Casino: We're too full to detect banned gamblers

Photo / Greg Bowker.

Increasing patronage on SkyCity Casino's gaming floor is making it more difficult to detect people who have been banned from entering the casino, SkyCity says.

Following an investigation, the Department of Internal Affairs has said it found SkyCity had no grounds to withhold paying a $60,000 win to a man who voluntarily banned himself from gambling in 2004.

SkyCity has paid the man, but said it was planning to lobby the department and the Government to "remove any doubt" on the conditions of re-entry into casinos.

"There are lots of people on our gaming floor, and as stringent as our surveillance and our technology can be, it's not possible for us to detect or stop every single person who has been excluded from entering the casino," Skycity's spokeswoman Connie Sprague said. Miss Sprague would not say how many problem gamblers were banned from entering the premises.

SkyCity's lawyer, Peter Treacy, said he hoped the Government would bring in regulations to give some "legal teeth" to its efforts to keep problem gamblers out.

Mr Treacy said SkyCity believed the $60,000 winner had contravened the Gambling Act, but Internal Affairs disagreed.

"Our policies, we believe, are still absolutely right. The whole thrust of them is to protect those few people who shouldn't be there from themselves ..." he told Radio New Zealand.

"What's disappointing is that the department now doesn't seem to share our view of what the consequences of re-entry and breach of conditions should be."

In August, 28-year-old Sothea Sinn, who banned himself and his girlfriend in 2004, entered the casino and gambled undetected for a few hours and won a $60,000 jackpot playing Caribbean stud, a card game similar to poker.

He believed the ban had expired when he went to collect the winnings, but was taken into a room with a SkyCity guard.

Internal Affairs gambling inspectors who arrived soon after had initially agreed with the casino that Mr Sinn should not be paid because he had not completed six counselling sessions, which was part of the criteria for him to re-enter the casino.

But the department said that upon further investigation, it had found no reason under the Gambling Act for SkyCity to refuse payment, reported the department's newsletter, Gambits, in its December issue.

The department had "reconsidered the issue as one involving the integrity of gambling" and advised SkyCity that Mr Sinn had not breached the Gambling Act because his ban had expired.

It also said alleged breaches of civil law had no impact on the Gambling Act, and the matter of whether the $60,000 was paid out was a matter between SkyCity and Mr Sinn.