The Carnival Cruises casino is like many others out on the water, but the cigarette smoke was heavier than others. Still, I found a reason to play.

View other posts in this series:

• Trip Introduction: The New Pirates of the Caribbean
• Review: Hyatt Regency Miami
• Review: Carnival Horizon Western Caribbean Cruise – Part 1 – Booking and Room
• Review: Carnival Horizon Western Caribbean Cruise – Part 2 – Main Dining
• Review: Carnival Horizon Western Caribbean Cruise – Part 3 – Lido Marketplace
• Review: Carnival Horizon Western Caribbean Cruise – Part 4 – Quick Service Restaurants
• Review: Carnival Horizon Western Caribbean Cruise – Part 5 – Specialty Restaurants
• Review: Carnival Horizon Western Caribbean Cruise – Part 6 – Ship Programming
• The Ship Features on the Carnival Horizon
• Camp Ocean on Carnival Horizon: A Good Kids Club (Mostly)
• Excellent Internet with Carnival Wi-Fi
• A Lackluster Experience with AT&T Cruise Package
• Spin to Win: The Carnival Cruises Casino (this post)
• Carnival Drink Packages Are Not Worth The Money
• Is Carnival’s Faster to the Fun Worth Your Money?
• Ocho Rios: Entryway to the Heart of Jamaica
• Cozumel: A Potentially Fun and Festive Mexican Port
• Calm and Relaxing: A Review of the Hyatt Regency Coral Gables
• First Friday Feast: Excellent Cuban Dining at Versailles

The Carnival Cruises Casino

We recently cruised on the Carnival Horizon, a ship first launched in 2018. On the Carnival Horizon, the casino is located on Deck 4 midship.

There also is a players club, but you don’t need to register for it before arriving. I won’t get into the fine details of the Carnival Players Club in this post, but in theory if you gamble enough, it could earn you credit towards benefits like a free cruise. Some people live and die by this process, gambling their way into multiple cruises per year. Though we came here on a free cruise offer extended by their casino, I didn’t gamble enough to get another free cruise.

The best I could get for a follow-up offer is an offer for up to $1,220 off. Sadly, we’re living in a time where that type of discount doesn’t translate to a free cruise.

If you’re not into slot machines, there is a decent (but small) collection of table games. Table minimums are much more tolerable than the Las Vegas Strip.

There is a lot of cigarette smoke

You’d be forgiven to think of the casino as a no smoking area. I mean just look at the sign below. Those are the first three words that appear on the sign along with the standard red circle with a line through it.

But then right under the red words is a sign saying that smoking is permitted for active players. Are you expected to put out your cigarette when you switch machines? I did not see it enforced on our cruise. In fact, the smoke was incredibly heavy in the casino. I am not a smoker, but I respect that others have a desire to smoke. I just wish there were some windows or doors to get fresh air circulating in here instead of the stagnant heavy smoke the whole time.

The Carnival app shows your Carnival Cruises casino gambling stats

If you ever wanted to know how many Carnival Players Club Points you have or how much is available to play, check the Carnival app. They make it easy enough where you can see your balances at any time on the ship. Their app doesn’t show much of anything when you’re not on a cruise, so you’ll just have to trust me that it’s helpful and easy to navigate.

At the end of the cruise, if you have any money left in your Player Bank, it will be returned to you via however you loaded it. But let’s table that discussion for now.

Loading free play onto your machine

Thanks to the casino offer I had when booking the cruise, I earned $50 of free play just for showing up. The process of loading the free play is pretty similar to what you would do in Las Vegas. Just show up at the machine, enter your default PIN, and load it onto your machine. They warn you that all free play must be used at the time you load it.

But, wait. What’s your default PIN? It’s your birthday. But unlike other uses of your default PIN on the ship, it’s not MMYY. At the casino, it’s MMDD. That threw me off to the point where I needed to embarrassingly ask the Players Club team what went wrong.

I can’t speak to whether the slot machine is stingier when free play is loaded, but I did earn back an abysmal $15 from that $50 loaded. I guess it’s at least $15 more than I otherwise would have made if I didn’t use the free play.

Are drinks free at the Carnival Cruises casino?

No, drinks are not free. However, you can earn free drinks on your account if you gamble enough. Or if you booked your room via a casino rate, free drinks might already be loaded on your account. There is a limit of 15 drinks per player per day, but I seriously hope you aren’t drinking that much while gambling. There’s nothing good that can come from that combination.

There is a small pop-up bartender’s stand in the corner of the casino or you can chat with the servers who walk around. While I did have free drinks loaded on my account, I didn’t use any while at the casino. I’d rather not have my sense of logic impaired when playing.

So what was my angle for the Carnival Cruises casino?

Before my cruise, I loaded up on two things:

• Carnival gift cards, purchased at a 10% discount.
• Cruise Cash offered by Carnival to be used onboard the ship, purchased with those discounted gift cards.

From a knowledge standpoint, I wanted to be sure both methods worked in the Carnival Cruises casino, and indeed they both do.

Stopping by the ship’s ATM

You can’t just walk up to the slot machines and load gift cards directly. So instead, I headed to the Horizon Atrium to stop by this lovely machine. This machine allows you to manage your account. And if you have some extra funds you want to load, it will add it to your account. Simple enough.

Gambling at the machines

I stopped by different slot machines to load $500 at a time on each machine. I’d recommend you not just immediately cash out from here. That’s a quick way to get blacklisted and the party will end quickly. So I played a bit. After all, it’s sort of like I gave myself some free play with the discounted gift cards. It also led to fun conversations with neighbors who thought I hit it big on my machine when they saw my balance.

At one point, I even hit some pretty good payouts. I both love and hate the picture below. I love it because I won $285 from it. So why do I hate it? Because if I bet nine ways (that’s $9/spin), I could have hit the $10,000 jackpot. When I cry myself to sleep over this, I tell myself that this particular payout would not have happened if I did bet nine ways. They just show this pattern to make me bet more next time. Logical?

Knowing when to stop

So if you preload cards on your account, how do you know when you hit your limit? The simple answer is to go into your folio on the Carnival app. From there, you’ll see if you’re running a positive or negative balance. If Carnival owes you money, it will say “Amount owed to [guest]” or “Will be settled to [guest]’s gift card”. You don’t want that, because it means you have to deal with gift cards that won’t be used until your next cruise.

When it says a balance will be settled to your credit card, then you know the gift cards loaded on your account have been drained.

Cashing out

In theory, you can just go over to the casino redemption machines to cash out your Player Bank. I did this successfully my first time, but my second (and final) time, it failed. Instead, I had to stop by the casino cage, where a friendly and helpful cashier asked me to hang out for a while. Turns out I just needed to change my PIN for security reasons before I could fully cash out. A simple process, and cool that this process works.

And I don’t believe I’m blacklisted since I still get casino offers (as shown above) that offer more free play. And we’ve done something similar on the Celebrity Solstice.

Bottom line

If you can get past the heavy smoke at the Carnival Cruises casino, it offers a fairly strong chance for you to earn a quick buck. It might take some planning pre-cruise to fully take advantage, but I found the investment worthwhile.

Stay tuned for the next installment where we’ll look at our confusing time trying to use the AT&T cruise package.