TCSJOHNHUXLEY’s roulette optimisation system Gaming Floor Live is on trial in a major Asian market
Gaming Floor Live—a real-time roulette optimisation tool developed by TCSJOHNHUXLEY to maximise key performance areas and casino profitability—is on a multiple-table trial in a major Asian casino jurisdiction. The system automatically captures game data via sensors on the wheel and table, providing vital information to maximize turnover, maintain house advantage, reduce operating costs and allow operators to understand opportunity costs.
Inside Asian Gaming attended TCSJOHNHUXLEY’s special Access All Areas product demonstration at the Ghostbar in Palms Las Vegas during G2E to learn more about Gaming Floor Live. We spoke to Harley Jackson, the company’s Technical Director Australasia, one of the key people behind the product’s development, for an update.
IAG: What’s happening with Gaming Floor Live since we saw you at G2E Asia?
Harley Jackson: It’s recently been installed for a four-table trial in a major Asian casino market. We can’t be more specific at this stage.
What does Gaming Floor Live do?
The aim of the product is to maximize the yield on roulette tables. The amount of time you give players to place their bets has a critical outcome on the yield of the game. Too little time to bet and players can’t get their chips on the table. Too much time and your games-per-hour figure suffers and your revenue suffers accordingly. Somewhere between those extremes is the perfect point allowing you to optimise the revenue on the table. That point changes depending on the number of players at the table and the value of the chips being played at the table. A one-dollar table is going to have a different optimum game speed to a ten-dollar table and so on.
Does game speed vary depending on what form of roulette is played?
No matter what form of roulette you are playing, it always comes down to maximising the revenue. The type of roulette is irrelevant. You can apply Gaming Floor Live to any form of roulette and it will analyse all the different playing scenarios. Typically you would put the system in, leave it running for a couple of months, and let it collect data on a wide range of games and game conditions. What Gaming Floor Live then does is pick out the most profitable scenarios. So for every combination of table limit, chip value, and number of players at the table, it will sift through the data and pick out the most profitable spin rate for each of those particular combinations. Gaming Floor Live is able to analyse all games and game conditions—regardless of table limit or number of players—to identify the game speed that led to the greatest yield in the past. That information can then be used by the system to indicate the optimum speed dealers should be aiming for.
Once a casino manager has that information, what happens then?
It’s all very well to know the optimum spin rate, but how do you put that into effect? That’s the point of the dealer feedback device we have on Gaming Floor Live that tells the dealer how they are doing and when to spin. There are some graphical speedometers that indicate the dealer’s past and target game speed, and a bar that counts down and then blinks when it’s time to spin the ball.
Could that make the dealers feel they’re being spied on?
Well, firstly we are not spying on the dealers, we are trying to maximize the table yield. Whilst relating these measurements back to the dealers is one of the reporting functions of the system, this could become a positive motivation tool. One of the reports indicates how a dealer is performing and that shows up on the feedback display. Where many green indicators are shown, it means the dealer is adhering to the optimal game speed. A sea of red indicators means they’re ignoring the guidance from GFL. To create an incentive for dealers, a casino could implement a monthly competition and award a prize to the dealer who got the most green indicators. We’re not trying to replace dealers. We’re not trying to tell them how to do their job. We’re maximising table revenues so that in the long run operators can perhaps even employ more dealers.
So where exactly are the sensors?
GFL connects to the existing wheel and the chip sorting machine. There’s also a dolly sensor under the layout that registers whether the dolly [the marker indicating a winning number at the end of a game] is in its ‘home’ position or not. With these inputs we can determine everything we need about the game: betting duration, game rate, chip turnover, number of players, and payout duration.
What’s the purpose of the dolly sensor?
The dolly sensor assists the casino on two important metrics—betting duration and payout duration. Betting duration is defined as the time between the dolly coming home (after the previous payout) and the ‘no more bets’ signal from the wheel. Betting duration is an important measurement because it allows us to target the optimum yield from the table more accurately than the traditional “games per hour” metric. Payout duration is the period of time the dolly was away from home following the winning number result, and this is useful for objectively rating dealers.
The dolly sensor has minimal impact on the dealer. We know that dealers play with the dolly during the game, so if the dolly is not in the home position prior to a payout beginning, GFL requests via a flashing LED that the dolly briefly be placed in the home position prior to crowning the winning result. And GFL knows when a payout is due to begin from information received by the wheel sensor.
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