Slot players love their free play, and depending on how much is available, and how a particular slot is doing, players may want to move on before exhausting their budget:
When you download your free slot play to your card, what happens if you don’t use it all. Is the balance left on your card or do you lose it? For example, you download $200 free play to your card and only used $50. You left to go to another machine, even though you played with your card, you did not use the remaining $150 and then left to go home. When you return at a later date is the $150 free play still there from the previous offer.
Mizz T.
Let’s cover this in two parts: Leaving a machine before it’s exhausted, and leaving the casino before it’s played through.
Moving On to Another Machine
As we’ve covered in a previous topic, free play works in one of two ways:
- You wager, and it rebates your wager at the conclusion of a spin.
- You download a bucket to your machine, and it’s added to your balance.
In the former, since it’s rebating your wagers as you go, if you decide to move on, it simply deactivates that session when you remove your card, leaving the remainder of the balance on your account to use on a different machine.
For the latter, it depends. Usually, when you hit cash out, the machine will cash out any actual cash, and the remaining balance of free play, if any, would be left on the machine. What happens next can vary; we’ve seen casinos print a free play ticket if you hit cash out again, we’ve seen others where it puts it back on your account, and so on.
We’ve also seen scenarios where the balance just remains on the machine, where you actually have to play through it. Walk away, and it’s left for someone else. So we always encourage players to check that credit balance.
So if your casino is in the latter camp, we tend to recommend downloading what you want to play through. One step is it will ask how much of your free play you wish to download. If you have $100, maybe only do $20 or $50 so you can decide how things are going.
There are literally dozens of player tracking systems out there, each with their own specific way of dealing with this – or multiple ways, depending on how configurable these systems are. So our answer is understandably broad, and if you’re unsure how your casino works, you can always check with the players desk or a slot attendant.
Leaving the Casino for the Day
What happens to the free play really depends on the offer. Some casino offers must be used on the day they are received, or within a certain number of hours (24, 72, etc.) of being activated. Some other offers may have longer windows, but all offers have some sort of expiration.
With that in mind, before leaving the casino, it’s worth knowing what your casino’s policies are. If you’re not going to be back for awhile, we highly advise not leaving money on the table and playing through the free play you have.
If your casino gives you more time to play, and your goal is to save it up so you can play it altogether, that’s fine, but just watch the timing, because these things tend to be precise. If you have 24 hours to use it from activation, and show up 30 minutes too late, it’s gone. That’s why we tend to use free play on the day it’s issued to our account, or the day we show up, whichever’s earlier.
Takeaway
Individual casinos set policies for how offers work, and how free play is redeemed. As such, policies and structure will vary. It helps to get to know how your specific casino handles these elements, so you can make the best use of them. But we recommend using your free play available during your trip, to avoid the risk of losing it before your next visit.
Have a question? Submit yours here!
