Inside Asian Gaming

Winning Hand Winning Asia plays to its casino gaming strengths while expanding in the online and hospitality markets “I always play games in real casinos. I never play in test showrooms. When you are putting your own money into the machine in a live casino, you really get a feel for the games.” So says Alice Tang, Director – Product Marketing for Macau based company Winning Asia Technology Ltd. The business offers a wide range of services to the gaming and tourism sectors in East and Southeast Asia. They cover three main product areas: land-based casino gaming; online casino and casual gaming and hospitality. Winning Asia, founded in 2007, is a relatively young company compared to some of the big name gaming solutions providers in Macau, but it is growing quickly. Ms Tang puts that down to a number of factors, including a good understanding of the market in Macau and beyond, and the flexibility in approach of its staff. Under the land-based casino heading, Winning Asia offers a range of services. These include: new product development by its owndevelopment team, product localisation for foreign slot manufacturers seeking to enter Macau or other Asian markets; testing of overseas product to check it is compatible with existing equipment in local markets; Winning Baccarat and partnership with equipment makers and/or casino operators in managing casino floors or slot halls. Online offer Under the online services heading, Winning Asia has multiple capabilities. It can build live casino Internet sites with live dealers; create back end systems to cope with the betting agent structure commonly needed to support transactions for online betting and casino sites in Asia (where the agent acts as go-between in issuing gambling credit to players and collecting debts) and in developing ‘soft’ games for the Internet café market in Mainland China. “They include games a bit like fantan , based, for example, on stories from Chinese history. Our team will brainstorm and come up with the games,” says Ms Tang. Fantan , or ‘ fan-tan ,’ meaning ‘repeated divisions’inMandarin, is a traditional Chinese game. Although still played in some Macau casinos, it has largely been superseded by baccarat in Chinese players’ affections in modern times. Fantan ’s simplicity does, however, lend itself to adaptation into soft gaming. A square is marked in the centre of a table or tablecloth, and the sides are marked one, two, three and four. The banker puts on the table a double handful of small counters or buttons that he covers with a metal bowl, known as ‘ tan koi ’. The players then bet on the numbers, setting their stakes on the side of the square that bears the number selected. Players can also bet on the corners, for example between numbers two and three. When all bets are placed, the bowl is removed and the ‘ tan kun ’, or croupier, uses a small bamboo stick to remove the counters from the heap, four at a time, until the final batch is reached. If it contains four counters, the backer of number four wins; if three, the backer of number three wins and so on. The winner receives three times the amount of his stake less a 5% commission deducted Winning Asia’s Internet café soccer game EGT INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | January 2010 22