I was planning on playing Quick Quads at the South Point. The four machines were full. I knew two of the players and one told me she was leaving in fifteen minutes.
No problem. I had about $4000 worth of $20 bills I had received from a small casino that had run out of hundreds. I started to put them into two side-by-side machines, creating $1,000 tickets. Since jackpots are paid in cash at the South Point and the game I was going to play creates W2Gs fairly often (on good days, anyway), I wanted to have ammunition for the play.
I also had a ticket from “last time.” I had played earlier in the day, and my ending score was $840. My plan was to insert $160 into another machine, cash the ticket out, and enter it into the machine where I had previously inserted the $840 ticket.
But it didn’t work. When I put in the $160 ticket, the machine’s iView screen read “Unable to Accept Tickets at This Time.” Possibly those aren’t the exact words, but that is certainly the exact message. The credit meter remained at $840 and the $160 ticket didn’t “reappear.”
I flagged down a passing slot repairman. He read the iView screen, listened to my tale of woe, and started looking for my ticket. He took out the bill acceptor and found no “extra” ticket. He pushed some buttons to look at the summary of what happened and he saw the last two entries were an $840 ticket and an unreadable ticket. He turned the machine off and on again. There remained $840 in credits, but I was still $160 short.
So he called over the slot shift manager. He listened to both me and the slot tech. I also showed him my stack of twenties and said I’d been creating tickets for later use. If that was against policy, I wanted to give him every chance to tell me not to do it. Then he said something like, “I have to check another computer. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
It’s possible he called surveillance. That well could be part of standard operating procedures in cases like this. That prospect didn’t bother me. Surveillance would have seen that I had entered eight $20 bills and then hit the cash out button. It’s also possible he made a decision that calling surveillance wasn’t necessary because I’m a “known player.”
Several times in the past I have created large tickets before I started to play. The South Point has had enough experience with me doing this and then gambling for several hours that they aren’t particularly concerned with me “laundering money.” That has to be on their checklist somewhere as something to consider when people insert money in the machines and then cash it out without playing. But for their regular players, especially the “big” players who then put the larger tickets into a machine and do indeed use those tickets for gambling purposes, this isn’t a concern. Such players have to get the money inserted into the machine somehow, plus $100 bills are the largest available, so the only way to do it is to put a lot of bills through the bill acceptor.
There are casinos where I could bring the cashier $10,000 and have her create four $2,500 tickets, or maybe ten $1,000 tickets. At this time, that technology isn’t available at the South Point. So big players create their own tickets. This is beyond the experience of players who never enter more than $20 at a time into a machine (in some sort of money management strategy), but among players who plan to play fairly large amounts for hours at a time, it’s commonplace.
Fifteen minutes later the slot shift manager came back, apologized for the delay, and had a floor person pay me the $160. I don’t remember whether he ordered the money-collection-box on the “offending machine” to be changed or not. By this time, the Quick Quads machine was open and I settled in to play.
When I told Bonnie about this later, she asked if I was worried I wouldn’t get the $160 back. No I wasn’t worried. I was telling the truth and surveillance evidence was available if the casino wanted to examine it, so there was nothing to get anxious about. The discussions between me and various casino personnel were conducted between calm individuals trying to solve a mutual problem. I’m not the type to get really excited and start calling names when minor inconveniences happen, so the casino didn’t react negatively to me.
The only thing I was a little concerned about was whether somebody else was going to get “my” Quick Quads machine while I was waiting to be paid. I was pretty sure I had that covered. When my friend left, I put my jacket over the back of the chair and tilted the chair onto the upright machine, had my player’s card inserted, and watched the machine. I believe I would have been able to explain to any “reasonable” player what the situation was and that I would end up getting the machine. All turned out well and nobody challenged my “possession” of the machine I wanted.