With most casinos open 24 hours a day, there’s generally not an opportunity to make changes without doing so in the public eye:
I always wonder when do casinos put new machines on the casino floor? I would think Sunday or Monday night? When it is slower?
Karrigansita L.
One of the things a few of us at team Flip The Switch recently was marveling about was how one local casino we had visited a couple of times in quick succession for team outings and the like was how much the casino floor was changing in such a short time. Some slots that were there on a Monday were replaced by Thursday.
Each casino will have their own policies on this, but it generally comes down to a few factors. Staff availability will be one, and sometimes that can mean in partnership with the company who makes them, especially when it comes to specific setups like leased equipment and wide area progressives.
Another is when casino floors are slow or busy. Weekdays and earlier mornings are often more popular times to tackle these changes, as doing so at 8 pm on a Saturday night is likely not going to be as easy, and takes machines out of service that players would want to access.
Finally, the size of the casino will matter. Bigger casinos making more changes will likely be doing them on a rolling basis, whereas smaller casinos making less changes would be likely to doing so in timed scenarios.
Back to that example cited at the beginning of our answer. One thing that is happening is not only are machines being updated, but often they’re being moved around. So the more complex changes tend to happen when it will be least disruptive, and with the staff there.
So we during those bigger changes would see the slots still being finalized in the late afternoon but were largely in place. So in that casino’s example, weekdays during the day, before people got out of work and headed to the casino, is their solution. But we’ve seen other casinos handle it differently.
Like other house rules and things that can vary by casino, this is one of those things where each casino makes their own decisions based on what makes sense for them, but they’ll largely avoid nights and weekends unless absolutely necessary.
