Casino Social Distancing: SOLVED!

Reopening casinos with enforced social distancing is problematic on SO many levels for operators.

Let’s assume we are going to turn off every-other-machine to keep people six feet apart:

Okay… if you are the slot vendor doing a rev share, I imagine you are a little freaked out that half of your investment is turned off…sitting idle.

If you are a player, you might be more than a little pissed that your favorite title or your favorite seating position is now turned off. It might be enough to make you go to another casino.

That’s just the introduction to the problem, even if you, the operator, don’t care about a little customer inconvenience and don’t give squat about what the vendor thinks (or you own your games and don’t have a rev-share issue).

After a player finishes at one of the socially-distanced machines, a new player comes up to play the machine and gets contaminated from the evil-seeds left behind by the previous player. YUCK. (Not to mention the whole issue of casino liability in that case; some casinos have said they are going to require patrons to sign a liability waiver giving the casino a free pass for that negligence.)

Serious damned problems.

OR NOT.

The mad scientists at systems provider CasinoTrac have created an incredible solution that… well, frankly, if you are not using it you are not nearly as smart as I thought you were.

Here is my understanding of how it works:

• All the machines are turned on; nothing is off for social distancing.
• A player approaches a machine they like, sits down, and inserts their players club card.
• The system immediately shuts down the machines on both sides of the chosen game. (If there were already people at the games beside it, then it would not be on because the system would have shut it off when THEY inserted the card).
• Once the player leaves the game, the machine shuts off and the other games beside it come back on.

Dig this: It gets better:

• Once the player leaves the game and it automatically shuts down, the system sends a message to housekeeping to come wipe down and clean the recently played machine.
• When the housekeeper or slot attendant finishes the cleaning, that employee inserts an employee keycard into the game to notify the system that it is ready for play.
• The machine comes back on (unless the machines immediately beside it are in play).

Seriously, HOW F’ing COOL IS THAT?

“It’s like having a virtual slot attendant follow you around the floor,” Chad Hoehne, the President & CEO Table Trac Inc. told me.

He’s right… and it is by far THE best solution I have heard; especially in the face of the plastic sheets between games, legal documents signed by players, and other harebrained schemes floating around.

Casino social distancing SOLVED!

I am officially "wowed"!