Field notes, sorted
A working glossary of resort-casino terms
I started this list on a wet afternoon in the Wrest Point archive, the year a clerk gently corrected my use of the word casino to mean an entire seventeen-storey building rather than the one room, among many, where the tables actually stood. The tower also held a revolving restaurant, several hundred guest rooms and a lobby that never once felt like a lobby, and I had been calling the whole thing by the name of its smallest part.
What follows is sorted the way the paperwork sorts it — by licence, by floor plan, by the naming habits of the room itself — and it leaves out anything written for a player rather than a researcher. No odds here, no payout tables, no house rules. Just the words that describe how these buildings got licensed, how they were laid out, and what the industry and its regulators actually call things.
Licensing and regulation
Five terms, in roughly the order a planning file would use them.
Casino licence
The state's written permission to run gaming tables and machines inside a named building, held by one operator and not simply transferable if the building changes hands.
Licence condition
A specific obligation attached to that licence — a minimum count of hotel rooms, a retained heritage facade, a reporting schedule — that has nothing to do with any game and everything to do with the building being more than a gaming room.
Exclusivity period
A fixed span in which government promises not to licence a competing casino nearby. Exactly how long, and on what renewal terms, is not always made public, so any figure quoted for it is worth treating with some caution.
Soft opening
Trading before the ribbon-cutting. Jupiters on the Gold Coast took paying customers from November 1985, weeks ahead of its official opening the following February, so the building could be tested before anyone made a speech in it.
Integrated resort
The regulatory description for a casino licensed only as part of something larger — a hotel, a convention floor, retail arcades — though the phrase is used loosely enough in marketing that it is worth asking, on any given building, how much of it is genuinely not gaming floor.
Architecture and space
Porte-cochère
The covered carriage entrance, sized for a coach or a taxi rank rather than a footpath — a reminder that these buildings were designed for arrival by vehicle, not on foot.
Atrium
A tall, lit void the floors organise themselves around. Some architects reserve the word for a proper roofed courtyard; plenty of casino marketing uses it for any lobby taller than two storeys, and the two usages do not agree.
Convention floor
The flexible non-gaming hall a licence condition often exists to guarantee — proof, on paper, that the building does more than take bets.
Podium and tower
The standard massing: a low, wide podium holding the gaming floor, convention space and parking, with a slender hotel tower rising out of it. Sydney's Pyrmont casino and Perth's Burswood both follow the pattern, for the same practical reason — a gaming floor needs width, a hotel needs height.
Revolving restaurant
A rotating dining room at the top of the tower, a device this era of building shared with observation towers more than with other casinos.
Octagonal plan
Wrest Point's tower, designed by Roy Grounds as a seventeen-storey octagon, reached sixty-four metres — still the tallest building in Hobart — and the eight-sided plan gave nearly every upper room an angled water view instead of a flat one.
The gaming floor itself
Five more, including the two everyone already knows and mostly gets slightly wrong.
Casino
Properly, the single licensed room or floor where wagering happens — not the hotel above it, not the car park below, though the word gets used for the whole address more often than not.
Pokies
The Australian word for coin- or note-operated gaming machines, short for poker machines, used the way an American would say slots.
Slot machine
The same object, under its other country's name — placed here next to pokies on purpose, because the machine does not change; only the word for it does.
Table games
Games dealt across a felt layout by a person, rather than triggered by a button. Casino Canberra opened in 1994 with tables and no machines at all, which makes it the honest edge case: a casino, in the strict sense, and nothing else.
Gaming floor
The specific licensed area within the larger building where any of this is legally permitted — the floor that gave this notebook its name, and that was never, on any site I have measured, the whole building.