Page 9 - July 2002 • Southern California Gaming Guide

The 21st century casino delivers more customer convenience and ushers in a whole new era of gaming.
Wby Sylvie Norbu
alk into just about any San Diego County casino these days, and you’ll notice a sound is missing. Yes, you’ll hear a low cacophony of electronic beeps, music, and voices. But what you
won’t hear is the characteristic casino “ching-ching-ching” — coins falling on metal—the sound that would make gamers beam as they watched their winning coins tumble into the metal tray of their slot machine. And while the music of falling coins brings a smile to any gamer’s face, that smile doesn’t always last too long.
You see, after winning a jackpot, you then had to gather your winning coins and heap them into plastic casino mini-buckets, balance the heavy buckets in your arms (real tricky if you had more than two buckets and were carrying a pocketbook) and trudge them to the line of other people waiting with their buckets full of coins at the casino “cage”. On a busy night, you had to wait, buckets in arms, for your turn when the attendant would then take your buckets, and drop the coins into count- ing machines. Sometimes the process took what seemed like an interminable time. Maybe the coin bag had to be changed; maybe the counter got stuck and you waited, patiently (oh, sure!) until nally, nally, you were given, after veri cation on the counter, your cash!
This routine would take anywhere from
ve minutes (no waiting in line, no dropping anything) to upwards of fteen minutes (on a busy weekend night). The process took you away from your play, and away from the fun. And when you were through, your hands were usually dirty from scooping up all those much-handled coins. It wasn’t unusual to see some women wearing gloves—in fact, some Vegas casinos used to give out gloves to their customers. Casi- nos also thoughtfully provided packaged hand wipes at the cages. No matter how big of a smile the sound of coins brought when the jackpot hit, the prospect of going through another mini-ordeal of cashing out was enough to make many gamers call it a night after only
one big win. Sure, some casinos tried self-service coin-counters, but people aren’t great at reading and following directions when they’re ush from a win. So, the self-serve counters invari- ably would be out of service (probably due to some customer goof).
Fortunately, the days of cashing out coins are numbered. In true American fashion, innovative technology came to the rescue! The coinless slot machine has saved us from the drudgery of coin handling! No easy feat, coinless play has evolved as a result of the entire evolu- tion of gaming and gaming products.
Today, all San Diego casinos have at least some ticket-in/ticket-out or coin- less slots. Some casinos have the major- ity of their slots as coinless; some have kept a mix, usually heavily weighted towards cashless (coinless) for two very good reasons: Customer convenience and casino ef ciency. Barona Casino, according to Assistant General Manager of Slot Operations, Lee Skelley, has 93% of its slots converted to ticket-in/ticket- out technology. Sycuan Casino boasts almost entirely coinless slots, and other
county
casinos
have varying
percentages (but the majority of the slots
are coinless). As casinos proliferate in our
backyard (and over our county borders), they seek out more ways to attract customers, and coinless, a boon to the gamer, is here to stay!
The Evolution of the High-Tech Slot Machine
So how has this all happened? The microprocessor era has transformed business operations worldwide, and affected gaming dramatically. The slot machine is only 100 years old, and was originally created to dispense candy and little toys. It quickly evolved from the rst mechanical slot, Jenning’s Liberty Bell machine which appeared in 1930, to the rst free-spinning reel slot introduced in 1963 by Bally, which featured an elec- trical bell, electromechanical circuitry and motorized hopper pay. The Bally mechanical slot machine was the forerunner of the electronic slot that led to the rst video poker machines in the mid-1970s.
In 1981, two major events occurred that would change the face of slot play forever. For the rst time, in Las Vegas, slot machine revenues exceeded table games. And
in 1981 a company named International Game Technol- ogy (IGT) was created, and began designing a series of video slots for their Draw Poker product line.
In 1983, IGT introduced the rst solid-state spinning reel slot machine. It used a fundamental microproces- sor that enabled light and sound. Further electronic enhancements came quickly: Multi-line bets, double pays, ve-reel games and huge “Big Bertha” machines. As slot machines began to proliferate and jackpot amounts increased, casinos had to deal with the growing problem of “slot cheats” who had gured out how to manipulate the reels to make them stop on a jackpot. In response to
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July 2002
Page 9
THE SAN DIEGO GAMING GUIDE