About Cheers Poker Room 

The Cheers Poker Room & Casino is a state-of-the-art Las Vegas-quality casino experience with a local appeal.  Nestled in the mountains of Salem, New Hampshire, the largest flash casino in the state offers 25 gambling tables with a variety of games, including Roulette, Blackjack, Let It Ride, Mississippi Stud, Boston Stud and Three-Card Poker. The entertainment goal is to “keep it fun and simple.” Each poker table is custom-built with automatic shufflers, player phone charging ports and comfortable seating. Player identification swipe cards allow all players to participate in a rewards system at gaming tables throughout the casino.

Challenge

The owners of the Cheers Poker Room & Casino wanted to provide a one-of-a-kind customer experience that paired a warm, small-town atmosphere at the gaming tables with the big sound and picture of a state-of-the-art AV installation. The management had specific requirements for each of the 50 large screen monitors with 150 end points of four serial connection modulated TV channels, Direct TV connection and Comcast via IR. The owners also wanted complete control of each screen in the room, so that employees could easily personalize any screen to the guests’ needs. The goal was to enable guests to watch the shows of their choice on the TV screen of their choice. 

Solution

Platinum Protection, a local AV and security system installer, presented Kramer Control as the solution, utilizing the SL-280 Kramer Control brain in conjunction with FC-26 Power over Ethernet (PoE) control gateways. This configuration provides customers with the ability to remotely control devices via RS-232 and IR connections. The PoE capabilities of the 50 FC-26 units simplified the installation, as additional outlets weren’t available at the monitors. According to Mike Terrizzi, owner of Platinum Protection Solutions, “We could have controlled the TV via IP, but using one IP endpoint simplified control wiring so that troubleshooting is at the gateway device level.”

Platinum Protection designed more than 50 pages in the Kramer Control User Interface for Cheers Poker Casino. As a cloud-based platform, Kramer Control was ideal for allowing multiple administrators to program the system, both on the installer’s team and onsite at the casino. They designed a personalized home page, as well as presets and scheduled events that could be accessed from an iPad controller.  Based on a channel line-up and typical sporting events, the presets assigned audio volume to all monitors and access to specific channels. Because of the ease of the Kramer programming, Terrizzi said, “Once we tested programming on one TV and we had a visual layout of a page, we duplicated it and dragged control data. This allowed for buttons like ‘home’ and ‘map’ to be duplicated, significantly speeding up the building process.”

In addition, the installer created presets based on sporting events, grouping particular monitors together, to be controlled by the same group of remotes. A toggle remote offers access to groups of monitors and provides a single master mute solution.

Results 

Because of the simple user interface and customized presets, any floor manager at the casino can use the iPad controller to change channels and control monitors. “They can change channels on a specific TV without affecting anyone else’s viewing or fumbling with multiple remotes, giving the customer the ultimate viewing experience,” Terrizzi said. 

In addition, the system is expandable. Terrizzi noted, “If required we can use a GPIO, sothe fire alarm can trigger a macro to turn off all TVs in the event of a fire, making it simple for the fire department to communicate during an emergency.”

Dan Dandreo, owner of Cheers Poker Room & Casino, said, “The system is working very well. Mike (Terrizzi) and his group are masters at this. He customized two iPads that control every TV, and everything works off of the Kramer system.” Dandreo praised the simplicity of the system, with its “all on” and “all off” buttons, and the numbered TVs. “It’s so easy,” he said, “It requires two minutes of training. We are the only real popular casino in New Hampshire and we can watch up to 48 different shows at once on 82-inch TVs.”

In addition, because the casino management believes in the power of social media, Terrizzi’s team also connected video cameras to Facebook Live, to provide constant updates to fans about why Cheers Poker Room is “New Hampshire’s Best Casino.”