Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | February 2008 Vendor Profile including MGM Grand and StarWorld in Macau.The industry leadingChipper Champ Plus was recently updated and refined to create Chipper Champ 2 , which sorts up to 500 chips per minute and is marketed as “the quietest chipper ever made.” Dr Sjöberg explains “the advantage in general is you can get more spins [or hands] per hour because the dealer doesn’t have to sort chips.” He estimates the increase in game speed from using the Chipper Champ is “easily 10-15%”. New draws TCS JOHNHUXLEY unveiled several new products at ICE 2008, but Inside Asian Gaming’s favourites were Novo TouchBet™ Live-Blackjack and TouchTable MultiPLAY™ Roulette. The cool-factor of these innovative products could even contribute to the realisation of Dr Sjöberg’s prediction of a rise in popularity of blackjack and roulette in Macau. Game preference is hardly homogenous throughout Asia, however. Roulette already has a major following at Genting in Malaysia, for example, but it seems blackjack will take off before roulette in Macau,“since it is easier for a baccarat player to migrate to another card game,” observes Dr Sjöberg. Although a distant third in terms of share of Macau casino revenue (behind baccarat and even sic bo ), blackjack is the most popular casino card game in the world and shows clear potential to grow in Macau given the arrival of more non-Chinese visitors following the opening of glitzy new casino resorts in the city and the adoption of western trends among the “hip, young” set. Novo TouchBet™ Live-Blackjack is the latest NovoTouchBet™ live game,with Live-Sic Bo, Live-Baccarat and Live-Roulette already Chipper Champ 2 Novo TouchBet ™ Live-Blackjack available. Novo TouchBet™ Live-Blackjack allows up to250players toplay simultaneously fromthe same live game,offeringmajor labour cost savings to casino operators in Macau, where dealer costs have skyrocketed in light of the huge expansion in casino capacity and the government’s ban on casinos using foreign workers as dealers. Other benefits from the automated system include increased game speed and reduced fraud and error, while the individual terminals provide players a comfortable and unintimidating playing environment. One of the key enabling technologies behind both Live- Baccarat and Live-Blackjack is the state-of-the-art optical recognition system in the TCS JOHNHUXLEY AccuPLAY Intelligent Card Shoe, which, unlike competing intelligent shoes that only work with a particular card brand, is able to read almost all the major card brands in the world. When a live dealer draws a card from the AccuPLAY Shoe, the card value is immediately displayed across all player terminals using realistic 3D graphics. “The automatic recognition of cards facilitates the game,” explains Dr Sjöberg “rather than relying on the dealer to press in the cards every time.” Novo TouchBet™ Live-Blackjack also features a unique method of game handling, allowing all players to play the game in parallel as if each player were playing individually against the dealer—with some hitting and others standing, some winning, others losing.