Ask the Slot Expert: My first cashless gaming experience at the slots

One of the results of the ongoing pandemic is the accelerated development and acceptance of cashless gaming products. IGT's solution even won Product Innovation of the Year at the recent Global Gaming Expo.

Strictly speaking, cashless gaming has been around for a long, long time. Have you ever played with cash at a table game? Using chips (well, cheques, strictly speaking) at a table game is cashless gaming, isn't it? Isn't using tokens (Remember them?) at dollar and up machines also cashless gaming?

What we're really talking about with these new products is cashless funding of our gaming bankrolls. Rather than handing Covid-carrying bills to your dealer or putting them in the bill acceptor on a slot machine, cashless gaming products let us establish our bankroll for a game without handling all that nasty cash. (Silliness aside, you don't have to worry about catching Covid from cash. Catching the disease from fomite exposure is rare compared with catching it from aerosol exposure. And maybe the trace amounts of cocaine on the bills will kill the virus.)

Cashless gaming products were used to purchase chips at table games first. Products for slots were sure to follow.

I had my first -- and unintentional -- experience with cashless gaming at Red Rock's slots today.

A few days ago I noticed stickers that said "STN CASH" on Red Rock's slots. These stickers replaced the ones for Red Rock's "cardless connect" system, which let you use an app on your smartphone to connect your machine to your player card account instead of inserting your player card. I used that system a lot when it first became available, but then I went back to using my card because it was faster.

When I got home, I googled "stn cash" to see what I could learn about it. There's a stncash.com website. It says that STN Cash is "mobile funding straight from your phone to your favorite machine in seconds!"

I downloaded the app to my phone and followed the instructions to create an account and link my Boarding Pass card to it. When I got to the point of trying to add a funding source to my account, the app said I had to go to the casino cage to validate my identity.

The website actually has identity validation as the second step after downloading the app, but I skipped over it to see how far I could get.

I wasn't sure whether the system was operational yet. There were no signs or brochures about it in the casino. I asked the cashier if they were doing the verification for STN Cash yet. She said they were and I should meet her at the last window. They hadn't started publicizing the system yet, but they were signing up anyone who wanted to use it.

There was a bit more involved than just proving I was me. I had to fill out a form with my name, address, SSN, and ID number and sign it indicating that all of the information was correct and that I agreed to the terms and conditions of the STN Cash program. I also had the option to specify a daily limit on withdrawals. I had to give them at least $5 to fund the account initially too.

After a bit of typing and clicking by the cashier and a consultation with her supervisor about what a particular message meant, they asked me to enter my PIN on a keypad. After the system accepted my PIN, they asked me to open the app, press the Connect button, and hold my phone near the machine.

I did as they asked and then asked which of the two card readers at the window I should hold my phone near.

"Not those," said the supervisor. "The machine right behind you."

I had forgotten about the video poker machine that is at the last window. It makes more sense to use the player card reader on a video poker machine to test the app than a credit card reader. After a few seconds, my Boarding Pass info appeared in the slot club panel on the side of the screen. They said I was all set up now and I could start using the system.

I had planned to add my bank account to my STN Cash account after I got home. Then I would transfer some money to the account the next time I visited Red Rock and use the app instead of cash to play.

I still had some time before my pizza would be ready at Side Piece, so I sat down at an NSU machine to play the free play I had available. I thought my long period of bad luck had finally ended (over 17,000 hands since my last deuces and I haven't been getting my share of wild royals and five-of-a-kinds and straight flushes), but the machine was just teasing me. After an initial period of good-paying hands, I had a long string of losers and had to feed the machine. I had $83.54 left on the credit meter when it was time to pick up my pie. I hit the Cash Out button and --

No ticket came out. I hit the Service button and waited. And waited and waited. That was unusual. Red Rock is usually quick to respond to a service request.

When the floorperson arrived, I told her that I hit Cash Out and no ticket came out. She opened up the machine and she was as surprised as I was to not see a ticket stuck in the outgoing ticket path. She pulled up the voucher history on the machine. The last voucher printed was not for $83.54.

She then pulled up the cash out history screen. This screen showed that the machine did handle a cash out for $83.54. Where did the money go?

There was about 30 seconds of silence as she was trying to figure out what happened and I was trying to figure out if I was out $83.54, and then it was like 48 minutes into an episode of House or Death in Paradise. Someone makes an offhand remark and House or the Detective Inspector solves the case.

I saw the STN Cash sticker on the machine again.

I told her that I had just signed up for STN Cash, but I didn't connect my phone to the machine. Could the money have gone to my STN Cash account anyway?

I pulled up the app again and, sure enough, my balance had increased by $83.54.

She said that once you go cashless, all your cash outs are cashless. You can still put cash or tickets into machines, but when you hit Cash Out, your credit meter will transfer to your STN Cash account. She also said that I was the first person she's seen using the system.

It looks like you only have to connect the app to a machine if you want to transfer money from your STN Cash account to it and use cardless connect instead of your player card. When you hit Cash Out, or hit the disconnect button on the app, or just leave the machine, your credit meter gets transferred to your STN Cash account regardless of the source of the funds.

Once I had more than toll money in the account, I should have tried connecting the app to a machine. I didn't think about what I should try because I was already late to pick up my pizza.

Some questions I'll get answered:

• When I take out a marker, can they add the money to my STN Cash account?
• Will handpays still be paid by hand or will they just add the money to the account after I sign the W-2G? (I hope to get an answer to this question real soon. It's been 108,00 hands since I hit a royal!)

I thought we would never see cashless gaming. I thought that regulators would not approve the products because they make it too easy for players to lose more than they had planned. If they have to wait for another marker or go to the ATM to withdraw more cash or take a cash advance on a credit card, they have some downtime to think about what they're about to do and maybe change their minds.

One method to prevent players from "going on tilt" is the ability to set a daily limit. The procedures shouldn't make it easy to raise your limit. There have to be some speedbumps. (I didn't set up a limit, so I don't know exactly what is limited. The amount you can withdraw from an external funding source? The amount you can lose from your STN Cash account?)

Tickets replaced coins and tokens on slot machines. Cashless gaming may replace tickets.

Here are the latest Covid data. I added columns for hospitalizations because, in addition to decreasing the spread of Covid and the number of deaths from Covid, another goal of the vaccines is to decrease the number of cases requiring hospitalization. There is a difference in the hospitalization data for US versus NV. The CDC reports total number of Covid hospital admissions. Nevada reports current hospitalizations, not admissions.

All data comes from the CDC (https://www.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totalcases, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html), except for Nevada current hospitalizations (https://nvhealthresponse.nv.gov/).