Do Casinos Still Have Hard-Count Rooms?

Before the advent of ticket in ticket out slots, just about all casinos, big and small alike, had two count rooms for money: a “soft count” room for paper money and a “hard count” room to count coins. Do the casinos still have hard count rooms?

The short answer is no, though casinos certainly still count coins. All hard-money handling, including coins, remains part of casino cash logistics. However, the traditional hard-count room is almost non-existent.

The shift away from coin-operated slot machines began in the 1990s due to high maintenance costs, labor intensity, and the rise of ticket-in-ticket-out (TITO) systems. Back in the coin-in era, casinos had hard count rooms where slot attendants/security dumped hopper buckets, coins ran through mechanical or optical counters, and everything was logged, reconciled, and secured like a mini-Fort Knox. That all faded fast once TITO became standard in the early 2000s.

However, a handful of casinos around the country continue to offer coin-based slots for nostalgic appeal. And some very old tribal casinos or tiny locals properties still have a handful of coin-operated slot machines with small legacy coin-counting setups. Slots A Fun, as we know, has several dozen old-style coin machines, so the Phil Ruffin joint almost certainly has automated counting and batching equipment, including robotic sorters and/or automated coin sorters. Last we heard, some locals casinos, especially the smaller ones out in Henderson, still had some coin machines.

But on the Strip and in modern casinos around the country, coins are essentially gone.

In fact, greenbacks themselves are being phased out as casinos push toward cashless options. Like coins, cash will probably never go away entirely, but as we discussed in a recent QoD, the demand for this kind of money will no doubt follow coins into obscurity in the not-too-distant future.

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Comments

Kevin Lewis Feb-02-2026

The primary reason..

...why coins were phased out by the casinos is that inserting coins slows play down considerably. Putting in a hundy or a TITO and going tappity tappity tap burns up your money much faster. A player inserting coins gets in 6 to 8 spins per minute. A player tapping the button and burning credits gets in 10 to 15 spins a minute. So the casinos started making it impossible to feed the bandits coins at all 

It's not enough that you lose. They want you to lose QUICKLY.

John Dulley Feb-02-2026

El Cortez

I think the el Cortez has some coin machines in the back area by the garage..

Randall Ward Feb-02-2026

cash

Plastic for gambling ruins the mystery, no one really wants to know exactly how much they win/lose. Hopefully it doesn't happen for awhile

Doug Miller Feb-02-2026

No doubt the casinos benefited

I think Kevin Lewis correctly hit a big part of the benefit for casinos of eliminating coins, but I think that there are additional factors.  Casinos had to have rolls of quarters, nickels and dollar coins or tokens, some casinos even hired (mostly) women to walk around the casino exchanging rolls of coins for paper money.  Back in the old days it seemed to me that the number one issue for slot maintenance employees were stuck coin issues, and I would think that there was some wear and tear on the machines from the coins that you wouldn’t have with paper money or tickets.  Then the casinos had to hire at least one employee to accept a bucket of coins and run them through the coin counter and give paper money to the winner, not to mention the cost of hiring someone to stock each machine with coins to pay out and to collect hundreds or even thousands of coins from each machine.  I would think that it is easier and faster to collect paper money.

JCCoryell Feb-02-2026

Not as fun

Casinos without levers, coin trays, and mechanical reels lose quite a bit of excitement.  There is nothing mechanical to these modern machines.  They're just computers now.  I imagine that when chips and physical cards are gone from table games something more will be lost.  I go to casinos for the excitement of the casino floor and the social interaction amongst people.  That is slowly dying out and once its gone so will I

King of the Bovines Feb-02-2026

What I miss...

With the old coin operated machines, you'd get this gunk buildup on your fingers from handling all of those coins, especially nickels.

The best part?

It tasted pretty good!

/Try the veal...

Jeffrey Small Feb-02-2026

The excitement of coins

The new slot machines just don't match the excitement of piles of coins crashing out of the slot machine when you hit a jackpot! And the hassle of collecting the coins and getting them counted!  The horse race machine on the second floor of the D is one of the last holdovers--hit a 200-1 winner and scramble to collect the coins as they fall on the floor! Also, the excitement of winning 150 dollar coins at the airport and almost missing my flight since I was told that I had to place them in a holder get paid!  Just not the same as getting a TITO ticket and taking it to the cage!

slickmv Feb-02-2026

Skeuomorphic sounds

I wonder for how much longer will slot machines bother to play the "ching-ching-ching" sound meant to evoke the memory of coins falling into the metal tray? There's a generation of players who have only ever heard the electronic version of this, and not the analog. Will it linger on like the "save" icon meant to resemble a 3.5" floppy disk?

Question of the Day - 02 February 2026

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