There is no official category called a premium pokie. No regulator certifies one, no manufacturer's catalogue has a premium section with a legal meaning, and nothing in South Australian law treats one machine as a different class from the next. The word is used by three different parties to mean three different things, and nearly all the confusion readers have about it comes from mixing them up.
A manufacturer uses it for a hardware line: the big-screen, curved-display, high-backed-seat cabinet that costs a venue considerably more than a standard upright. A venue uses it for an area of the floor, usually the one with those cabinets in it and sometimes just the one with better chairs. A marketing page uses it to mean that something good will happen to you. Only the first two correspond to anything you can look at.
Below is the whole measurable list. If a claim about a premium machine does not reduce to one of these rows, it is not a fact about the machine.
The four things that actually differ
| Property | What it is | Where you read it | Does it change the odds? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Denomination | What the machine counts one credit as | On the machine's own display and help screens | No. It changes how fast money moves, not the return. |
| Bet range | The span from smallest to largest accepted total bet | The bet panel and the help screens | No, but some features only arm above a threshold. |
| Cabinet | Screen size, seat, button deck, sound | By looking at it | No. It is furniture. |
| Linked jackpot | Whether a shared prize pool is wired across machines | The overhead display and the help screens | It changes where part of the return is paid, not how much. |
Four rows, and three of them say no. That is the finding of this page and it does not get more exciting further down. What the remaining paragraphs do is explain each row well enough that you can check it yourself on a specific machine, rather than taking a page's word for it.
Denomination: the one that fools everybody
A gaming machine does not count in dollars. It counts in credits, and the denomination is the exchange rate between the two. At one cent a credit, a hundred credits is a dollar. At a dollar a credit, a hundred credits is a hundred dollars. The grid on screen, the reels, the feature, the sounds and the numbers that flash when something lands can all be absolutely identical between two machines at those two settings.
Which produces the single most common misreading on a gaming floor. A win of five hundred credits looks like the same event on both machines. On one it is five dollars and on the other it is five hundred. People remember the number on the screen and the feeling that came with it, and the feeling is a poor guide to what the evening cost.
The useful discipline is to stop reading credits altogether. Most machines can display the balance in dollars and cents, and if yours is showing credits there is usually a button or a help-screen setting that changes it. Having made that change, the premium question answers itself: a higher-denomination machine is not a better machine, it is the same machine with the decimal point moved, and the move is in the house's favour in the only sense that matters, which is that you reach the end of your money sooner. Our page on return to player explains why the proportion does not shift when the denomination does.
Bet range, and the thresholds hidden inside it
The second measurable property is the span of accepted bets. A machine has a minimum total bet and a maximum total bet, and the maximum sits under a ceiling set by South Australian law that applies to every gaming machine in every pub and club in the state — the same ceiling in a city club and in a small room on Murray Street in Angaston. A venue cannot configure a machine above it and no amount of being a good customer moves it. The current figure is published by Consumer and Business Services and we do not reprint it here, because a stale number on a page is worse than no number.
Within that span, though, there is something genuinely worth knowing, and it is the only place on this page where bet size interacts with the game rather than just the arithmetic. Some games arm a feature only at or above a particular total bet. A set of symbols that does nothing at the minimum becomes live higher up; a side jackpot is only eligible above a threshold; an extra reel position unlocks. This is not hidden — it is written in the game's own help screens, which are reachable from a button on the machine and which almost nobody reads.
The consequence cuts both ways. If a game's headline feature is the reason you sat down, then at a bet below the threshold you are playing a different and worse game than the one advertised, and the premium framing is at its most misleading there. But raising your bet to arm a feature also raises what every spin costs, for a return that is not promised to anybody. The honest summary: read the help screens, find the threshold, and then decide whether the game is worth playing at that price — not whether to chase the feature at a price you did not plan on.
The cabinet, which is furniture
A tall curved screen, a padded seat with a back, a transducer in the base so the sound arrives through the chair, a button deck instead of a touch strip. These exist, they cost the venue real money, and they do exactly what furniture does.
Worth saying because the inference is so tempting: a venue that has spent heavily on a cabinet has an interest in that cabinet being occupied, and the occupancy it wants is long. Nothing about the hardware alters the game inside it. The same title ported to a flat upright behaves identically. If you prefer the chair, prefer the chair — it is a real preference and there is nothing wrong with it. It is simply not a property of the gamble.
Linked jackpots: where the return gets moved
The fourth row is the one that requires care, because it is the only place where a configuration difference does change the shape of what you are playing — without changing how much comes back overall.
A linked jackpot takes a slice of every bet placed across a group of machines and accumulates it into a shared pool, which pays out to one player at some point. The total return on the game still has to sit inside what the game is approved to return. So the slice going into the pool is a slice taken out of the ordinary prizes. You are not being given an extra prize; you are being paid in a different shape — smaller, rarer ordinary wins in exchange for one very large, very improbable one.
That shape has a name, volatility, and it is a matter of taste rather than value. Someone who wants a long session with frequent small returns is being sold the opposite of what they want by a progressive display. Someone who only cares about the possibility of a large number is being sold exactly what they want, at the usual price. The volatility page sets this out with the arithmetic, and the linked jackpot page covers how the pools are built and reset.
One correction worth making while we are here, because it attaches itself to progressive machines more than any other kind: a pool that has not paid for a long time is not closer to paying. Each spin is drawn independently. How the number generator works deals with that, and the myths page collects the rest of the family of beliefs this one belongs to.
How to check a specific machine in about a minute
All of the above is checkable standing in front of the thing, before any money goes in. In order:
- Find the denomination. It is on the machine. Switch the balance display to dollars and cents if it is showing credits.
- Find the minimum and maximum total bet. Both are on the bet panel or one screen into the help.
- Open the help screens and look for a threshold. Any sentence of the form "available when betting at least" is the one that matters.
- Look up. If there is a progressive display above the bank, you are on a linked game and the return is shaped accordingly.
- Look for the return statement. Where a figure or a range is published for the game, it is in the help screens, not on the glass.
If a machine is marked premium and none of those five readings differs from the machine next to it, then nothing about it differs from the machine next to it. That happens more often than you would expect.
In a room the size of Angaston's
A practical note for anyone applying this locally. Angaston's two gaming venues are hotels — Angaston Hotel at 59 Murray Street and Barossa Brauhaus Hotel at 41 Murray Street — and neither publishes a machine count, a floor plan, a title list or a premium area, so we print none of those. A country hotel room is small. The realistic position is that whatever mix is there is the mix, and the choice is between the machines in front of you rather than between configurations you went looking for.
Which makes the minute described above more useful here than any amount of planning in advance. And the one question that genuinely decides the evening is not about the machines at all: neither venue publishes hours for its gaming area, and state law requires every gaming area to shut for part of each day. A phone call before you leave settles that. The Angaston venues page has what each hotel publishes about itself, and the comparison page covers what can honestly be compared between two rooms.
Gaming machines in South Australia are in adults-only areas of licensed venues. No configuration, cabinet or denomination makes a machine pay, and losing the money you put in is the normal outcome. If gambling has stopped being a choice, Gambling Help Online takes calls free of charge at any hour on 1800 858 858.
What this page rests on
Credits, denomination, bet ranges, feature thresholds and return statements are all read from a machine's own display and help screens, which is where we tell readers to read them. Gaming machines in this state operate under the Gaming Machines Act 1992, and the statutory maximum bet and maximum prize for a single spin are uniform across South Australia and published by Consumer and Business Services SA; we describe both ceilings and print neither figure. No manufacturer, machine model, game title or venue floor plan is named above, and no machine count or title list is attributed to either Angaston hotel, because neither publishes one. The Angaston street numbers are from Angaston Hotel's own site and from the South Australian Tourism Commission listing for Barossa Brauhaus Hotel.