Responsible gaming

What we are actually trying to achieve

An evening’s play and then bed is a better outcome for this house than a guest who was still at a table when the door shut. That is not a slogan; it is the reason the room is built the way it is. Five tables and no more. Closing at one, not at three. No credit on the floor. Nothing on the property dispenses cash. The bar in the hall shuts at eleven, two hours before the tables, which is deliberate and which people notice.

Age, every visit

18 in Queensland, a photograph identity document every single time, including for the guest who was at dinner in this building an hour before. A picture of a licence held up on a phone is not a licence.

What the staff do while you are standing there

• Hold a limit you set. Say the figure before you sit down and it is written down.
• Say what the hour is the moment it is asked for. The clock is on the end wall and nobody has to look for it.
• Keep your place for twenty minutes if you want to eat, walk outside, or sleep on it.
• Keep you out for a stretch of days if you ask them to, and write it where the next shift will read it.
• Take a self-exclusion at the front desk, in person, effective that evening.

None of that has been put on this website, and that is a decision. Every one of them a thing said to a person standing in front of you, in a room forty paces from where you are standing. Putting it on a web form would suit us and would not suit you.

Five signs worth catching early

• You are thinking about the room while you are standing on a boat at Whitehaven, which is the thing you came to Queensland for.
• You went back after telling yourself, out loud, that you were finished for the night.
• You have walked down Begley Street to the cash machine and back more than once in an evening.
• You are playing at a figure you would not say out loud to the person you came here with.
• You have started hoping the staff do not recognise you. They do; there are eleven of them and twelve rooms.

How the staff are trained

The two who work the door and the bar go through it before their first shift and once a year after: what the law requires, how to check a document, how to refuse somebody without a scene, and the guest whose drinking has got ahead of the playing. The manager on duty looks in at least twice a night. Both of them have stopped a night early before, and neither was ever questioned about it afterwards.

How to ask

Tell whoever is standing at the door, or whoever is at the desk in the hall. The wording does not have to be any good. No one will make a scene of it and no one will pass it on.