Players clubs and comps: what the card is really worth

Not your wins and not your losses. What is recorded is volume: how much money you cycle through a game, at what average bet, for how long. A player who bets small for four hours can be worth more to the system than one who bets large for twenty minutes and leaves, even if the second player lost more.

From that volume the floor computes a theoretical loss — your play multiplied by the house edge of the games you played — and rewards are a fraction of that figure. The exact fraction varies by property and is rarely published, which is the honest reason no page can tell you "the card is worth X%".

Worth having

• Parking and resort-fee waivers at properties that charge for both.
• Room rates offered to carded guests, which are frequently below the public rate.
• Food and show discounts you would have bought at full price anyway.
• Sign-up offers — a one-off, and the best value the card ever has.

Not worth playing for

• A comp earned by playing longer than you meant to. The rebate is a percentage of a loss; the loss is the whole amount.
• Tier status pursued to the next level. Every tier ladder is designed so the last stretch costs more than the tier is worth.
• Mailed offers treated as free money. They are an invitation priced against what the sender expects to win back.

The desk is near the entrance and the transaction is short: a government photo ID, a name and an address, no fee and nothing to sign up to. The ID is not optional and it is not the casino being careful — a floor that hands out a tracked account without checking who is on it has a regulatory problem, not a customer-service one.

Where the card works afterwards is the part nobody explains at the desk:

• Within one operator, everywhere. A large group runs a single programme across every property it owns, so a card issued in one city works in another — which is why the first question at the desk is whether you already have one.
• Across operators, nowhere. There is no shared scheme and no transfer. Two casinos across the road from each other can be two unrelated accounts.
• Tribal casinos, separately again. Each runs its own programme, so a card from one tribe's floor is a piece of plastic at the next one.

If you want to know which properties share an operator before you drive, the state pages in this directory name the operator on every row where the source has one — see Oklahoma or Nevada for what that looks like.

A month after a carded visit, post and email start arriving, and three quite different things arrive under the same cheerful wording. They are worth telling apart before driving back for one of them.

An offer is priced against what the sender expects to win back from the visit it prompts. That does not make it a trick; it makes it a marketing cost with a number behind it, and the number is smaller than the trip usually is.

At a machine the card goes in the reader before the first spin and comes out when you leave. Play with the card out is invisible: it earns nothing, and it is the single most common way people give away an evening's worth of tracking. Most machines show a name or a tier on the screen once the card is read, which is the only confirmation you get.

At a table the card goes to the dealer, who passes it to the floor supervisor to open a rating — do it as you sit down rather than after an hour, because rating starts when it is opened and not when you did. And take the card with you: a card left in a machine is somebody else's account until it is handed in.

Get the card, use every non-gambling benefit it carries, and let the play be whatever you were going to do anyway. That is the arrangement in which the card is genuinely on your side — and it is also the arrangement the maths supports, which is rarer than the marketing suggests.

One privacy note worth knowing: a carded visit is a record of when you were in the building and for how long. That is unremarkable for most people, and worth a thought if it is not.