MICHAEL JUST COULDN'T STOP

It's 1.16pm on a Thursday and the gaming room of a South Auckland hotel is full. Eighteen pokie machines - with names like Foxy Fortune - chirrup, tinkle, and flash. Bursts of melody indicate success as streams of coins spew out a chute - winning back a fraction of the dollars invested can be considered a victory in pokie-land.

It's impossible to tell what time it is as there are neither clocks nor windows in the Otahuhu hotel's pokie room. That's standard for gaming rooms. So is being at full capacity. The waitress at a pub down the road says people are lined up outside waiting for her to open at 9.30am every day. She says the only "emptyish" spell is when some punters leave to pick their kids up from school.

Michael Demchy, reformed pokies addict and gambler. (LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF) Michael Demchy, reformed pokies addict and gambler. (LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF)

Former pokies addict Michael Demchy, from west Auckland, knows the scene. His decades-long battle to escape it sapped his self control and made him ask: “Who’s in charge of Michael?”

“I’ve got free will, supposedly, and yet gambling cut through my free will.”

The 53-year-old says he would wake up announcing ‘today I will not gamble’, yet end up on autopilot, veering into pokie venues and feeding hundreds more dollars into the machines.

“I’d be going to see a friend or something, and I’d go off course,” he describes. “I’d go into the carpark of a bar and as I’m screaming at myself with my rational brain to walk out, I’m still walking in. And I’m still putting money in the machine. And I’m still pushing the spin button. And it’s all just happening.”

There's a huge demand for pokies - not only from punters, but from those benefiting or hoping to benefit from the more than $200 million per year of money from people like Demchy that gets reinvested into communities by gaming trusts.

Thousands of charities get funding from the trusts, including Riding for the Disabled, assorted women’s refuges, the New Zealand Canoe Polo Association, and the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Education Trust.

Gaming trusts and charities take the line that gamblers do play the pokies out of free will, so there’s little ethical issue in taking their money. And where there are problem gamblers, the industry works hard to minimise the damage.

But critics argue moral jeopardy is at play. That even though only 2.5 per cent of New Zealand’s population are likely to become problem gamblers and 40 per cent of money from pokie machines finances good works, it is ethically perverse for charities to benefit from people playing machines designed to be addictive.

(ROBYN EDIE/STUFF) (ROBYN EDIE/STUFF)

Visually, pokies are themed to appeal to a range of characters: those who like fast cars with Vegas showgirls, or marine creatures, or crystals in the sunset and soulful wolves are well-catered to.

A woman at the Otahuhu hotel named Margaret, who was in her 50s and originally from Samoa, split her $20 bills across multiple machines, switching seats every time a new one became available. She said she usually liked a crystal-centric pokie, but that it hadn’t been treating her well of late.

"I want to find a new lucky one," she says. She doesn't want to say how much she spends or makes on the pokies.

"It's not a problem though, I'm ok," she smiles.

Margaret is there again at 6pm.

There's a screen on a wall displaying the venue’s last jackpots. Someone won $952.10 that morning, on machine number 8, and Margaret says she knows someone who made “more than a grand” once.

Mike Cassidy, who is the manager of the Mangere Cosmopolitan Club in Auckland, says staff at his venue make a note of everyone in the gaming room at 15-minute intervals.

“If anyone is spending too much we will talk to them. If they have any problems we are able to point them in the right direction and get help,” he says.

“If we find they are not telling the truth, we have the power to exclude them, which we do.”

Demchy, who has been through extensive therapy for his addiction, says gambling led him to lie to friends, family, and colleagues in order to get money.

He reckons he’s fed “somewhere in the low six figures” into pokies and while he’s had the odd win, he hasn’t profited a cent.

“Financially my life got rather dodgy - there was a lot of robbing Peter to pay Paul,” he admits. “I wanted to go gambling to get money so solve the problems that gambling was creating.”