Some casinos allow two cards to be in use at the same time, and may permit shared play on one account. One player wonders if that helps her:
Once in a while my Mom comes to the casino with me and I have her use my extra player’s card. Does this add extra towards my play or it does not matter as long as one card is being used?
Teri C.
All players card play is tracked, whether you or mom are playing on the card, so it would count towards your play, and be factored into your casino offers.
If you’re one of the casinos whose house rules allow for this, it can be one way to accumulate better offers than splitting play among two cards. A common scenario is a husband and wife pooling play on one card at a time, vs. playing on both at the same time, because then to the casino a higher play amount is racked up on a single card in an individual visit.
If your play is pretty balanced, you might not notice too many differences – instead of each of you claiming, say, $10 in free play, you might claim a $20 bucket on one account. But if the play is imbalanced, especially if one of you is more of a gambler than another, it may make more sense to not be fueling a second players card with a small amount of play that might not lead to much of anything.
My partner and I fall in the latter camp. For instance, when on cruises, he’ll occasionally pop down, and we’ll jointly play one of the slots he does like on my card. In this way, I get credit for the additional play, which helps with our cruise offers, which we share for vacations anyway.
In land-based casinos, if we’re visiting one we’ve never been before and there’s some sort of sign up benefit, we might choose to each get a card to take advantage of those perks, especially if we’re not expecting to be back again for a long time, if ever.
But otherwise, we’ll pool play so that if something good like a hotel room comp comes out of our combined play, given we’ll share it anyway, we have the best chances for that, vs. splitting our play up and risk only getting room discounts on both cards.
But one thing we don’t do is play on two different machines with two different cards from my account. So we play together, on a single card, at the same time, and that tends to be less of an issue. My home casino doesn’t even let players have two cards active at the same time. If you get a replacement card, they deactivate the old one, so that scratches the ability for two to play on different machines at the same time.
The important thing is to make sure that the casino you’re at doesn’t frown upon it, or worse actively enforces rules that would create a situation. For instance, we’ve shared the image from one casino that says if you’re playing with someone else’s card in the machine you could be denied a jackpot.
It’s one thing when you accidentally have the wrong card in a machine, but it’s entirely another to knowingly break their rules, and then risk having players club status revoked. So we see other players advise not to drift too far apart in case of issues like a machine breakdown or a jackpot handpay.
Ultimately, when your card is in the machine, you get credit for the play. It does help to know though what is in bounds and what is not – the last thing a player tends to want is offers or perks being revoked because a casino caught them in violation of their rules, all for a bit of extra play on their account.
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