Talking Stick casino in Scottsdale lost power last night. All were evacuated from hotel and casino. How do they know how much money was in the machines? There was no backup generator.
Talking Stick Resort Public Relations Director Ramon Martinez told a local Fox News affiliate that the casino would be closed indefinitely after being flooded in a storm on August 11 (the middle of the monsoon season in Arizona). Five tournaments, including the Arizona State Poker Championship, which some players had paid $2,200 to enter, fell victim to the closure.
The first expected reopening date of August 19 came and went, with the announcement that the damage was far worse than first thought. As of this writing (on September 1), it remained closed.
The casino in a Facebook posting said that it did, in fact, have a backup generator, but a succession of storms, four in all, overwhelmed the generator area.
“An estimated 200 people were playing on the casino's 844 slot machines at the time of the outage,” reported AZ Central. Slot players who hadn’t pulled their tickets were counseled patience: “Slot machines like those at Talking Stick typically retain all gaming data when powered back up after an outage, the Arizona Department of Gaming said in a statement.”
Elaborated ADG spokeswoman Caroline Oppelman, “These are very sophisticated gaming machines, and we fully anticipate that they will retain the information that was in the machine prior to the power loss. That's pretty standard, but until the power's restored, we just don't know.”
As for how much money is in the machines, Talking Stick relies on its player-tracking software to tally that information. Also, according to Martinez, slot attendants took down players’ names and machine numbers at the time of the outage. "If we were unable to reach players impacted, we are encouraging them to contact us directly,” Martinez told AZ Central.
“Slot machine players who had slot tickets in hand, but were unable to redeem them due to the incident, can go to Casino Arizona to redeem their winnings,” read Talking Stick’s official statement. “Impacted players with questions regarding their slot play can call 480-850-7708.” (We tried the number; no answer.)
We turned for a more technical answer to Boyd Gaming spokesman David Strow. “Should power be lost entirely to a machine (a very rare event, given the multiple power back-up systems in place on the casino floor), the data would be retained within the slot’s memory indefinitely. For example, if you put $20 into a slot and unplug it, it will still show a balance of $20 when you plug it back in, regardless of how long it has been without power,” he explained.
“As far as linking players back to balances once the machine is turned back on, there are two ways you’d do that,” Strow continued. “The easiest is a player loyalty card – if one had a loyalty card inserted at the time of the outage, we could easily link that player back to the machine’s cash balance. But even if the player didn’t have a card inserted, you could link back to the player based on surveillance footage. The player would have to let us know where they were sitting, of course, but you’d have video footage to confirm the claim.”
