Pokies and Slot Machine Information

Average NSW household loses almost $1300 a year on gaming machines

Pokies in the Australian State of New South Wales are chewing through almost 5 billion dollars worth of its citizens cash in a year.

“NSW gamblers are now flushing $4.8 billion a year… And that is not how much is being wagered — it is the amount that players are losing”

Daily Telegraph Article

The Daily Telegraph article is full of interesting facts - we recommend you read it in full.

Its quite incredible just how much each slot machine can make in a year - $66,000 each in hotels and $45,000 in clubs according to the article. As usual, the government take is high - if governments weren’t so reliant on gaming machine taxation then the payrates on individual rates could be increased. Players would lose less.

The massive profits generated by hotels with gaming machines have revived the hotel industry. One hotel recently sold in Sydney for $53 million dollars, you can do the math and figure the pokies profits must be incredible.

“The number of hotels now making more than $1 million a year profit just from gaming is now 470″

Hotels are entitled to make a profit, like any other business. The way their pokies generate the revenue though should be examined and the tax take curtailed. Making pokies fairer to play ultimately benefits everyone.

If you think getting a drivers licence is expensive…

The government of Queensland, Australia has been kind enough to publish on its Treasury website the various fees and charges associated with running, selling and monitoring gaming machines in the state.

If you thought getting or renewing a drivers licence was expensive, have a look at some of these fees:

General Fees:
Grant of gaming machine licence: $2,064 (minimum).
Grant of major dealer licence: $137,633, + $11,470 application fee.
Grant of Licenced Monitoring Operator licence: $275,263 per ten years, + $11,470 application fee.
Grant of Gaming Employee Licence: $172 per five years. We don’t know whether this is paid by the venue or an individual employee - if you work for a casino and would like to share the info, please add a comment.

Fees associated with owning gaming machines:
Acquire a gaming machine: $25.
Destroy a gaming machine: $25 - you even get charged to blow up a pokie.
Change the percentage return: $25 - another fee for doing very little.

All fees are shown on the following website:

Qld Government Site

Obviously there is a cost to the Government to regulate and control gaming. Regulation is necessary to ensure probity in the running of the machines. Without it, operators would be free to alter machine payout percentages so as to drain your bank account in record time (though that happens pretty quickly already in some venues).

Weigh against that the fact that the Government already takes a very hefty profit from each gaming machine - heading for $14,000 per machine in the next few years.

Pokies Article

Charging the extra fees as shown on the Treasury website seems a little excessive. Venues must recover these fees somewhere. If you wonder why you lose so much on slot machines - these fees and turnover based taxation are a good part of the reason.

Pokies in Western Australia

Western Australia is unique amongst Australian states - it has no slot machines outside of its single casino. Its casino, and therefore the entire state, has 523 slot machines. On the other side of the country, the state of Victoria has almost 30,000, and Queensland around 45,000.

A population comparison demonstrates the per capita pokies penetration difference:

*Population data Jun 05 from

Australian Bureau Statistics
Other data from

The Sunday Mail

Original data from the Sunday Mail reports comes from a report by the South Australian Centre for Economic Studies. The Sunday Mail provides a very interesting breakdown of the differences in employment patterns in states with high penetration of pokies versus Western Australia, with very few.

Western Australia apparently intends to keep its gaming machine numbers low and restricted to its single casino venue. The former Premier (leader in Government) of Western Australia complained in April 2005 that his state was losing taxation revenue as a result of its low pokie count:

“my Government has a policy of no pokies and I want to keep it that way…The proliferation of poker machines in other States and Territories has given them access to a rich revenue stream that doesn’t exist in WA”

WA Government Site

It seems Western Australia has a difficult choice. If it wants to bring in the billions of dollars in tax that other states do from gaming, it has to either introduce the machines, or raise taxes in other areas. In the meantime, the state enjoys the upside to low gaming machine numbers - less problem gambling and enhanced employment opportunities for its residents.

Unusual incentives for playing pokies

Although this link dates back to 2004, it provides an interesting insight into the types of activity that might go on in one of the smaller gaming machine establishments around New South Wales, Australia:

“The tussel to win an even bigger share of the punting dollar has led one hotel to offer ‘erotic men’s massage’ as an alternative to cash payouts… at the rate of 14,500 points an hour.”

Wesley Mission

Obviously this particular strategy to attract players is not widespread, and its use by one venue should not unfairly tarnish the reputation of others.

Another interesting insight from the link:

“The background and age of a typical problem gambler in NSW is of a Sydney-based Anglo-Australian male of 39 years.”

We’ll do some checking of other sites to see whether this data can be corroborated and extrapolated as a benchmark of problem gambler demographics.

Orwellian Chips in Chips

Off the topic of slots a little, an article online describes the future of casino gaming chips such as found on roulette and blackjack tables:

Sun Herald Online

“You can tell what the casino’s position is on every single table within a matter of seconds on the entire gaming floor.”

Casinos will use the technology to ensure the chips in play on their tables are genuine, which is fair enough, but also to track individual players fortunes.

The technology is reminiscent of the magnetic loyalty card readers on slot machines which enable casinos to track player spending and movement:

Loyalty Card Programs

The advent of wireless Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips in gaming chips will give casinos another edge in the odds. If they can see players playing too well (card counting perhaps), they can easily correlate the player with the plays and remove them from a table.

Do you really want those many electronic eyes in the skies of casinos to know exactly whats in your pocket as you move around the venue?

Gaming machine standards in Australia and New Zealand

If you enjoy reading delectably dry documents, we have found 115 pages of rivetting material just for you. Its the overview of gaming machine standards for Australia and New Zealand, and can be found here:

Tasmanian Govt Website

There are some interesting facts buried in the document, such as:

Page 45: 3.9.16b “The probability for attaining each winning pattern of symbols (offered in the Base game) must not be less than 1/7,000,000.”

We take this to mean that the worst possible outcome is that the best possible outcome can be expected to come up at least every 7 million spins. The best possible outcome in most pokies games is to have five wildcard symbols (which normally substitute for other symbols) come up on one payline. As noted in a previous article about the “Black Rhino” game, its going to cost you a lot of time and money to test this hypothesis.

Page 46: 3.9.17e “Gamble features (e.g. Double-up) are to be excluded;”(from the Nominal Standard Deviation of a game).

A doubleup is an optional method of increasing your total win for a spin, usually by selecting “Red” or “Black” and winning or losing based on the computer selection. We take this clause to mean that double-ups are in fact won or lost completely randomly. It would make more sense if doubleups were fully controlled by the gaming machine, but if random chance is determining the outcome, this may be one of the best ways to achieve a better payout on pokies games.

Page 47: 3.9.22 “Autoplay is prohibited.”

This one is a no-brainer. I have seen one machine with autoplay enabled. As soon as it was brought to the attention of the venue, the machine was taken offline. A lot of players can be seen getting around the autoplay prohibition. They wedge items such as a folded coaster, cigarette packet or their cat into the spin button in order to achieve autoplay.

Page 49: 3.9.49b “The residual credit removal play must return at least [MINRTP]% and not more than 100% to the player.”

When you’re playing a slot game and you are down to your last few credits, you often have the option to gamble your residual credit (those last few cents, and always less than the minimum token value accepted by the game, say $1). Its a natural assumption that you would have even odds of winning a residual credit gamble. This clause appears to say otherwise - that your chances of winning the residual gamble may be the same odds as the main game is set to play. What a cheek!

Page 49: 3.9.57 “The display of the result of a game outcome must not be misleading or deceptive to the player (e.g. must not improperly indicate a near miss).”

This one benefits players. It prevents the machines from deliberately generating rolls of the reels which generate continuous ‘almost’ wins. One slot machine manufacturer was heavily censured a few years back for programming almost wins (not one of the current crowd of manufacturers).

Pages 113-115 appear to list the minimum RTP (return to player%) for each State/Territory. There is quite a variance between the different jurisdictions.

Overall, these standards are a great idea. They cover the basics of ensuring that you are losing your money in a reasonably fair fashion. The alternative would be cloak and dagger slot machine odds, which benefit no-one.

Note: all assessments above are opinions only, and should be treated as such. This blog makes no guarantee that opinions are factually correct.

Play a $500 slot machine?

Most people are comfy playing a 1 cent or 2 cent slot machine on a low bet - there is only so much you can lose per hour playing these games.

How would you feel about playing a $500 slot machine - five hundred dollars a spin, minimum! Such games do exist, you can find some at the MGM Grand:

MGM Grand

Presumably these machines would be set to higher RTP (Return to Player) percentages than low denomination machines, or you’d very soon go broke. No doubt they also accept high value banknotes, as filling one with 5 cent pieces would take a long time. You’d also end up with very dirty fingers. Coins sure do get around.

So the next time you sit down and play your 1 cent machine at 20 cents a time, have a thought for what the super-rich (or super-silly) might be doing with their mountains of moola.

45000 Pokies in Queensland Australia

The market penetration of pokies in the state of Queensland, Australia continues to rise. There are around 45,000 poker machines in this state.

Queensland has a population of over 4 million now, meaning that there is more than one pokie per hundred people in the state.

Australian Bureau of Statistics

Buying pokies is not a cheap exercise - a shiny new slot machine will set you back somewhere between ten and twenty five thousand dollars. You’re looking at over 500 million dollars worth of slot machine hardware.

Why are there so many machines in a state in which there were none only 15 years ago? Ultimately one reason - taxation. The more machines there are, the more tax is raised.

Queensland has 45,000 pokies. The Government plans to increase those in pubs from 18,843 to more than 20,000 and expects its share of the takings to rise by 25 per cent to $657 million a year by 2008.

Sunday Mail Article

This equates to around $14,000 per year per gaming machine the state is making in tax revenue - nice work if you can get it.

ATM’S at casinos

ATM’s (Automatic teller machines) can be found in most pokie venues and certainly at most casinos. You’ll often see banks of ATM’s at larger casinos, and quite frequently they’ll all be in use. Makes you wonder how much cash they can actually store.

ATM’s are handy things - at a price. They are now associated with high fees, especially if they are third party machines which are not owned or operated by your own bank. Expect to pay $2-$5 a transaction for the basic fee alone.

A quick scan of the discarded ATM receipts at a casino yielded some interesting information - a large number of the withdrawals are from credit card accounts. (Note: we only browsed tickets left on top of machines and only when no ATM user was around who could be identified).

Some banks add extra charges, especially for credit card withdrawals. One Australian bank charges 1.5% of the amount being withdrawn as an instant fee. So if you withdrew $600 from your credit card, you would be slugged a fee for using the ATM, plus a whopping $9 by the bank. Then they start charging interest immediately at extraordinary rates.

Now all the fee information is likely to be in the terms and conditions you agreed to when you opened the account, so the only real cause for complaint pertains to the audacity of setting such high fees in the first place.

The real question in the ATM/Casino story is about the wisdom of allowing credit card withdrawals where the funds are likely to be lost in the adjacent casino. Allowing limited withdrawals from savings/cheque accounts makes sense - you can do that anywhere and at least you’re using funds you’ve saved. With credit card withdrawals, you’re just borrowing money from a powerful lender and risking a lot if your losses spiral out of control.

Additionally, casinos are usually licenced premises. Add alcohol to holding a credit card and pin number and you have a recipe for instant losses.

Should ATMs be banned from casinos then? Lets just say its very unlikely to happen, the venues have too much of a vested interested to allow it to occur. Certainly though, the ability to withdraw funds from credit card accounts should be restricted by transaction amount or removed entirely. Even an opt out mechanism would be welcome - flag all gaming venue ATM’s so that customers could exclude their accounts from being usable at those machines.

Update to Earlier Story

An update has been located to the earlier story about the lost ‘package’ - a lady left a baby in a car whilst playing the pokies in New Zealand.

The arrest was related to an incident where a baby was discovered locked in a car in 30C midday heat behind the Stellar Bar in Masterton.

The lady in question has been arrested:

Times-Age Article

We’ll be watching for future updates on this story.