I went to Viejas this morning, mainly to play a poker tournament (San
Diego's Indian casinos have some of the best low-limit poker
tournaments I've ever heard of). I busted out pretty early and
decided to see if one of the two decent VP machines nearby were available.
The first one I came to was "Out of Service" and the other was
occupied. Well, at least they weren't reprogramming it with worse
pay-outs, I thought. I wandered downstairs to a nickel bank that had
NSUD in the past. I did a double-take when I saw the screen: it was
now the same (exactly, I think) as the two multi-denomination,
multi-game, machines upstairs. It included NSUD and Triple Bonus Plus
(99.8%) at $.02, $.05, $.10, and $.25. This bank of about 12 machines
is downstairs, past the Pai Gow in a small "room" with big craps and
horse racing games.
I played for about an hour (and lost) and had a couple of problems.
One, the machines were not in great condition. One was out of ticket
paper (they are TITO), one's bill acceptor didn't work, and the third
one I tried didn't accept bills very easily. They were also a bit
dirty in general, maybe because they hadn't had time to clean them
after a busy weekend. I decided to let them know about the problems
and to test their response time, I lit my Change light. One hour
later, despite a lot of employees passing me on the way to and from an
employees' door nearby, my light attracted no attention. I haven't
played there much lately. Is this a downside of TITO? Less need for
change people? Or was someone probably just slacking off? Or did
they maybe just ignore me because I was playing and didn't look like I
needed change? Anyway, I found it only mildly annoying because I
didn't really need anything to keep playing but wondered how long a
hand-pay might take!? I imagine they still do that, at least for
jackpots big enough to warrant a W-2.
--Jim