Pokies in Perth: one venue, no spinning reels, and a card to play

Why there’s only one place

Western Australia took a different road from the rest of the country. The Casino Control Act 1984 stops the regulator approving any game played on a poker machine, so pubs and clubs in WA have never had them.

The Government restated it in its response to the Perth Casino Royal Commission: poker machines “are not allowed and will not be allowed in Western Australia, and electronic gaming machines will not be allowed outside of Burswood Casino. There will be no weakening of this necessary ban.”

Burswood Casino is Crown Perth. It’s the only venue in the state with electronic gaming machines.

What’s on the floor at Crown Perth

Crown Perth says it has over 2,000 electronic games. They look like pokies but run under different rules:

• No spinning reels. The WA appendix to the national standard rules them out.
• Approved as other games. Titles are authorised under game rules such as Video Bingo; Where’s the Gold, for example, appears in Crown’s Video Bingo rules.
• Slower play. A game must take more than 3 seconds, or more than 5 seconds where it has an unpaid feature.

The WA rules

• Minimum return: every game must be certified to return at least 90% — the highest floor in Australia.
• Maximum bet: no bet on any machine on the Main Gaming Floor may exceed $10 in total.
• Carded play: since 1 December 2025, you need a current Crown Rewards card with time and loss limits to play.

At 90%, $100 staked is expected to return $90 over the long run, against $85 in a NSW or Queensland club. The calculator puts it next to any online game in our table.

Hours

Crown Perth is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It closes from 3am to 10pm on Christmas Day, and from 3am to 12pm on Good Friday and ANZAC Day. Crown also enforces play limits of 12 hours a day and 48 hours a week.

If you’re after the reels

The spinning-reel pokies you’d find in Adelaide or Brisbane don’t exist anywhere in WA. The Adelaide and Brisbane guides list venues from their own pages if you’re travelling.

Ainsley Duff

Editor, Payback Notes · Published 29 September 2026 · Checked 29 September 2026

Ainsley Duff writes Payback Notes from Adelaide. She reads RTP where it is actually published — state technical standards, provider game sheets and help files, venue pages — and puts a date and a link beside every figure.

What I checked for this page (29 September 2026): read the WA Government’s response to the Perth Casino Royal Commission, the WA appendix to the national standard (NS12.1), the WA return-to-player policy, and Crown Perth’s pages on gaming machines, carded play, opening hours and its Video Bingo game rules. Not done yet: the number of Crown Perth machines by room — Crown publishes only ‘over 2,000 electronic games’.

How figures get in: how we verify RTP · sources for this page · how we earn. A commission never changes the RTP figures we publish or the order they appear in.