The United States Playing Card Company has been busy forming value-added partnerships in an effort to augment its Bee-Tek™ Intelligent Electronic Baccarat Shoe
The Bee-Tek™ Intelligent Electronic Baccarat Shoe is a new piece of The United States Playing Card Company’s (USPC) mission to increase its share of the Macau market. Macau’s casinos
currently consume about 100 million decks of playing cards a year, with the vast majority of that provided by a competing supplier. USPC believes it now has the right offer to challenge that competitor’s dominance. In pursuit of that goal, the company set up a Macau office in December last year, and in February hired Adam McGregor as vice president of sales for Asia, based out of that office. USPC also has upgraded its entire baccarat solution, with the new Bee- Tek™ shoe, which, according to President of Global Sales Retail and Casino Michael W. Slaughter, is not only more secure and less vulnerable to degradation over time than competing products, but is also based on an open-architecture platform to enable upgrades and expansion and facilitate working relationships with partners.
USPC’s Michael W. Slaughter
“The partnerships are how we build our business. We’ve found a number of organizations that want to work with us because we operate in an open environment,” explains Mr Slaughter. “We’ve got the ability to work with more partners because we do share information. So if you think about how Android went about building their business, they’ve made the architecture open to the developers. So we’re asking, ‘How can we work together?’ versus ‘How do we close off the technology loop and keep people away.’”
USPC has found many eager partners in the e-table realm, says Mr Slaughter. “You might see our shoe on the tables of some electronic games where they chose the path of using cards because a lot of their players wanted the real feel and touch of cards involved in their digital game versus a digital card. So you’ll see those developers out there that we’ve partnered with.”
Among several other technology partnerships USPC has formed recently the new functionality offered by its tie-up with eConnect, displayed at last month’s Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, stands out in particular. The new innovation comes from the integration of the Bee-Tek™ shoe and eConnect’s Dragon Baccarat software, which allows operators to monitor their casino floor for live game statistics tied to surveillance video and gives them immediate information that protects the integrity of the games. It lets the casino see and detect unshuffled decks, repeated card sequences and numbers of wins in a row and generates real-time shoe error alerts, which can indicate device tampering. Operators can also use the system as a tool to identify dealer error, improve dealer training and create better game awareness among table games management.
“So not only do they watch the video,” says Mr Slaughter, “but they can track all the statistics: number of hands played per hour, number of wins, number of losses, number of ties. So it just gives you a myriad of data to analyze. … Once you begin to understand the hands per hour played at a table, then you can understand your casino productivity. So, for instance, table 1 over here is doing 25 hands per hour and table 2 is only doing 15. So the question for the casino operations people might be why? Is it dealer technique, could it be that? Could it be the style of play? Could it be the players at the table? So the video, obviously, shows the behavior at the table. So you’re tracking behavioral data, both the player’s and the dealer’s. This leads them to be able to understand that data across the entire casino, the entire table games operation, and then they can make decisions about how they redeploy assets within the casino to improve productivity.”
In terms of security, he explains: “Let’s say there’s a player dispute. Now, you have that video to go back to, but you’ve also got all of the data behind every card that was drawn. If the casino determines that it needs to go back and investigate to make sure that fair play occurred, they can go back and tie the statistical data to the video. That’s the big benefit. Tying the two together. Because there’s always been video, but there’s not been a lot of statistical data tied to it. It’s always been observational. So instead of anecdotal data, where someone in security is viewing this and saying, ‘I think this is what’s happening,’ now they’ve got statistical data to go back and prove this is what did happen.”
Mr Slaughter believes USPC will be well positioned with the Bee-Tek™ shoe to grow its business. “The deployment of the shoe in Macau has been a strategic position for us. We talked at G2E Asia, and those rollouts are happening in Macau right now. There’ll be a major player rolling out there very soon. And the training is going on with a major casino here in Las Vegas. So we’re thrilled about the acceptance, deployment and the benefits and features that this shoe brings. It’s a game changer for us.”
