Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | October 2009 30 Feature move player ratings into real time. Bally Technologies has been doing this with TableView, acquired from Prism in 2003. TableView gives floor supervisors touch screen data entry for game ratings, and it has accounting features to record openers, closers, fills, credits and markers. This saves supervisors from having to fill out slips at the tables and take the data back to a computer for entry. “Our player tracking piece actually resides in the back, where TableView is fully integrated with our player tracking system,” explains Jerry McGowan, Bally’s regional sales manager for table management system. “The best way to look at TableView is point-of-sale. It’s really data entry, and that information flows back to our player tracking system in real time.” The next step, McGowan says, is more automated information through RFID or optical solutions to track wagers and cards. Bally worked on an optical solution for its MindPlay system but never quite got the card recognition feature—which used bar codes on card edges—to be as accurate as desired. MindPlay is no longer being marketed, though McGowan says it can always be taken off the shelf if a customer wants to look at it. International Game Technology is going the RFID route with its Table iD suite of products developed in conjunction with Shuffle Master and others. IGT also has gone in for game development and bonusing with fully automated electronic table games on its MP Series and DigiDeal Digital 21 game. On live tables, the original Table iD application, called Table Manager, was developed in the mid-1990s to take paper out of the pit. In its current version, computer monitors can be installed at each table for the same kind of data entry Bally does with TableView. New in the last two years are Chip Manager, using RFID chips to track wagers, and Card Manager, using a Shuffle Master card-reading shoe, to track game play, and Lucky Draw for table bonusing. With Chip Manager tracking actual wagers through RFID chips instead of relying on pit supervisors to estimate average bets and time of play, table games managers will finally have information as accurate as that gathered on the slots, says Eric Lancaster, IGT table product marketing manager for network systems. He explains: “I walk up to the game, I sit down, I give them some cash, they give me some chips, and I start betting $25 a hand. So the floor supervisor puts in $25, and they turn their attention to another player or another table. And then I up my bet, and now I’m playing $100, but the floor supervisor doesn’t see that. And so for all we know the average bet on that rating is going to go in as $25. So if I sit there a couple of hours and then get up and go, what the property is going to reinvest in me as a player is below what I as a player would expect. The point of the matter is, with the RFID technology reading the bet, you’re not counting on average bet any more, you’re counting on the equivalent of coin-in on the slot floor. You know exactly what was played. Therefore you’re rewarding for comp dollars, for player reinvestment, you’re rewarding the proper players the proper amount based on your marketing philosophy.” Next up for Table iD is Lucky Draw, which in its original application plays off an old casino standard. Operatorswhohavewanted to created bonus excitement at the tables have had drawings, with dealers handing players a ticket, say, for each blackjack. Tickets then were drawn out of drums for prizes. With Lucky Draw, the awarding of tickets is automatic and the drawings use a random number generator, just as in bonus games on slot machines. “You can do some more exciting things with it,” Lancaster explains. “Let’s say it’s the Fourth of July and you want to do a promotion called ‘Fours on the Fourth,’ and so everybody who gets dealt a pair of 4’s on a blackjack game gets a ticket in a drawing. Or on a baccarat game you can say: everybody who’s playing whenever a natural shows up gets a drawing ticket. Or you can say ‘Win for Losing’: every time the dealer gets blackjack you get a drawing ticket. The concept’s the same, you just have that real-time thing going on now. It doesn’t affect the game itself or the rules or the speed of the game. This is all going on in the background.” Inching toward integration The concept of bonusing on table games is something that excites Barona’s Mike Patterson, who sees loads of potential in Shuffle Master’s iTable. Chips are replaced with individual touch screens for electronic wagering, althoughdealers and cards are still used. ShuffleMaster also has set up blackjack games with some of its proprietary side bets, such as Royal Match, and also incorporates an odds bet that allows players to wager on the outcome of a hand after they’ve seen their initial cards and the dealer’s up card. “When I saw that, that was like a home runout of the ballpark,”Patterson says.“Some of the side bets are insurance or mitigating bets and some are odds bets, and the odds bets just excite the hell out of me. I love that kind of action. If you have a 17 against a dealer’s 9, it’ll put up the odds for you to bet on whether you win or lose. I think that’s just awesome. If you get 20 against a 9, it Shuffle Master is integrating its iTable solution for blackjack with a variety of proprietary side bet concepts