North America’s fastest-growing provider of high-security key-changeable locks for the gaming industry has a presence at the Global Gaming Expo as it continues to replace 20th-century technology for casinos.
Lockdogs, owned by Jeff Connor, is in booth No. 4007 and features the company’s latest new products, including the LS-10, which is key-changeable more than 650,000 times. There’s also the LS-7 padlock that’s key-changeable 13,650 times.
Connor is a veteran of more than three decades in the casino industry and worked in every aspect of gaming, from brick-and-mortar and online casinos to EGM and systems sales before founding Lockdogs in 2014.
In addition to his employment in the gaming industry, Connor was an announcer for Sugar Ray Leonard Boxing and was featured on “The Contender,” produced by Mark Burnett, Sylvester Stallone, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Steven Spielberg for NBC and ESPN.
His friend, Darren Wong of Imperial Gaming Supplies and Lockdog’s North American independent factory rep, found a lock produced by the Japanese company Miwa that was key-changeable more than 13,600 plus and told him it was the “most revolutionary thing in gaming” for the slot side of the business. He introduced it to casinos for slots and table games in Macau and Australia.
Connor became the North American distributor for Miwa’s locks. Lockdogs also distribute locks for table-game areas, including for drop boxes, spindles, slam locks for float trays, and key-changeable padlocks. Kiosks and cages also use their locks.
“I was 30 years in the gaming business and didn’t know how many locks we had on slot machines,” Connor said. “That was someone else’s department. I showed it to friends in Nevada and Washington and they said this is what you need to be doing. When we won awards from gaming magazines for the innovative product of the year, we were off to the races.”
It started when Connor took the lock to a trade show in Washington and the crowd was awed that the casino industry would no longer have to count dimples or loop locks.
Slots have locks for the main door, central computing system, top drawers, bill validators, and cash boxes.
“I went to IGT, Light & Wonder, and Aristocrat and said, ‘Instead of having a shipping core (the lock-changing system at the time) and people having to put in a shipping core and removing it and putting in new locks, why not install our locks on the line?” Connor said.
Lockdogs has had a strong working relationship with IGT, Aristocrat, Everi, Incredible Technologies, and other companies that have installed Lockdog’s locks.
“It saves payroll dollars and they save money,” Connor said. “All they have to do is put one key in, turn, turn, put another key in and turn it, and it’s coded. Those machines are ready to take money the minute they hit the floor at the casinos.
“The old school was you had shipping cores and someone had to pull them out and put in new lock. That lock had finite dimples and when you were done with that, you had to switch out the core or drill out locks and get rid of it. Ours was the last lock they would ever need.”
Since there is no gaming in Japan, Miwa didn’t see the potential for their use in the casino industry. Lockdogs adapts Miwa’s locks for use in North American gaming.
“Our competitive advantage is we take all of the things that make an operator’s life miserable and make it easier,” Connor said.
Lockdogs isn’t like the traditional model of when one key breaks, people have to buy more keys. Connor said he changed that paradigm with a two-year warranty on locks and lifetime warranty on keys and codes that are specific to individual properties.
“You can’t go to Lowes or Home Depot and duplicate our keys. They’re linked on the codes and everything is custom made every time you need a reorder,” Connor said. “The big thing is a lifetime warranty.”
If a casino key is compromised for some reason, whether it’s a disgruntled employee or it’s misplaced, an entire slot floor can be rekeyed in a matter of hours, as opposed to weeks, without drilling out the cores or other waste of employees’ time.
“All you have to do is get a new key code, then recode to the new code and your floor is 100 percent changed in a matter of hours.”
Once a machine is retired, Connor said the locks are stripped out, uncoded and recoded, and put in new machines.
“That operational efficiency is our legacy and what caused the exponential growth and winning as many awards as we have,” Connor said. “In operations, you have 99 problems and your locks shouldn’t be one of them.”
