Ask the Slot Expert: Casino employees should know what's going on

A panelist at a seminar on giving superior customer service in a casino had this suggestion for casino managers. He said that all employees should know the basic details about an event occurring at the casino. Anyone who wears a uniform or a name tag should be able to answer two of the five W's of journalism. Guests already know who, what, and why, but they might have questions about when and where? Every employee that might come in contact with a guest -- slot attendants, slot technicians, dealers, pit bosses, cleaners, suits walking through the casino -- should be able to tell a guest where and when an event is happening.

In short, employees should know what's going on.

Slot machines and slot clubs have gotten complicated today with many interconnected systems, sometimes it's difficult (if not impossible) for a slot attendant or slot club rep to know what is going on.

I needed to earn a certain number of tier credits for a promotion. I switched machines when I was a few credits short.

After playing more than enough to earn the tier credits, the kiosk said I was still a few credits short. The points I had earned were added to my total, but the tier credits weren't.

This casino doesn't use the "every dollar played counts" model for earning tier credits, so if you pulled your card before playing enough to earn a tier credit that play would be for naught.

I went to the slot club booth and told the rep that something didn't seem to be right with that machine. I earned points, but no tier credits.

She explained to me that I wouldn't earn a tier credit if I pulled my card before earning the credit. I explained that I never pulled my card the entire time.

After a bit of digging and looking at various displays, she said it looks like you were pulling your card and putting it back in every few seconds. The raw data showed a Card In followed by a Card Out a few seconds later followed by a Card In and a Card Out and so on for the entire time I played the machine. I was never Card In long enough to earn a tier credit.

After they finally accepted that my problem wasn't user error and I kinda knew what I was talking about, I was able to alert them to a problem on a machine that they may never have known about. It wasn't easy for the rep to figure out exactly what was going on.

Sometimes it's difficult to be taken seriously and not get written off as someone who doesn't really know what's going on. I remember what one of the presenters at a programming seminar I attended said about their outside testers. He said that some testers just don't understand how things are supposed to work, so what they think is a bug is really proper behavior.

On the other hand, he said, when this one tester said that he thought he found a problem, they said a collective "Oh sh!t!" because they knew that it was really likely that there was a bug.

I usually go to the movies a couple of times a week. If I don't sneak in a bagel and coffee for an early morning show, I buy popcorn and an ICEE at concessions (and keep Progressive's Dr. Rick's warning in mind: "Snacks are going to be expensive.").

I've had so many ICEE's, I know what color the ice crystals in the window should be. I know the proper dispensing consistency. I know the sounds the machine should make while dispensing.

The supervisors at the theater know that if I say there is something wrong with one of the ICEE machines, there is a problem and they will check the machine.

The casino with the Triple Play royal progressives I've been playing the last few months had a good gift last week so I sat down at one of the machines to earn enough points to get the gift. When it was close to the time I was going to need to quit and go to a movie, the machine dealt me a 4-card royal.

I held the four cards and thought that it would be nice to get one or more royals, but I shouldn't get greedy considering I've had two royals recently. Nevertheless, I got the card I needed on the top hand, which had the highest progressive value.

It was $1300, so I would get a tax form. I didn't expect to get a hand pay because I had enrolled in Instant Jackpot a few years ago at the casino. Instead of waiting for a handpay, I could just enter my PIN and have my winnings added to my credit meter. The casino sends a consolidated W-2G at the end of the year.

The machine displayed a hand-pay required message, but the card reader display had a message asking me to enter my PIN. I entered my PIN and then got an error message, "Insufficient credentials." Means something to somebody, I suppose.

When the slot attendant came to verify the hand-pay, I asked her about the message. She didn't know what it meant. When she came back with my money, she said that she had reported it to a slot technician. It had been a long time since I had a handpay at this casino, so I asked her if she thought that I might have to refresh the paperwork I signed to enroll in the program. She suggested that I ask at the slot club booth.

A supervisor in the slot department handled my enrollment in the program, so I wasn't sure that the slot club was the right place to go.

This casino is in the middle of a complete makeover. The slot club booth has been -- temporarily, I hope -- combined with the cage. After my movie, I went to the cage. I told the cashier about the error message I got and wanted to know if there was a problem with my Instant Jackpot participation.

Then I explained to her what Instant Jackpot was. It's not like the casino didn't display big signs about the program when it first started a couple of years ago.

She said that she would get the slot booth manager. The manager knew about the program, but didn't know what the error message meant. She said she would investigate and disappeared into the back of the cage.

She came back a few minutes later. She said she had to have her boss check this. He said that everything was fine with my enrollment. The machine probably just didn't support Instant Jackpot.

I said that it was a newish machine and it didn't have the placard that the old machines have saying that this machine doesn't support Instant Jackpot.

I didn't expect everyone I spoke to about the error to know what caused it, but I did expect them to know what Instant Jackpot does.

I suspect that the machine had to provide some credentials to the Instant Jackpot system and those credentials were insufficient. There's a problem with the configuration on the machine.

In the interest of science, I'm going to try to get a royal on another machine in the bank to see if Instant Jackpot works on that machine.

If you would like to see more non-smoking areas on slot floors in Las Vegas, please sign my petition on change.org.

Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com.

Copyright © John Robison. Slot Expert and Ask the Slot Expert are trademarks of John Robison.