Most comparisons of gaming rooms fail at the first step, by trying to compare the wrong thing. Once you accept that the machines are not the variable, the exercise becomes small, finite and answerable in about four minutes on the phone. What follows is the procedure in order. The last section works it through on a real pair of venues, but the method does not belong to that town.
The procedure, in order
- Fix the evening before you fix the venue. Date, the hour you want to be sitting down, who is in the group, who is getting everybody home, and the figure you are willing to lose. Without those, you are browsing rather than comparing.
- Confirm each venue exists as you think it does. Read what the business publishes about itself — its own site, not a directory. The word that matters is gaming. A TAB is wagering on racing and sport, and plenty of places have one without the other.
- Establish the address to the street number. Not the street, not the town. This looks pedantic until the first time it saves you.
- Ring each one and ask the same questions in the same words. Identical questions are what make two answers comparable. Improvised ones produce two anecdotes.
- Score only on what you were told. Write the answers down; memory flatters whichever call came last.
- Check the trip home for each option separately. This is where apparently equal candidates usually separate.
Three of those six happen before anybody picks up a phone. The ordering is deliberate: the preparation is what turns two conversations into a decision rather than two impressions.
What compares, and what does not
| Comparable, and how you find out | Not comparable, whatever anyone tells you |
|---|---|
| Hours of the gaming area on your date — ask the venue | Which room "pays better" — not a property a room has |
| Step-free access on the route you will walk — ask about that route | Whether machines are "running loose" tonight — not a thing |
| Whether food is served, and until when — usually published | Return percentage as a reason to pick a venue — it belongs to a cabinet |
| What else the venue offers — its own service list | Room size as a proxy for generosity or atmosphere |
| Whether staff answer a specific question specifically — ask one | Jackpot size as evidence about the venue |
| Getting there and getting home — your own planning, done twice | Whatever an entitlement figure seems to say about the floor |
The right-hand column is longer than people expect, and it holds almost everything the word "best" is reaching for. A machine's advertised return is fixed by the configuration approved for that cabinet and describes a volume of play no human sitting will approach; it is the same in a country pub as in a suburban one. Each spin resolves on its own, so no room accumulates a mood. If that is new ground, the return explainer and how payouts are put together cover it, and the myths page handles the folklore.
The call is the measurement
Four questions, asked the same way at each venue. Is the gaming area open on this date, and until what time? Name the date out loud: a weekday answer and a weekend answer are different answers, and a public holiday is a third. If we want to eat, when does the kitchen stop? Which entrance should we use for a step-free path, and is it step-free the whole way through, thresholds included? And, only where a particular game is the reason for the trip, do you have it — by its full name including any suffix, because manufacturer families run several versions under near-identical names with different feature rules.
How those are answered is itself one of your comparables, and the most undervalued one. A venue whose staff can picture the route from the door to a seat, and who will say "no" to the last question rather than "I think so", will handle a problem well on the night. That is the only direct observation you get before you arrive. The longer form of the call is on our checklist page.
Room size is not a proxy for anything
"How many machines?" is what people ask when they do not know what else to ask. A bigger room does not change what any cabinet does. It improves the odds that something you fancy is free on a busy Friday — real, but modest — and it usually comes with more noise and less space between seats.
There is a sourcing problem too. Many venues publish no count, and the public records that look like they answer the question record approvals and entitlements rather than what is switched on. A venue need not run every machine it holds the right to run; cabinets come out for servicing and refits, so a quiet midweek room may be partly dark. The figure you can look up is not the figure you asked about. If size genuinely matters, ask how many machines are in the room at the moment and treat the answer as a snapshot.
Put the trip home inside the comparison
Two venues can match on every row above and still be unequal, because an evening ends when everybody is home rather than when the gaming area closes. Comparing that means doing a little work twice: how you reach each place, how you get back, who is not drinking in each case, and what happens if the room shuts earlier than you planned for.
In a regional setting this step often decides the whole thing, because options thin out after dark. In a city it matters less but still matters: a venue on a line you can ride home beats one needing a booked ride. Make the return leg a row in the comparison rather than a footnote under it. Our page on reaching one country town without a car shows how brutal that row can be.
Worked example: two hotels, one street
Angaston, in the eastern Barossa Valley, is a clean test of the method because it removes the variable that normally swamps everything else. Angaston Hotel is at 59 Murray Street; Barossa Brauhaus Hotel is at 41 Murray Street. Both list gaming, they are separate businesses, and they stand a couple of hundred metres apart on the same street. Travel time and the trip home are held constant, which almost never happens.
Run the procedure and what remains is the service list and the phone call. One venue publishes dining, a front bar, a TAB, gaming machines and accommodation upstairs, with a number to ring on 08 8564 2428. The other is listed with dining, bars, gaming, a TAB and lotteries. Neither publishes a machine count or gaming-area hours, so the call carries the whole decision — and the accommodation at number 59 makes the access question specific, since a level entry to a bar says nothing about a staircase. The outcome is not a ranking but a choice between two described evenings. Local detail is on the Angaston comparison page and the Murray Street page.
Gaming areas are adults-only. No method of comparing venues reduces the risk of losing money, because that risk belongs to the machines rather than to the room, and no outcome is guaranteed. Gambling Help Online answers free of charge at any hour on 1800 858 858.
Scope, and what this method cannot do
The procedure above is general and makes no claim about any venue's quality. Details in the worked example come from Angaston Hotel's own website, reviewed 1 October 2026, and from the South Australian Tourism Commission listing for Barossa Brauhaus Hotel; neither publishes machine numbers or gaming-area hours, and nothing has been substituted. South Australian machines operate under the Gaming Machines Act 1992, with Consumer and Business Services SA holding the licensing and entitlement records — those answer whether a venue may operate machines, not what is on the floor. Statutory ceilings on the stake per spin and on a single machine's prize for one spin exist and are identical across the state; take the current figures from the regulator, not from an article. Machines are regulated state by state, so a rule quoted from interstate may not apply where you are standing.