INSIGHTS – Gavin Isaacs

Shuffle Master CEO Gavin Isaacs takes us through the latest offerings among his company’s wide-ranging casino solutions offerings

Shuffle Master fielded a comprehensive exhibit at last month’s G2E Asia, featuring new additions to their five product lines: utility products, proprietary table games, electronic table games, slots and interactive line.

Inside Asian Gaming Publisher Kareem Jalal sat down with Shuffle Master CEO Gavin Isaacs at G2E Asia for a video interview, excerpts of which can be viewed online at the IAG website, www.asgam.com. The full transcript of the interview follows.

Kareem Jalal: You have new products in all categories, basically. What are some of the things you’re highlighting here?

Gavin Isaacs: Yes, I think it’s one of the first trade shows in the world we’ve ever done this. It’s pretty exciting. So we have our five categories now in our business, with the addition of interactive.

The first categories is utility products. What have you got new there?

In our utilities we’ve got the MD3 out. It’s obviously already in the market. We’re really focusing on that and it’s doing incredibly well here in Macau. We have it in most of the casinos here.

Please tell us a bit about the MD3. How is it better than the well-known MD2?

The first thing is, it’s faster. So on 8 decks it’s 20% quicker to shuffle.

Secondly, it’s got card recognition. It does digitized photos of every card when it shuffles them, so you can actually detect any kind of fraud—a replacement of a card, a missing card, we’ll always be able to do accounting. But also what the actual card is. If someone tries to put in a card from another deck it’s not registered. So it really is a complete product in that respect. But also, and most importantly, any of the defects in or the issues people had with the MD2 have been fixed in the MD3.

So being responsive to customers’ needs. I guess that underlies all your innovations?

That’s what you have to do as a technology company. You have to look at your products, you have to work on improving them.

Once you launch a product, you have a life cycle for it, you collect issues, you fix bugs that you have to fix as you go, then you do major releases, and then when you come up with a new innovation such as the reading of the cards which we’re putting in all our shufflers going forward, you obviously release a new product. So hence the MD3.

So in the utility products category we’ve got that. We’ve also got our new Easy Chipper chip sorter, used particularly in roulette—you gather all the chips, you put them in a chute, and it collects all the chips in the right colours in groups of 20 or whatever you want.

I believe there’s also a Deck Checker?

Yes, we’ve got the Deck Checker. We bought that from an old company as part of a prior acquisition. We’ve improved it, we’ve released it and it’s here as well. So utilities we really have a full range.

What about your next category—proprietary table games?

We’ve brought some new games here obviously in the proprietary table game range. Mississippi Stud and Six Card are both here. But we continue to bring new games out. Not as relevant in Asia yet as it is potentially in America.

Of course your two stable performers in the proprietary table games category in Asia are Casino War and Three Card Poker, which is called East West Poker here.

And that product line’s very important for us because that’s where we create our IP for our game IP, and then we leverage that in our next sector, which is our electronic tables.

What’s new in that category?

Clearly that’s an area where we’ve been a world leader, but we haven’t really invested enough in the past, so now we’ve stepped up our R&D. We have our i-Table Roulette and our i-Table card games here, which are an iPad-like, proper-table-shaped device with a dealer, with everything electronically done through the i-Shoe. So the cards are recognized, you bet on a little iPad-like interface. Very cool, lots of attraction on them.

We’ve also obviously brought out our new Mojo cabinet with the widescreen for our Rapid Table Games. In Singapore, we have over 500 terminals connected up to our Rapid. We’ve brought out a new cabinet with a new-look screen and a new graphic interface. That’s our Mojo widescreen. We have concurrent gaming, simultaneous and multi game. I think we have two roulettes on this version, and two live baccarat. Very excited by that. We feel this is going to be a great product in this market and potentially help extend this into other markets around the world.

So apart from the more slick design and wide screen, it also allows for multi games, so you can play several tables at once.

Four tables at once, and bet on each of them concurrently. So very excited by this product, very excited by this technology. And that’s available in Macau now. Looking forward to the first installation of that. And we also have an automatic roulette wheel where we have our Mojos around a wheel in the middle which is fully automated. So we have a full range of electronic table products that we’re bringing. I guess one other thing that we’ve done, which just shows our IP, we bought a game called Fire Bet. Fire Bet is a craps game where you shoot for your points. So you say ‘I’m going to roll a 4,’ and if you do that 6 times before you get a 7 or get dealt out, you win 1,000 to 1. So we brought that bet on an electronic version of craps to Macau. We’ve got a lot of product in the electronic table space.

Apart from adding excitement for the player, side bets like the Fire Bet are also good from the operator’s point of view.

Side bets are great for operators. They add excitement and interest in the game. From the player’s perspective, they’re worth going after, but they’re obviously great for the operator.

And of course you have some new slots?

Of course. There’s Duo Fu Duo Cai, our progressive made particularly for the Asian market. We’ve been very successful the last year and a half with our Equinox cabinet, and with the content that goes in that we’ve been building some great momentum. Taking a lot of market share in Australia, which is fabulous. But in Asia we really have needed to improve. So we’ve engaged a China studio in Tsingtao, and their first four games are here. Again, more investment in R&D with the progressives specifically for this market. All our games come in English and Chinese, so it really is an important investment for us in the slot business.

You’ve really ramped up your Macau team. Are they feeding a lot of information back to the development teams?

Obviously, yes is the answer. But the China team is different from the Macau team, I mean that’s really an R&D center only. But we have people travelling around the area the whole time, product managers, getting data from customers, getting data from the market. Not rumors, but real data, bringing that back into the development equation.

Asia is a lot more important to the company now.

Yes. Asia, the last quarter, I think was 17% of our total revenues. I’m delighted from a Shuffle Master perspective that over 50% of our revenues come from outside the US. We really are a truly global company.

I guess you see that developing a lot more in the coming months and years. What are the big opportunities you see in Asia?

Well, this [the Mojo] is probably the biggest investment you can do for Asia. We do so well in Singapore with this product. We hope this kind of product actually comes from Asia out to the rest of the world. We also do very well with this in Australia. This is also in the Australian market. Vegas Star and Rapid do very well down there.

Your last product line is interactive, where you provide online versions of your proprietary table games. What are you showing here from the interactive division?

Here we’ve got Casino War, Ultimate Texas Hold’em and Three Card Poker. We’ve been bringing our games into the interactive space. They’re being played here as well. And we just bought the Ongame Network [one of the world’s leading online poker networks, acquired by Shuffle Master in March this year]. So everything we’re doing with the exception of the slots is focused on the pit.

Globally, do you see the interactive division as offering potentially the greatest growth?

You know, I’m a little bit cautious and wary of interactive. It’s a natural progression for us to have our proprietary table content on felt, then on electronic, and then online. We have over 2,400 IP filings. The money in it is there to be made, obviously. If America takes off it’s going to be huge. If Asia ultimately legalizes, it will be even bigger.

We operate in over 300 jurisdictions in the world. So we really are a global company. We won’t risk any of our markets, anywhere, for anything. And it’s very important from the online perspective that we’re very cautious. So those games will have social wrappers around them, so you’ll play them on Facebook.

But interactive is an exciting division. Again, a big investment in R&D there. Ongame has over 150 developers in Sweden. So we really are transforming the company, staying focused on the pit, and really investing in our R&D.