The certification process isn’t bound to North America, nor is it exclusive to traditional casino operations. It occurs in North and South America, across Europe, in Australia, Macau, the Caribbean — everywhere GLI is. Perhaps one of the most sweat-inducing steps of certification is the on-site inspection, but it doesn’t have to be.
Budget. This single word can send chills down the spine of even the toughest regulator. Many states today face various degrees of fiscal crisis, and few governmental agencies can escape close scrutiny of their expenditures. It is not helpful that the average taxpayer unsympathetically views the bureaucracy as an insatiable monolith, intent on the relentless pillage of any available revenue.
I travel a lot, and when flying the unfriendly skies, sometimes the best offense is a good defense. Thus, I always board a plane with OK! Magazine, The National Enquirer, Star, Globe or US Weekly in hand. Upon taking my seat, I immediately zone in on the latest exploits of future ex-con Lindsey Lohan and try to project an, “I can’t wait to talk about how awful the paparazzi is” vibe to whomever thinks the seat next to mine looks attractive.
If given the task of selecting a competitive blend of gaming devices for a new casino, where would the best starting point be? Planning for a new casino takes many twists and turns, but some portions of the decision process are consistent with the planning phase for ordering new machines at an existing casino.
The first step is analyzing game performance at the property level.
The latest offerings in progressive jackpots combine a number of possible payouts to players, allowing them to play for several levels of progressive awards. The most common multi-level payouts offer four, five or six progressive jackpots. Some are relatively small, giving a high frequency of wins, while others are very large and are awarded infrequently.
Read some of the gaming regulation news from August 2007. Featuring news from Antigua and Barbuda, Great Britain, Japan, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Russia, South Carolina and West Virginia. It includes topics like lawsuits against the United States, a possible change in the legal gambling age, extended gambling hours and smoking bans.
What is suitability? If you asked a dozen regulators to define it, you would probably get at least that many different answers. As with most elusive concepts, efforts to plumb the depth of its meaning usually produce more, not less, confusion. In our roles as both state and tribal regulators, we have had to confront a number of difficult suitability questions. Now, we humbly offer you our perspective on this challenging regulatory concept.
The process of reporting on a property’s weighted hold percent can be simplified through many of today’s slot tracking systems. Then again, many of today’s casinos still lack the technology designed to provide this information. Either way, we need to know how weighted hold percentages work — read on to find out why.
I’ve been tossed out of a lot of beds, but never as forcefully as one mid-summer night in 1999 at about 3 a.m. in Laughlin. No, I was not enjoying the fickle embrace of Big Red, the local lonely gal, but rather tremors, as the fault line shifted beneath the Mojave Desert and offered all those a-slumber a mighty geologic burp of an earthquake.
This month we’ll study progressive jackpots in more detail. To start, we’ll make a couple of assumptions about our exercise. First, let’s assume we already have a game with the proper theoretical payout percentage and theoretical hold that will allow a specific percentage to be accrued in the progressive jackpot. Second, let’s assume the game is a 3-reel stepper game, which will make our calculations simple.
