Euroslot Tournament Play Feature

Answers were supplied by Peter Davies Gamestec Business Development Director

How long has the company been involved in tournaments?

Gamestec were pioneers in the development of Skill With Prize Tournaments over 10 years ago.

What different types of tournaments do you organise (i.e. on site, national, international)?

The tournaments we organise are all UK based. At the moment they run across networked machines, usually across a particular pub company. The tournaments are based on a league structure.

We are currently in the process of developing a National Tournament across all Retail Customers using both Gamesnet and It Box terminals for the first time.

We are also making available a house specific tournament. This will allow individual venues to customise tournaments for their own players, offering prizes sponsored by local businesses.

What are the main challenges in organising each type of tournament?

The main challenges are:

• Ensuring we choose a tournament game that creates incremental play rather than substitution from other games.
• Making sure that a variety of tournament games are utilised to avoid the same expert players winning every time
• Choosing the right length of tournament to encourage repeat play but avoid boredom

How do your tournaments differ from those organised by others in the industry?

The size of our operation allows us to offer bigger prizes. It also creates a greater challenge for gamers due to more players having the opportunity to take part because of the scale of the tournaments.

What legal considerations do you have to take into consideration when organising a tournament?

We ensure that the rules of the tournament are explicitly clear to all participants.

SWPs fall outside of gaming regulation however we ensure all our games comply with the BACTA Code of Practice for SWP Machines.

What prizes do you offer?

In the past we have offered a range of prizes including Activity Days, Plasma TVs  and Meal Vouchers. However we find that Customers prefer Cash prizes and most of our tournaments now offer Cash prizes.

How many people usually enter your tournaments on average?

We can only record the number of plays not the number of players. This varies enormously dependent upon size and nature of tournament.

How do you advertise your tournaments?

The most effective advertising in our experience is achieved by obtaining the buy in of the Retailer and their on site management team through effective communication. Staff incentives can also work well as they help generate strong word of mouth messages to pub customers.

A strong visual game is essential to attract players. We have also tried point of sale (POS) advertising including signs and posters, but have found it is relatively expensive and not as effective as when licensees and or customers generate a strong word of mouth message about the tournament.

How important are the operators in promoting the tournaments?

We have an extremely important role in promoting the tournament. It is our job to communicate information about the tournaments to licensees and to get their buy in so they are able to promote it effectively to their customers.

What was your most successful tournament?

It is difficult to single out one specific tournament – there have been lots of successes. It is always gratifying when the company’s efforts are recognised and appreciated by our Retail partners.

We recently ran a tournament involving our Texas Hold ‘Em poker game which was very successful as it capitalised on the current popularity of poker. Tournaments which involve cult games such as Tetris also often tend to do well.

Making presentations of large cheques to grateful Tournament winners is very rewarding. Presenting a £500 cheque recently to an impoverished student for winning a Punch Taverns Tournament on Tetris was particularly good.