Ray Morgan Company Supports TITO #TITO

The amount of information an auditor can get from the TITO system is amazing, says Doyle, one of the first auditors at Argosy to work with the new technology. An auditor can quickly look for inconsistencies throughout the system, comparing the tickets issued by the slot machines with the tickets redeemed in the count room, or examining why a cage near a certain group of machines is not redeeming as many tickets as other cage stations.

Best of all, Doyle says, auditors can reduce the frequency of time-consuming hopper tests, which involve choosing a random sampling of machines, dumping out the coins, counting that money, and reloading the machines. Handling the coins is a dirty job.

Tickets, on the other hand, come out of the machine freshly printed, each with its own unique validation number and bar-coding. "Once you have that ticket, it's just like holding money," says Brian Casey, marketing manager for IGT Gaming Systems. Of approximately 130,000 TITO gaming machines in the United States, about 70,000 used in 139 casinos operate on the EZ Pay Ticket System from IGT.

TITO is still relatively new, accounting for a fraction of as many as 700,000 gaming machines in North America today, Casey says. Oddly enough, the coinless machines installed in the past two-plus years are still equipped with hoppers that casinos have to disconnect.

That's because early on, much of the industry feared casino patrons would not accept the new technology because they would miss the "ka-ching" sound of the money dropping out of the machine and the feel of the coins in their hands.