Pokies and Slot Machine Information

New Zealand flicks the monitoring switch

April 20, 2007 on 7:08 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments

New Zealand gaming machine control has entered the same era of government oversight as most Australian jurisdictions – finally.

“The Department of Internal Affairs has hooked-up over 20,000 gaming machines to an electronic monitoring system ahead of schedule.”

Computerworld article

Until now overall control has been quite lax in comparison to Australia and the USA. The change benefits the government as it is able to instantly tell from a central location what funds are due to it. It also benefits players – its very much more difficult for nefarious venues to modify slot machines in their favour when the gaming software is centrally monitored.

Also of interest in the article is the following quote:

“connecting 20,289 gaming machines”

New Zealand has a population of 4,181,836 – which indicates there is a slot machine for every 206 residents. This is roughly half the per capita slot machine installation in Australia:

Country	Number of Slots	Av Slots/State*	Population	People per Slot Machine
Australia#	197,107	28,158	20,625,651	104.64
New Zealand	20,289	N/A	4,181,836	206.11
USA	770,408	20,261	298,399,775	387.32

(Taken from http://www.pokiemagic.com/blog/2006/03/29/gaming-expansion-in-usa/)

Section 87(2) of the NZ Gambling Act 2003 guarantees public access to the statistics gathered by the new monitoring system – we’ll report them as we find them.