PENN Play Starts Its Year on May 1 and Can Clear Your Balance in 30 Days. The Card That Used to Be mychoice, Explained.

Caesars and MGM count tier credits by the calendar year. PENN Play counts them from May 1 to April 30, and the rest of the program is just as unlike the two everyone compares it to.

Published 2026-11-02.

PENN Play's program rules, marked updated May 1, 2026, say members earn Tier Points toward their status "between May 1 – April 30," with the reset at 11:59pm on April 30 and the new tier loaded on June 1. Caesars Rewards and MGM Rewards run on the calendar year. PENN's year ends in spring, which means a snowy weekend at a Hollywood casino in February is a late-season push, not an early one.

That is the first of several ways the card most regional players carry works unlike the two programs it gets compared to. PENN replaced mychoice with PENN Play in April 2023, when it had 26 million members; its June 2026 press releases put the count above 33 million. The name mychoice still comes up at the desks, and in search boxes, which is why this post exists.

Three brands have sat on this card in three years. mychoice was the Penn National Gaming program from the Hollywood Casino era, retired in April 2023 for PENN Play. Seven months later the sportsbook attached to it became ESPN BET, under a deal that had PENN paying ESPN $150 million a year.

That deal is over too. In a filing with the SEC, PENN disclosed that on November 5, 2025 it signed a termination agreement with ESPN, effective December 1, 2025, under which it would "re-brand its sportsbook from ESPN BET to theScore Bet" and pay ESPN $38.1 million in the fourth quarter plus a further $5 million. CNBC reported the next day that the yearly $150 million payments would stop. On the morning of December 1, app users were told to update, and ESPN BET was theScore Bet.

For your card the sportsbook's name is a detail. The earn rule survived every rebrand: a $10 straight bet earns 1 Tier Point, a $5 parlay earns 1, and only wagers at odds of -500 or longer count. Our history of the company covers how it got here; that post still calls the sportsbook ESPN BET, which it was when the post was written.

The tier calendar is the thing to internalize. Tier Points earned from May 1 to April 30 decide your tier; the count resets at the end of April; the new tier is loaded June 1; and the benefits page says you keep a tier from the day you earn it through May 31 of the following year, so May is the cushion month between one year's status and the next.

Rollover softens the reset, by tier. Owners Club carries up to 30,000 Tier Points into the new year, Elite up to 15,000, Preferred up to 5,000, Advantage up to 500.

Play carries nothing.

For players who concentrate their trips around the end of the calendar year, PENN's clock is kind: a December multiplier weekend and a March one land in the same tier year. For anyone running a Caesars card and a PENN card side by side it is a trap, because the two years end four months apart and the one that ends in April is the one people forget.

The last row is the strangest number in any casino program we track. Buying coins in a free-to-play app earns Tier Points ten times faster per dollar than a slot machine does.

We do not recommend it. We note that PENN published it.

PENN Cash is what you spend. The rules set a floor of at least $1 of PENN Cash for every 400 Tier Points, at every tier. At the slot rate, 400 Tier Points is $2,000 through the machine, so the floor is a twentieth of one percent of coin-in. The app's Real Time Rewards pays better once you pass 3,000 Tier Points: $10 per 3,000 at the Advantage level, $25 per 5,000 at Preferred, $150 per 25,000 at Elite, $500 per 50,000 at Owners Club. Work those through at $5 a point and the cash return runs from about 0.07% of coin-in at Advantage to 0.2% at Owners Club. Each reward has to be claimed within two weeks of issue.

Then the part that matters most: what a PENN Cash dollar buys. PENN's earn-and-redeem page lists $1 of PENN Cash as $2 of food, $2 of hotel or $2 of retail on property; $1 of credit for online sports betting; 100 Choice Privileges points; or 50 cents with Ticketmaster. Redeem at dinner and every figure above doubles. Redeem into the sportsbook and it does not, and the converted credit then expires in 60 days. A member who turns PENN Cash into theScore Bet credit is handing back half of it.

PENN is unusually blunt about its lower tiers. Under access services for Play and Advantage, the benefits page says: "There are no benefits at this tier level." Advantage gets the Real Time Rewards described above, a Choice Privileges Gold match and up to 10% off Norwegian Cruise Line fares, and that is the list.

Preferred, at 18,000 Tier Points, is where the card changes. VIP lounge access, offers for stays at M Resort, a Choice Platinum match and, for Preferred members past 25,000 Tier Points, one complimentary Norwegian cruise for two of up to seven days.

Elite, at 50,000, adds the things that save money on a trip: VIP parking, a VIP check-in line, no resort fee at PENN destinations, a guaranteed personal host and PENN Cash that stops expiring. The cruise improves to an oceanview stateroom with a $50 food and beverage credit, the Choice match goes to Diamond, and past 100,000 Tier Points you can add a companion card. One footnote deserves quoting: "Hosting may be removed based on play behavior, promotional eligibility, or other PENN Play criteria." Guaranteed is doing less work than it sounds.

Owners Club, at 200,000 and with management's approval, is the tier the brochure is built around. A guaranteed comp room on 48 hours' notice, capped at six nights a month and three in a row. A $500 annual travel reimbursement for airfare or mileage to a PENN casino other than your home property. A balcony stateroom on the cruise with a $100 credit, early check-in and late checkout, and a birthday dinner arranged by the host. There is also a luxury gift at 400,000 Tier Points, which PENN says becomes available in June 2027, with an option to take up to $5,000 of PENN Cash instead. Four hundred thousand Tier Points at the slot rate is $2 million of coin-in, so the gift is not a thing most members will see.

What PENN does not offer is a status match from another casino's card. The only matches on its partner pages run outward, to Choice Privileges: Advantage to Gold, Preferred to Platinum, Elite and Owners Club to Diamond. The rules say transfers in from an outside program are at Penn's discretion, which in practice means the desk may say no.

The usual line on PENN Play is that it is a card for people who live near a Hollywood casino and has nothing to do with a Las Vegas trip. Half of that is right. PENN's only Nevada property is M Resort in Henderson, well south of the Strip, and its partner pages list no Strip tie-in. M Resort did open a second hotel tower in December 2025, taking it to 765 rooms, and Preferred members and above get offers there; it is a real destination for the card, just not a Strip one.

The other half of the advice misses the part that costs people money, which is treating PENN Cash like a Caesars Reward Credit. Caesars wipes a balance after six quiet months at every tier. PENN's clock is six months at Advantage and Preferred, 30 days at Play, and off entirely at Elite and Owners Club. A new member who visits once, earns a few dollars of PENN Cash and comes back in six weeks finds nothing, and the rule that did it is published. Our comparison of expiry clocks puts the four big programs side by side.

The regional label is also out of date. In Illinois alone, PENN moved Hollywood Casino Joliet off its riverboat and onto land in August 2025, a $185 million build with about 1,000 slots and 43 tables, and opened the $360 million Hollywood Casino Aurora on June 24, 2026 with 226 hotel rooms. Hollywood Casino Columbus added a 203-room hotel on June 12, 2026. A PENN card now gets you into new buildings, which was not something anyone said about mychoice.

The honest summary: the earn side is average, the lower tiers are empty by PENN's own description, and the redemption side rewards one specific habit, which is spending PENN Cash on dinner and rooms rather than on bets. Anyone whose play is naturally at a Hollywood, an Ameristar or an L'Auberge should carry the card. Nobody should drive past a Caesars property to earn on it.

Topics

• penn-play
• mychoice
• hollywood-casino
• comps
• loyalty

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