Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming May 2014 86 C asino Macau Jockey Club, which opened its doors on the 30th of last month, on the eve of the big Labour Day holiday, serves as a virtual showroom for LT Game’s latest and greatest products. “The whole concept of Casino Macau Jockey Club is that it’s a ‘chipless’ casino,” explains LT Game COO Betty Zhao. Occupying center stage in the new venue are three E-Baccarat tables that blend the look and feel of the traditional game with the speed and efficiency of touchscreen betting. “The players can still squeeze the cards, but they won’t use chips, so the games will be really fast because dealers won’t need to do any payouts—they’ll be done electronically,” says Ms Zhao. “We’ve got 10 seats around each table, and these are for the relatively high limit players at Casino MJC. There are LED lights in front of each player position indicating who bet the most to alert the dealer who gets to squeeze the cards. We also have two big signs showing stacks of chips corresponding to the bet size at each position, so players can see who bet how much. The signs will also include the trend board and display advertisements.” An Eye to the Future LT Game COO Betty Zhao believes her company’s “chipless” E-Baccarat table will usher in a new era of efficiency and faster games for casinos E-Baccarat “is twice as fast as a traditional table and saves manpower as well,” says Ms Zhao. Players can buy in by inserting cash or a ticket into built-in acceptors. Betting is conducted at each seat on seven-inch LCD monitors. But it’s a real dealer dealing real cards, so the personal and tactile elements of the game that are so important to Chinese gamblers are preserved. What’s eliminated is the possibility of dealer error and disputed results (or worse, cheating or fraud) since every hand is electronically recorded. Which also makes player-tracking possible, bringing science to the art of ratings and rewards. Furthermore, Ms Zhao reveals the E-Baccarat tables are made in modular form, so that the touchscreen monitors and betting terminals can be customized for different settings. “If the customer has a bar or some other different kind of table, we just need to mount the betting terminal and the touchscreen monitor into it and players can play from there. So it’s quite a flexible product and it doesn’t have to be used exclusively with a regular casino table.” The Casino MJC also houses 172 of LT’s market-leading Live Table Multi-Gaming “The whole concept of Casino Macau Jockey Club is that it’s a ‘chipless’ casino,” explains LT Game COO Betty Zhao. Occupying center stage in the new venue are three E-Baccarat tables that blend the look and feel of the traditional game with the speed and efficiency of touchscreen betting. Not only do LT’s Intelligent Cash Access kiosks convert tickets to cash, like other kiosk products on the market, but they go one step further by allowing players to convert stacks of cash into tickets. System terminals, from which players can place bets on games dealt by live dealers either at one of the three E-Baccarat games in progress or on games at one of two other dedicated tables within the property. “There are cameras in the ceiling which stream the games to the terminals. This is something new,” says Ms Zhao. The new machines at Casino MJC bring the count of LT terminals around Macau to 3,239, including installations last month at MGM Macau and Wynn Macau. There will be a lot more of them in the future, too, for a lot of reasons: they’re convenient, they’re player- friendly and they’re extremely cost-effective. They’re also the best tool the six casino concessionaires have to keep pace with demand in the face of the government’s yearly cap of 3% on new table games. In a supply- constrained environment that is driving bet minimums in the largest table games market in the world through the roof, they’ve emerged as the ideal high-margin low-roller solution. G2E ASIA 2014