If you spend enough time around casinos, you’ll see the various people at work. This sometimes includes the slot techs and their accessing the machines.
Sometimes, when I go to the casino early in the morning, the employees are working on the machines. What exactly are they doing? This may be one reason why people are thinking the slots are fixed. Can you explain it to me?
Sally
Without being there we can’t be sure exactly what they’re doing, but if you zoom out, there’s certain things casinos will focus on early in the morning.
The Daily Drop
Most casinos have a policy of accessing machines daily. This is to do their daily drop – a removal of the cash in each slot machine, replacing that machine with an empty collector to start the process again.
You’ll often see casinos roping off sections of slots at a time, and players may even be asked to move for this process to be completed. This is purely to capture the cash, and to ensure machines are less likely to need maintenance during the day with a full bill acceptor.
Given that cash is a sensitive thing to be handling, it tends to require additional staff support, and because of the closing off of groups of machines, early mornings is the best time to do this to avoid inconveniencing too many people.
Slot Repairs
Casinos will often take care of issues with machines in real time when they can, but there will be times when something can’t be done at the time and will require a more specific repair, whether the replacement of a button or screen, or some sort of hardware part that may have worn out.
Similar to the drop above, casinos will often time these repairs for less busy times of day, since they’ll have less disruption around them and in turn will not be in the way of as many players. Since they’re opening up the machines and working on them, it’s a bit more disruptive, and machines around them may be blocked off too depending on the type of work needed.
Slot Additions/Swaps
An adjacent task that will often be done during the day and slower times of the business is the swapping in of new machines or games. Sometimes, it’s swapping the game that’s on the machine that’s already there, and sometimes it’s putting in new machines or moving old machines around.
You generally won’t see this work being done during the casino’s busiest times – the preference is to have as many machines up and running as possible during peak times – so that would lend itself more to slower times of day.
Working on Machines = Fixed?
Now let’s look at the other aspect to your question – that casinos opening up machines early in the morning somehow means they’re rigged. Slots are computers, which need maintenance every now and then. If casinos can’t open up the slots to do that work without people thinking they’re fixed… we’re not really sure what to say at that point.
What players should keep in mind is slots make casinos lots of money just by being set up and turned on. They don’t really need to do anything else.
This is why such a large percentage of the casino floor is devoted to them – they drive a significant amount of profit for the casinos. Yes, casinos can choose to change the payback, but they generally don’t, and that bears out in the payback data being pretty steady year to year.
So, if you see a casino worker inside a slot, it’s likely benign. If anything, it’s most likely to ensure you can play that machine later, because it’ll be up and running thanks to their efforts.
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