back). So that’s ultimately why Brian has these offers, and will generally continue to get them as long as his play level is maintained.
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