Of all the statistics casino operators track, the number of locks needed for the gaming floor doesn’t rank high.
But it’s top-of-mind for Jeff Connor, owner of Lockdogs of Minot, N.D., which specializes in key-changeable, high-security locks. He said each slot machine and table game needs five or six locks, sometimes more, and each pit podium needs at least one. The cage needs one for each cash drawer and cabinet. Trolleys, kiosks, slot bases, and items secured by padlocks add to the total.
Altogether, the count can easily reach into the thousands for a necessary security item that Connor says too often uses an outdated design that increases maintenance costs and requires frequent purchases of replacement keys.
Lockdogs products can be rekeyed on-site in a second with no special tools, Connor said. Using a set of codes unique to their property, an operator configures each lock based on factors such as users’ security clearance and job description. With the codes, “There’s no overlapping anywhere in the world,” Connor said. “And nobody’s going to be able to get a device off eBay or Amazon and pick that lock or duplicate those keys.”
Connor, who has almost 30 years of gaming experience, said the idea for Lockdogs began with his unsuccessful pitch to place slot machines at a casino in Washington State. He recalled the slot director’s response: “We’re not going to put them in, but I gotta tell you, I want that lock.”
Lockdogs, founded in 2014, distributes locks made by MIWA, a top manufacturer in Japan.
Connor’s company customizes them, adding a nylon tail nut, an anti-theft collar ring, and other features to meet the high-security requirements of casinos. Although introduced to U.S. casinos fairly recently, more than 300,000 of the high-security locks have been installed in Asian and Australian gaming venues, with no incident of security breaches, replications, or being reverse-engineered in their 11 years of use, Lockdogs says. The locks are expected to become available to European casinos in the coming months.
Conventional casino locks come in two forms, both using the pin tumbler mechanism common for decades. Dimple locks have keys with small indentations in the blade, while tubular locks use round keys. Connor said the Lockdogs line eliminates the considerable hassle of ordering new keys that break or get lost. Individual keys can be recoded thousands of times. Lockdogs guarantees its keys for life, which Connor said differs from the practice of using key replacement as a revenue stream. In addition, Connor said operators using traditional locks face the additional expense drilling out and replacing its core after it has been rekeyed two or three times.
Even though locks for the gaming floor are not considered gambling devices, Connor said regulators greet Lockdogs’ hardware “with open arms” because of its high-security features, proprietary keys, and ease of key recoding. For example, the company says a casino that had converted to Lockdogs determined that a key had become compromised, necessitating the rekeying of 900 slot machines. With the new locks, the procedure was completed in less than four hours. When that casino faced the same task with the dimple locks it had before switching to Lockdogs, rekeying the 900 games took two weeks.
Connor said major slot manufacturers, including Aristocrat, IGT, and Light & Wonder, upon request can ship machines to casinos with Lockdogs locks already installed. Instead of having to cover the expense and time of installing locks on new machines, the casino can quickly apply its unique code to the locks and get the games running.
“Locks are a product that hadn’t changed for years,” Connor said. “When we introduced our locks are put together, it was a quantum leap from what had been done in the past. At the end of the day, (a lock) is a lump of metal. The genius is in the way it’s conceived and put together.”
