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Update
and Blog - Wednesday, 11 November 2009 We've been out
gambling in the beautiful county of Herefordshire
and it's been quite an eye-opening experience.
Having a gamble
here in the UK can come in many forms - a trip to
the casino, playing the lottery, playing in a pub
poker night and plenty more. We're very much a
nation of gamblers (the industry had a turnover of
over £84 billion in 2006/7 and a survey by the
Gambling
Commission
showed that 68% of us gamble) and you'd think that
those companies supplying our gambling needs would
be working very hard to compete for our disposable
income. It's important to
understand that punters need to be assured that any
bet they place will be handled professionally. It
doesn't make a jot of difference whether you're
staking £500 on a hand of Blackjack
in a casino or popping 50p into the fruit machine
in your local pub - the requirement is still there
that the player gets a fair game and reliable
service. However, if what we came across in
Hereford is anything to go by then the gambling
industry is taking the piss. Hereford
Bull Visiting a pub in
Hereford centre, we played a slot machine - one of
those new, 'video-style' machines that have
Slot
Games and
'random' casino games. After a horrendous run of
rubbish results at a stake of £1 a spin, we
were approximately £150 down. Yeah, we were
stupid for putting that much in but we'd had a few
beers. In any event, our luck suddenly changed and
we hit the £70 jackpot. Even better, we hit it
again TWICE in the next few spins. In fact, we
ended up with a whopping balance of £269.
Happy times for us. Or, it would have been if the
machine hadn't freaked out and found a convenient
time to malfunction when we hit 'collect'. Instead
of kicking out 269 shiny pound coins, it's screen
spewed out a scary-looking error
message. Approximately 0.8
seconds later, we spoke to a member of the the pub
staff and instead of paying us out, they told us to
come back tomorrow to collect the
winnings. In some respects,
this is sort of understandable - many pubs don't
own the machines in them but it's hardly great
customer service. What if we were 'out of towners'
and leaving the City that afternoon? Would they
send us a cheque? Probably not, as the pub didn't
take (or ask for) a name, telephone number or
address. They didn't even give us a receipt or
anything reassuring, other than a 'come back
tomorrow' offer and a shrug of the shoulders that
said 'sucks to be you'. Remember that
whilst this is just a pub slot machine, this is two
hundred and sixty-nine bleedin' quid here. It's a
hell of a payout and we risked £169 of our own
hard-earned cash to achieve it. In fairness to
the pub, they did pay up without a problem the next
day. We're sure their mention of £169 instead
of £269 when we arrived was nothing more than
a slip-up. Probably. Anyway, they paid up and
that's the only reason we're not naming and shaming
the pub. Not that they escape criticism-free. The
very least they should have done was give us a
receipt for what was due. They should ideally have
taken our details too. It probably didn't please
them too much that we stuck in a couple of quid
when we returned to collect our winnings and
managed to drop another £70 jackpot. It almost
looked as though they thought we'd fiddled the
machine somehow or perhaps we're just being
paranoid. Despite us asking several times, they
didn't seem particularly keen on telling us what
caused the error in the first place - hardly
reassuring that it won't happen next time a
customer wins. If pub slot
machines are going to cost a wallet-draining one
pound a spin and be genuinely capable of making or
breaking a night out for someone then they need to
be damn sure that they can afford to pay any
winnings. It didn't help that the next pub we
visited in Hereford (The Booth) features a fruit
machine with spelling errors. Hardly reassuring
that your money is going into something
reliable. This isn't even
the first time we've had this happen. We recently
played a 'quiz machine' in a different pub in
Hereford and we're given an 'IOU' message when we
tried to cash out just ten quid! On this occasion,
the pub staff were less helpful and offered nothing
other than a 'nothing to do with us' excuse.
Awesome. Sport Of
Kings? Pah! Things didn't
improve much when four of us visited
Hereford
Races on
Sunday, 8 November. Paying an eye-watering £17
each just to walk through the door wouldn't be
quite so painful if it wasn't for the crappy
service you can expect to receive from the bars and
restaurants inside. Going to the
races should be an event. It's not cheap by any
means. You're paying something like £3+ for a
pint of lousy, flat beer served in plastic glasses.
You're also expected to pay nearly FIVE POUNDS for
a 'chip-shop' style pie. They won't even give you a
plastic fork or any kind of cutlery to eat it with!
That's right, you need to shove this burning meat
pie towards your face, hope you don't lose any skin
from your nose and then wipe away gravy from your
chin. Las Vegas, it ain't. A visit to
Hereford Races is quite an experience and yeah, it
was fun - but only because we MADE it fun
ourselves. Gallons of (rubbish) beer helped the day
along but it was a hugely overpriced experience and
the organisers of the bars are definitely taking
the piss out of every paying customer. As we said
earlier, it doesn't matter whether you're betting
big or small. It doesn't matter whether you're
spending a quid on the lottery or chucking a grand
on the Roulette
table. The service you receive should be
professional and offer reassurance. If our gambling
experiences in Hereford are anything to go by then
we've got a very, very long way to go before it
looks anything other than amateurish and
embarrassing. Getting It
Right There's still
something encouraging to take from all this and
it's that most Online
Casinos
have clearly done so brilliantly at not making the
same mistakes that the land-based gambling sector
often makes. If an an online casino crashed, failed
to pay out or didn't offer the right level of
service then players wouldn't risk their money
there. An online casino
doesn't go nuts when you hit the 'collect' button
and it shouldn't offer anything other than a
reliable, fair and enjoyable gaming experience.
Considering how long the UK land-based gambling
industry has been around, it has much to learn from
its much younger online equivalent. Until the
industry wakes up and stops treating its customers
like morons, you can take a read through our
cuttingly-honest Online
Casino Reviews
and play in the comfort of your own
home. Remember that
Casino Beacon is continuously updated throughout
the day so do pop back to the site throughout the
day. It's probably worth Bookmarking
Us for an
easy return. |
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