Pokies and Slot Machine Information

Big Brother switched on to monitor New Zealand pokies

Pokies in New Zealand are finally being monitored from a central control point.

(Pick the politician in the photo.)

The new oversight will ensure venues are fully complying with New Zealands regulations for slot machine management. Centralised electronic reporting will be easily possible for the first time.

Its a great idea in terms of ensuring greater transparency in the operation of the machines. As we’ve pointed out before though, it also makes controlling the taxation aspect of the machines a whole lot easier, and may be a precursor to higher tax rates being introduced.

A higher percentage of turnover from pokies is given to charitable or club type operations than is the case in Australia.

Slot machine error yields fortunes

A misconfigured slot machine in a US casino has paid out a huge cash surplus to punters:

“The Caesars Indiana casino lost nearly half a million dollars over two-days last month on one slot machine that had been incorrectly set to give players credit for 10 times the amount of money they put into it.”

Courier Journal Article

Its interesting the error is of a type that could be allowed to occur in the first place.

The slot machines in the venue are TITO - ticket in, ticket out. Paying out in ticket form rather than via cash or attendant certainly has its advantages. Less cash handling and lower numbers of gaming attendants required will lower casino costs overall.

In the days before TITO, most payouts would have occurred with the assistance of a gaming attendant. The unusual payouts at the machine would almost certainly have been detected and dealt with. Half a million dollars coming out of one machine over two days is a huge amount of money.

A “not so smart” award goes to those players who used the malfunction to knowingly reward themselves whilst using their player loyalty cards in the slot machine in question.

The whole incident begs the question - why didn’t the slot management software detect the ridiculous payouts coming from one machine. From the article its clear that it was instead an honest player who reported the faulty machine configuration that led to its detection. Lets hope they rewrite their management software post-haste, to prevent an expensive recurrence.

Poker machine popups keep punters informed

Its been almost a year since New Zealand introduced regulations requiring new pokies to display popup play statistics messages to players:

“gaming machines in casinos, pubs and clubs must display mandatory, on-screen messages to gamblers about how long they have been gambling and how much they have won or lost…gaming machines will interrupt play for at least 15 seconds to display the messages.

The messages will be displayed for 30 seconds if the gambler has not chosen either to continue or end that session of gambling.”

New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs

The ideology behind the popup message is simply to break any player trance and force them to realise exactly how much has been won or lost. The inability to banish the popup message for a minimum of 15 seconds forces players to return to reality for at least that length of time.

Its likely venues would set the popup interval to the longest time possible - they’re running a business after all.

There aren’t usually too many players who will sit on a machine for 30 minutes at a time - there is a lot of machine hopping that goes on as players try to find a win.

Some players will also regularly go back to zero credits or cash out and re-enter the funds into the same machine. In these cases its unclear whether the poker machine will then reset the popup timer to zero. If so, these players will almost never see the automatic popup messages.

The legislation does cater for these players though:

“At a gambler’s choice, display information about the games on that machine and about the gambler’s session of play”

New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs

Presumably this means the player can activate the popup any time they would like an update on their playstats.

From July 1, 2009 all gaming machines in New Zealand will be required to meet this information standard. As older machines lack the capability, there is a new revenue stream for slot machine manufacturers to either upgrade or replace the older units.

There has been little or no talk about introducing similar reporting requirements on Australian pokies.