Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | January 2010 16 USPCC The Birth of a USPCC Super Deck From raw paper to casino-ready playing card product S ecure, high quality printing, good batch management and secure pre-shuffling are all key components in any playing card deck or series of decks intended for casino use. The United States Playing Card Company has its Bee® brand cards pre-shuffled in a secure limited access area in its factory. The company says its videomonitoring system is in place solely for casino production cards, monitoring the area “24/7”. The fully automated, closed loop system starts with uncut sheets of paper and finishes with high quality decks in secure, tamper-evident packaging. USPCC says security is built into the production process and focuses on two key elements. First, USPCC removes as much of the human element as possible. Second the company verifies the integrity of each pre-shuffled deck; decks that are GLI Certified random. The process is a highly proprietary system, one that was custom-built to USPCC’s specifications that were driven by intensive market research around the globe. It is secure and is the future of playing card delivery—once a sheet enters the preshuffle line, a human hand is not required to touch it until the sealed deck is loaded into the shipping carton. This maximises quality and security from the point of manufacture through dealing on the table. Bee ® Dice “Our dice are on the floors of several casinos in Macau. We don’t do the sic bo dice because we don’t do the rounded corners. But we’ve got the Bee brand dice on several casino floors in Macau. “The tolerances on the measurements of our dice can be held tighter than the industry usually requires. That all comes down to weights and balance, so you’re getting a truer roll from your dice. That helps maintain game integrity for the operators. Some of the other manufacturers can’t hold the tolerances that we can hold,” explains Mr Watson. USPCC has resisted any move to relocate its manufacturing base away from North America and Europe. (Its Fournier brand is made in Spain along with some of the export versions of its other brands.) This is because of USPCC’s determination to maintain the highest possible standards of product quality and product security. “Dice production still has a significant labour component to it, because they need to be moulded using batch manufacturing, and there’s also the foil stamping,” says Dwight Watson. “As far as playing cards and the rest of our product range is concerned, we face the same challenges as everyone else on the labour cost component,” adds Scott Madding. “What we’ve been doing over the years more from a security standpoint than anything else, is to get equipment and technology in place that will take as much of the human element out of the equation as possible.” In July 2009, USPCC moved from its Cincinnati, Ohio base, where it had been for more than a century, to a brand new purpose built 570,000 square feet manufacturing plant across the river in neighbouring Kentucky—only a short distance from Cincinnati Airport. The company also invested US$30 million in new equipment for the plant. “We find that the more automation we have the better, and the fewer mistakes,” says Mr Watson. “Every time a human hand touches the product—and that includes in the casinos where the card packs go into the pre shuffle room—the opportunity for something untoward to happen, such as a card going missing or collusion with someone wishing to cheat the system, is there,” adds Mr Madding. USPCC’s historic home in Cincinnati, Ohio