Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2008 30 Hound.The system will effectively flag those chips and the next time they are presented for cash or play, an alert will pop up or be sent out to management.. Unique technology The key to the successful application of Progressive Gaming’s RFID system is the versatility of the antenna systems. It would be hard,for even an experienced gambler, to tell the difference between Progressive Gaming RFID enabled table and a conventional one. What the player would notice though is the ability of the dealer and the casino management to maintain the pace of play even in high volume games, without the need for interruptions related to housekeeping issues. The heart of the system is hidden away inside the tags embedded in the gaming chips and in the antennae inside the table. Under the surface of the table’s betting area are wafer-thin loops that act as antennae and send a dome shaped signal over the table to a height equal to a stack of around 35 gaming chips. On the outside, the RFID chip looks and feels like a standard gaming chip. On the inside, each chip is embedded with a tiny radio frequency (RF) microchip. When a gaming chip is placed in the betting circle, the antenna emits an electromagnetic field that enables it to read the value of the chip and relays the data to the table’s desktop computer and the back office system. Flexible reading The ability of the system to read chips stored either horizontally in the chip tray or stacked vertically on the table is the company’s proprietary knowledge, says Sandra Low. “For operational purposes we don’t go normally higher than 20 gaming chips, but system wise we can go–depending on the antenna–to 35 high,” adds Mr Oosthoek. “The system uses a dual axis antenna which means it can read and create a field at different angles. In this case it can read chips that are placed on it vertically. This is quite special from a technological point of view. We had to specially design it for this market.” Instant results With a conventional non-RFID enabled tray system, casinos have to wait until a table closes towork out the exact tablewin for that session. Until that point, the management team is essentially relying on experience and rough calculations “With a non-RFID system at end of the day the management sees how many chips there are in the chip tray and compares it with when they opened the table for that session. That’s essentially going to be their table win,” says Mr Oosthoek. “For Macau which has such a high volume of chips being played and so much money going around, that system is a rather rudimentary process. You have this big unknown all the time during the day. It’s sort of ‘after the fact’ calculation. You can judge it against all sorts of statistics for things like the average percentage for a baccarat table on its drop, but they are only statistics and not an absolute measure. This is particularly the case with baccarat which is quite volatile for wins,”he adds. Margins boosted Real time monitoring via 13.56MHz PJM RFIDhelps not only tomaintain speed of play but also to maintain or even boost margins, suggests Mr Oosthoek. “The pace of play—the number of ‘decisions’ per hour as it’s known in the business––is a key part of the business. A good dealer with the right system behind him or her can maximise the number of decisions an hour, and each time the operator is getting a percentage out of that,” he explains. TheChipInventorySystemallowsupdates of the chip stock or float level minute-by- minute, rather than hour-by-hour. “In a non-RFID system, managers like to count chip trays every hour, because if you wait until the end of the table session, it could be too late,” says Mr Rubio. Manual versus automatic “They manually count all the chips and compare the tally to the drop and make sure those ratios are in line. They also try to get an idea of how their turnover on the floor is building up, and where the turnover is. For example they may want to know whether to open one pit and close another. It’s s disruption though because even for experienced staff it takes time every hour to do this. “Our system can do the count automatically in real time. If for example the management is concerned about an