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By Columnist John Mowat: The Latest Development, Video King Project Manager
It’s exciting for everyone at Video King when we get to release a major version of software with big new features – and our latest release is about as big as they get! One new addition we hope will “draw” your attention is the Automatic Player Draw. A common sight in Bingo halls is the raffle or prize draw where players put a POS receipt or ticket into a drum, then an employee or volunteer mixes up the drum and pulls out a winner.
It’s a fun opportunity for players, but the downside is logistics: storage and cost of tickets or entry slips, the physical drum sitting out on the Bingo floor, writing player info on each ticket or requiring players to retain proof of entry, physically putting each ticket into the drum, and so on. So we’re taking the hassle away for the operator AND amping up the fun factor for the audience!
FUN YES, WORK NO
Now, our system can store an “electronic” version of your raffle drum. The operator decides how people qualify … then during each POS sale, the system automatically records the player’s “tickets” or chances in the draw and prints their entry numbers at the bottom of their receipt.
If you use a player’s club loyalty program, the players don’t even have to keep this receipt – the system will remember who each chance belongs to! Draws can either be conducted same-day or build over time, giving people more and more chances to win. When the time is right, the operator tells OMNI “draw me a winner,” and the system selects a chance at random from all those which were added to the draw.
At this point, the operator can simply read the winners out to the hall … but why not add a dedicated display PC and show an animated Bingo ball-style reveal of the winners instead!
Building up to big prizes at the end of the month or on special occasions is a fun way to inspire a repeat visit. Or maybe everyone who attends the busy night gets entered into a draw on the slow night … Again, the system automatically takes care of awarding these entries and tracking them in our secure, auditable database.
There are lots of ways the excitement of a free draw can help attendance on different days – and now it’s going to be a lot easier for your Bingo hall to run one! All the upside with none of the downside? Now that’s the “Latest Development.”