Now that the New Frontier is closing, I find myself stopping by it more and more often. Yesterday I went by to take some better pictures and grab some souvenirs.

I played one pull of the .25 slots and won 10 credits ($2.50). Since they still use coins, and not TITO, they were able to stiff me .25 when I cashed out. $20 with a 10 credit win - initial .25 for play, comes out to 22.25, right? Well, I got $22.00, and couldn’t prove otherwise. So, go ahead New Frontier, go nuts with the extra quarter. Buy an extra crayon to write room numbers with.

But I digress. As there was an affable crowd, I also played about $20 worth of Sigma Derby (video at top of post). I lost all of that. The favorites won almost every damn time, and it’s not fun betting on the favorites.

I also got a bunch of really nasty quarter cups. But while I was carrying it around with quarters, I realized how much I miss the quarter cups. I love the feel of all that steel in my hands, and nothing beats dropping them all over the floor and crawling around on your hands and knees on the filthy carpet chasing rolling quarters all over the place, then handing them to a surly cashier who dumps them into a probably-inaccurate hopper to be counted.

Ah, the good old days.

Now we have impersonal TITO (not affiliated with Jermaine, Marlon and Jackie).

Maybe I will miss that shithouse New Frontier after all.

Probably not, though.

BTW, you would think by watching that Sigma Derby video that I had bet and won on 8 credits. The 32 credit win on that combo was the highest paying I had seen for the session. But alas, the 4-5 combo LED was stuck on “8″, so that flashing eight was really “0″ … which is what I won on the race. Even when you win at the New Frontier … you lose. The New Frontier Sigma Derby is a fundamentally sound machine, but I hope whoever buys it throws a few bucks at it for a refurbish.

I think these machines are not a hit with the casinos because the power draw must be HUGE. I don’t know if the games pay for themselves. I rather doubt that they do. I know that are an attraction, but I don’t think the casino makes much cheese off of the game.

Unlike slot machines, you only play once per minute, instead of 20 times per minute … cutting way down on the amount of money wagered, the machine takes up a pretty large amount of space, probably enough for a double-sided bank of 8 slot machines … and the energy costs have to be huge. These are old-school machines that probably have a very inefficient energy design, and are probably a bitch and a half to maintain. And most people don’t wager tons of money on the races. I would imagine that a single $1 slot machine makes more raw cash than the Sigma Derby.

The above factors are probably why they have all but vanished from the casino-scape. Which is a shame, because it is a fun, cheap game to play. You can take a $20 roll of quarters and play for an hour. The one at the MGM is still going strong, but after the New Frontier goes, the MGM may be the last SD game in town … at least in the central part of town. I don’t venture to far-flung casinos like Texas Station or Whisky Pete’s in Primm to sniff out these machines, but as far as The Strip is concerned … the Derbys are an endangered species.