The Marine Room, our gaming lounge on the first floor, is restricted to adults aged 20 and over under New Zealand law. Please confirm your age before continuing.
Gambling Act 2003 · Photo identification is checked at the door of the Marine Room. Want to talk to somebody? The Gambling Helpline is free on 0800 654 655, day or night.
Access to this website is restricted to visitors aged 20 and over. Thank you for your understanding.
If gambling is on your mind and you would like to speak to someone, call the Gambling Helpline free on 0800 654 655, or text 8006.
The casino floor of the house: fourteen machines short of sixty, eleven tables, and a back room with two. Twenty and over.
The Marine Room takes the whole of the first storey — 520 square metres that spent forty years as a ballroom before it was anything else. The plaster ceiling is original. So is the parquet under the carpet, which is why the carpet stays.
Eleven tables sit in the middle of the room, fifty-six machines run along the seaward wall under the windows, and a smaller room behind a pair of etched glass doors holds two more tables and six chairs. The lighting is low and warm and comes from lamps rather than from the ceiling. Nothing plays over the speakers because there are no speakers.
Entry costs nothing and needs no membership. It is open to anybody aged 20 or over, staying here or not, and identification is looked at every single time — not when somebody looks young, but always. The bar in the corner pours the Bar Chevron list, and the kitchen sends up plates until half past midnight.
Eleven tables, fifty-six machines, one back room. Every casino game here is dealt by a person we trained ourselves.
Fifty-six of them along the windows: video reels, a short row of three-reel cabinets for people who want the old kind, and four machines linked to a single jackpot. Play starts at twenty cents.
Return-to-player figures are printed on every cabinet. An attendant is on the floor whenever the doors are open, and the machines take a break when the room does — nothing runs after close.
Five blackjack, two roulette, two baccarat, one three-card poker and one Caribbean stud. Minimums are NZ$10 through the week and NZ$20 from Friday evening until close on Saturday.
Roulette runs a single-zero wheel. Blackjack comes out of a six-deck shoe and the dealer stands on every seventeen. The rules for each game sit on a card at the table, and the supervisor will explain any of them without making a performance of it.
There is no screen standing in for a croupier anywhere in this room. Every table is run by a person, and every person has been through ten weeks of training downstairs before they deal a hand upstairs.
Most of them have been here years. Two came with the building in 2006 and are still on the roster, which tells you something about the room.
Two tables, six chairs, one dealer and a host, behind etched doors at the landward end. Reserved by arrangement for private groups and for guests who would rather play at a higher limit away from the floor.
Ask the duty manager on the night, or write ahead of your stay. The salon can also be taken for a whole evening as part of an event booking downstairs.
Tidy after six. In practice that means a collar or a jacket, not a suit — this is a seaside town and everyone knows it. Turned away: swimwear, bare feet, singlets, work boots, high-visibility clothing, and anything covering the face other than for religious reasons.
No cameras and no filming on the floor. No telephones at the tables. No cash machine anywhere on this storey, and no credit for gaming under any circumstance — not a loan, not a cheque, not a charge to your room. Management may refuse entry, or ask anybody to leave, without giving a reason.
This room runs under the Gambling Act 2003 and under a host responsibility policy filed with the Department of Internal Affairs. Everybody who works up here is trained to spot an evening going wrong and to speak up while it is still early.
Exclusion can be arranged in confidence with a dealer, a supervisor or anybody at the front desk. Clocks are visible from every table. Water is free and always offered. Nobody who has had too much to drink is served, at the tables or anywhere else in the building.
Gambling Helpline — 0800 654 655. Free, confidential, any hour of the day.
Dinner in the Norfolk Room, a drink at Bar Chevron, the first floor after that, and a bed at the top of the stairs. It all happens under one roof.