Boyd Rewards Explained: The Free Tier Earns No Points, Sapphire Costs 750 Tier Credits, and Boyd Will Not Say What a Credit Is

Boyd's FAQ says a new member is enrolled at Ruby and starts earning Boyd Points once they reach Sapphire. Read that twice: the entry tier of the self-described nation's favorite program earns nothing you can spend.

Published 2026-11-09.

Boyd Rewards' own FAQ answers the question of when you start earning points with a sentence most programs would bury: "Once you have achieved Sapphire status, you will start earning Boyd Points for your play." Sapphire is the second tier. A new member is "automatically enrolled in the Ruby Tier," and a Ruby earns Tier Credits toward Sapphire and nothing else. The first 750 Tier Credits of your life at the Orleans buy you the right to begin.

That is not how most guides describe Boyd's card, and it is not how our own data described it until this week. The program most people still call B Connected has been renamed, restructured and put on a different calendar, and almost every secondary source we read, including ours, had the old version.

Boyd's tier page gives the ranges in Tier Credits: Ruby "0-749," Sapphire "750+," Emerald "15000+," Onyx "50000+," Titanium "200000+." Upgrades are immediate, "as soon as you earn the required Tier Credits," and the page's promise about duration is the friendliest in the business: "You have January through December to earn your tier, and at least the entire next year to enjoy it." A Sapphire earned in March 2026 is a Sapphire through December 2027.

The reset is January 1, when Tier Credits go to zero, softened by a carryover Boyd publishes on its own page. Finish the year with 750 to 14,999 Tier Credits and up to 500 carry over; 15,000 to 49,000 carries up to 5,000; 50,000 to 199,999 carries up to 10,000; 200,000 and up carries up to 40,000. The carryover is issued by January 30, counts only credits earned at a property, and needs a balance of at least 750 to trigger.

If you have read about Boyd tiers resetting every six months, or about an Onyx Plus tier, or about Sapphire being the free tier, you have read something out of date, and until November 9 that included this site's own program table. Boyd's annual report for 2023 already listed "five player tiers - Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, Onyx and Titanium." We could not find a page giving the date the B Connected name was retired; the 2023 filing uses Boyd Rewards throughout, and press coverage from 2020 still says B Connected. The name on the desk is Boyd Rewards.

Boyd Points are what you spend. Reel slots, video reels and keno earn "one Boyd Point" per "$1.00 coin-in"; video poker and multi-game machines earn one per $2.00; electronic tables are rated "based on games played, denomination, and time played." Table games, bingo, hotel and dining have no published point rate at all, and a footnote warns that "select earning rates vary by property."

A point is a tenth of a cent: "1,000 Boyd Points = $1.00" as FastPlay downloaded to the machine or at retail, and the same points buy food and hotel stays at rates the page does not give. Work it through at the reel rate and slot play returns 0.1% of coin-in as free play, which is exactly what Caesars pays at 200 Reward Credits to the dollar on $5 a credit. The two programs look nothing alike and pay the same.

Tier Credits are the other ledger, and here Boyd goes quiet. Slots and video poker earn them "based on game played, denomination, and time played"; tables "based on game played, average bet, and time played." There is no "$5 equals one credit" anywhere on Boyd's site, which makes 15,000 for Emerald impossible to translate into dollars from the outside. Caesars publishes its rate; Wynn and Hard Rock do not; Boyd is in the second camp, and the app is the only honest count of where you stand.

Expiry is the one rule that has not changed: "After six months of inactivity, your Boyd Points will expire." Tier Credits "expire on December 31 each year," subject to the carryover above. There is one more oddity. Boyd's free-to-play Stardust Social Casino earns Tier Credits where permitted, at one Tier Credit per $4.99 of virtual-coin purchases, and 150 Boyd Points per 99 cents. We mention it because Boyd printed it, not because anyone should buy a tier that way.

Boyd's benefit grid names the perks but publishes it as a layout whose tier columns do not survive as text, so we will tell you what is listed and be honest about what we cannot assign. The named benefits: VIP parking, preferred valet, "Reserved Garage Parking (Only available for Boyd Rewards members with over 100,000 Tier Credits)," a best-room-rate guarantee, room upgrades based on availability, early check-in and late checkout, dining discounts or comps, priority and guaranteed restaurant reservations, a "Birthday Month Comp (Eligible for cardholder only)," VIP line access, early access at gift giveaways, VIP lounge access, an annual Holland America cruise, quarterly stays, an "Annual B Memorable Experience or Luxury Gift Package" and an assigned personal host. Gift shop discounts run 10%, 15%, 20%, 20% and 20% across the five tiers, spa discounts 10%, 15% and 20%, and slot machines can be held for one hour, an hour and a half or two hours.

Two benefits have their own pages and their own tier labels, and they are the reason to care about Emerald. The quarterly stay gives Emerald members a complimentary stay for two with a $75 food credit, Onyx a premium room with $100 of Boyd Play and $100 of food, and Titanium "a complimentary stay for two in a suite" with $250 and $250. The catch is geography: Las Vegas members stay at a Midwest or South property and vice versa, so the Orleans regular's free weekend is at Ameristar St. Charles or Valley Forge, not at Suncoast. Nights are not stated. The cruise is Holland America, not the Carnival and Norwegian lines other programs use: Emerald sails for two in an inside stateroom to Mexico or the Caribbean, Onyx in an ocean view, Titanium in a verandah stateroom with Alaska and Hawaii added, with a refundable $100-a-guest deposit and the guest paying taxes, fees and gratuities. Bookings open on the 15th of the month after your upgrade and must be made by year-end.

Everything else is hedged. "Select tier benefits may vary by location." Room discounts are "based on play," not by tier. Which tiers get free valet, and whether any Boyd casino charges for self-parking at all, is not on the page.

Boyd's rewards site still says "27 Boyd Rewards casinos in 10 states." The company's own October 2026 release says 26 in eleven states, and the difference is the year's churn: Sam's Town Tunica closed on November 9, 2025, Sam's Town Shreveport was sold in August 2026, and Virginia was added when the Norfolk interim gaming hall opened on November 7, 2025 with 132 slots ahead of a $750 million resort the company expects in late 2027. In Las Vegas, Cadence Crossing opened in Henderson in the first quarter of 2026 on the Jokers Wild site, with about 450 slots, and Eastside Cannery, closed since March 2020, began coming down in late 2025.

The card works at all of them, and the family story behind them is in our Boyd Gaming history, which until this week also called the program B Connected. The Las Vegas list is the Orleans, Gold Coast, Suncoast, Sam's Town, Aliante, Cannery, Cadence Crossing and the three downtown houses, the California, Fremont and Main Street Station. The regional list runs through Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania; Boyd's Ameristars are Kansas City and St. Charles, and Ameristar Black Hawk, which some guides attribute to Boyd, is not Boyd's.

Two corporate facts bear on the card. Boyd sold its 5% of FanDuel on July 31, 2025 for $1.755 billion and signed market-access agreements that keep FanDuel's sportsbook in its states; whether a FanDuel bet still earns Boyd Points is not stated on any Boyd page, and the rewards site mentions only "Boyd Sports." And on November 2, 2026 Boyd announced an affiliation with Sonesta that puts 19 of its hotels on Sonesta's booking platform from January 2027, with "future integration plans" to link the two loyalty programs. Nothing about points or status has been published yet.

The usual advice is that Boyd is the easy card: low tiers, six-month resets, points you can cash out at the locals casinos. Each piece of that is stale. The resets are annual now, and Boyd's FAQ does not offer cash for points; Tier Credits "have no value and may not be cashed out," and Boyd Points redeem as FastPlay, retail, food and rooms. If you want a published cash-back rate in Las Vegas, that is Station's card, which our Boarding Pass explainer covers.

What Boyd actually does well is the middle. Sapphire at 750 Tier Credits is a low bar even without knowing the rate, and the calendar-year clock with a two-year hold is kinder than Caesars' January 31 cutoff. Emerald, at 15,000, is where the program becomes a travel program, with a cruise and four comp stays a year that nobody earning a Caesars Diamond on similar play is offered. Our piece on locals casinos explains why the floors themselves are the other half of the argument.

The mistake to avoid is the one we made: assuming the published structure is the one you remember. Boyd rebuilt it, and the version at the desk is the one described above. There is no status match to shortcut it. Hard Rock's Tejon casino, as of our reading on November 2, matches Boyd Emerald to Legend and Onyx and Titanium to Icon, which is a nice compliment to Boyd's tiers and the only published match we know of in either direction.

Topics

• boyd-rewards
• b-connected
• boyd-gaming
• comps
• las-vegas

Related guides

• Caesars Wipes Your Whole Balance After Six Quiet Months. PENN's Clock Can Be 30 Days. — Four big casino programs, four different expiry clocks. One takes the whole balance at every tier, one only to
• Boyd Gaming: How a Vegas Locals Operator Quietly Became a National Casino Chain — Sam Boyd opened the original California Hotel in downtown Vegas in 1962. The family company now operates 26 ca
• MGM Rewards Explained: Pearl at 20,000 Tier Credits Parks Free, Gold at 75,000 Kills the Resort Fee, and a $5,000 Hotel Bill Is a Tier — MGM publishes exactly what a dollar of hotel spending earns toward status, and refuses to publish what a dolla
• Station's Boarding Pass Explained: Points Cash Out at 1,000 to the Dollar, Blackjack Earns Nothing, and Gold Takes One Session — Station Casinos publishes the one number Strip programs never do: what a point is worth in cash. It also publi

More casino guides