Under Canberra’s current hands-off poker machine policy, West Australians are paying twice — they lose State revenue by doing the right thing and must help cover the extra costs caused by other States doing the wrong thing. Australians are now the world’s biggest gamblers, with total losses across all gambling classes at $23 billion a year. Best Online Pokies compared to Poker Machines We list the best Australian Poker Machines and make suggestion for online counterparts to try. If you are like me you pretty much like the same poker machines when you visit your local hotel, club or casino. In Australia, IGT pokies come with a minimum bet of $0.01 and a maximum bet of $1.00 per spin. Popular titles at Australian casinos and land based venues include Major Money and Cleopatra. Ainsworth Game Technology. Ainsworth was founded in 1995 when gaming guru Len Ainsworth left Aristocrat to start his own poker machine venture.

Crown Perth Casino Details

Located on the Swan River in the suburb of Burswood just outside the city of Perth, Crown Perth (operated by Crown Limited) is a hotel and casino resort complex. Linked to Perth’s Central Business District by a public railway system, the complex contains a casino, two hotels, a convention centre, many restaurants and bars, and a 20,000 seat indoor arena called The Dome.

The Crown’s casino is open twenty-four hours a day. On the casino games floor, twelve table games are open at any given time. The Crown’s table game variety includes a few variants of blackjack, roulette (on single-zero and double-zero wheels), electronic versions of casino standards in the Rapid series (Rapid Roulette, Rapid Baccarat, Rapid Money Wheel), three variants of baccarat, casino-style poker games like Casino War, Texas Hold’Em, and Caribbean Stud Poker, Two-Up, Sic Bo, and Pai Gow.

Poker players who visit the Crown complex can participate in weekly No Limit Hold ‘Em tournaments with buy-ins as low as AUD $50 or play in ring games from noon to 6 AM during the week or twenty-four hours on Fridays and Saturdays.

The casino’s collection of electronic machine games totals just under 2,000, though traditional pokies or any reel-spinning games are not legal in Western Australia. (See our page about pokies facts for more information about these kinds of games.) In place of pokies, the casino offers skill games like video poker and machine versions of keno, along with other skill games that are hybrids of table games and video poker machines. Wagers on these games range from AUD $0.10 up to the high-roller level available on machines in the casino’s VIP section. Bets on these VIP games go up into the hundreds of dollars per round. A separate keno lounge located next to the casino’s sports bar operates around the clock available at a wide variety of bet sizes on both table versions of the game and electronic portals.

1. Poker Machine, Cherry Master Game $ 2,312.00; IGT multi game Video poker machine w/ stand $ 1,292.00; Double Up Joker Poker Quarter Machine with Hi/Low & Odd/Even by Omega Products $ 679.99; IGT POKER MACHINE $ 2,040.00; IGT PE+ Player's Edge Plus Joker Poker Video Poker Slot Machine $ 2,040.00; Vintage Status Poker 25-Cent Machine – $500.
2. Widely known as slot machines in the United States, fruit machines in the UK and poker machines or pokies in Australia, slot machines have a long and colorful history, and have come a long way from the first 'one-armed bandits' that exposed chewing gums as grant prix.

VIPs and special guests have their own gaming area, the Pearl Room, with a 180 degree view of the Perth skyline and the Swan River. All the games found on the casino floor, except for head-to-head poker, have high-roller versions in the Pearl Room where bet minimums hover around the AUD $50 mark. Complimentary beverages and game hosts serving VIP guests are available in this by-invite only section of the Crown casino.

Facts about Gambling in Western Australia

According to a government report, the Database on Australia’s Gambling Industry, a little more than 80% of adults in Australia participate in some form of wagering. That number makes Australians the most active bettors in the world, with easy access to bookmakers, betting on horse and dog races, pokies in clubs and bars, and the country’s many traditional casinos, not to mention legal and regulated online gambling.

The government agency that controls gambling in this territory is the Office of Racing, Gaming and Liquor. That group licenses and regulates all gaming machines and table games at Crown Perth, and is responsible for the auditing of all the games of chance and skill in the Crown casino-resort complex as well as in clubs and bars that make pokies and other machine games available in WA.

It wasn’t until 1974 that the government of Western Australia considered regulating and legalizing casino play, citing the fact that organized crime groups were already running illegal casino operations within territorial boundaries. The potential increase in tourism to the area was another major factor, and eventually the territory decided to pass legislation allowing for the construction of a casino in Perth, the framework that would eventually lead to the construction of the Crown Perth.

Nearby Destinations in Western Australia

The city of Perth is the major destination for travellers to WA. Perth is a major cosmopolitan city, the fourth-largest in all of Australia, with museums, performance halls, and cultural sites draw in in hundreds of thousands of international tourists every year.
Though the climate is generally dry and much of the territory is uninhabited, the northern tropical regions of the state are home to a diverse collection of wildlife, as is the southwest coastal area (home to Perth) which has a more comfortable Mediterranean climate.

Revenue from tourism (and from poker machines) continue to increase, thanks in part to places like the Crown Perth that take advantage of the size of the territory’s capital city and its many landmarks and tourist-friendly destinations to draw in business. Gambling regulations in Western Australia do allow for the construction of other casino resort complexes in the state, though so far Crown Perth has a monopoly on the territory’s casino industry.

Australia has more poker machines per person than any country in the world, excluding casino-tourism destinations like Macau and Monaco. It has nearly 200,000 machines – one for every 114 people.

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This startling statistic resulted from a wave of pokie liberalisation during the 1990s that saw them introduced into pubs and clubs in every state and territory – except Western Australia.

To track the social impacts of this expansion, state and territory governments have commissioned surveys to measure the levels of gambling consumption and gambling-related harm. In total, more than 275,000 Australians have been interviewed in 42 studies of this kind since 1994.

We recently conducted an analysis of these studies to build a nationwide picture of how pokie gambling has changed across Australia over the past 25 years. We linked the participation rates reported by the surveys with government data on actual poker machine expenditure in pubs and clubs for each jurisdiction – converted into 2015 dollars to account for inflation.

The expenditure data exclude poker machines in casinos; these data are not disaggregated for government reporting purposes.

Consequently, the figures we present here should be considered minimums – especially in Tasmania and the Northern Territory, where a large proportion of pokies are located in casinos. WA is excluded from the expenditure analysis because it has no pokies outside Burswood Casino.

A recent gradual decline in pokie losses

Nationally, pokie losses in pubs and clubs increased fourfold between 1990 and 2000 before plateauing at around A$860 per adult per year in 2005. Since 2005, there has been a consistent gradual decline in gambling losses across the various jurisdictions. Throughout this period, pokie losses per adult in New South Wales have remained around 50% higher than the national average.

The biggest contributor to the decline since 2005 has been tobacco control, not gambling policy. The introduction of indoor smoking bans across Australia in the 2000s hit pokie revenues quite hard.

It is also likely that caps on pokie numbers – which have been relatively stable since 2000 – played a role in limiting pokie expenditure.

However, this should give no reason for complacency. The decline in pokie revenue is slowing, and possibly beginning to reverse in NSW, the NT and Queensland.

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Current annual losses on pokies in pubs and clubs for Australia amount to $633 per adult. Losses in NSW are highest at $978 per adult and lowest in Tasmania at $283 per adult – although casinos play a more important role in Tasmania.

These figures are very high by world standards. The losses by Australians on pokies outside of casinos dwarf those of any other comparable country. They are 2.4 times greater than those of our nearest rival, Italy.

These losses are even more anomalous when compared to non-casino gambling machines in other English-speaking countries. Australians lose three times more than New Zealanders, 4.1 times more than Canadians, 6.4 times more than the Irish, 7.5 times more than the British, and 9.8 times more than Americans.

Falling numbers of pokie gamblers

The modest decline in losses since the mid-2000s has been driven by a falling number of people playing the pokies.

The chart below shows the proportion of the adult population in each Australian state or territory that gambles on pokies at least once per year. These proportions are derived from the surveys described above. Each survey estimate is represented by a single dot.

Participation rates peaked shortly after pokies were introduced in the late 1990s at around 40% for the larger states. Since that time, participation has consistently dropped to below 30% across Australia and has fallen to less than 20% in Tasmania, Victoria and the ACT.

Amounts lost per gambler have remained constant

Dividing the pokie losses in clubs and pubs for each jurisdiction by the number of actual gamblers reveals the average amount lost per pokie gambler per year as shown by the chart below. Some lines on this chart are shorter than others because the survey-based participation data is not uniformly available.

The reduction in total pokie losses since 2005 has not been matched by a corresponding decline in losses per individual gambler. After a reduction due to the smoking bans, losses per gambler appear to have plateaued – with some jurisdictions trending up (ACT and NT) and others down (NSW and SA).

This suggests that while fewer people are playing the pokies, the amount of money lost per gambler has remained relatively constant. And this amount appears very high.

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The amount lost per pokie gambler (just in pubs and clubs) in both NSW and Victoria is around $3,500 per year, or around $65 per week. The ACT sits at around $3,000 per gambler per year, followed by the NT and Tasmania at around $1,500 per year.

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To put this in some perspective, the average Australian adult spent $1,245 on electricity and gas in 2014-15.

And while we now have concerted government action to reduce energy costs, the regulatory reforms required to reduce the amount of losses for pokie gamblers are not on the legislative agenda in most of Australia.