Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | July 2010 10 to track all betting and payouts. They offer wonderfully efficient tableside accounting, player tracking and many more hands per hour, but otherwise in look, feel and playing style appear just like a ‘traditional’ table. There are tables that can be switched from full automation to attendant operation to fully trained dealer mode at the flick of a switch or a series of switches, such as TCS JOHNHUXLEY’s TouchTable MultiPLAY Series. There are tables with voluptuous or hunky (depending on the clienteles’ tastes) virtual dealers on video screen. There are even tables with robotic arms adapted from car factory assembly lines, dealing cards to players with all the charm and personality of Star Wars’ R2-D2 repairing Queen Padmé Amidala’s starship. What’s in a name? How a table is designated—i.e. as an electronic gaming machine (EGM) or as a live table—matters for all sorts of reasons. Not the least of them is that an EGM designation in Macau means a much lower annual government licensing fee than for a live table. “On a mass [live dealer] table, as an operator you’re paying MOP100,000 a year per table in government licensing,” says the gaming executive. “The most expensive licence is for a VIP table. If the DICJ [Macau’s gaming regulator] isn’t telling, then I’m not telling. But it’s a lot of money. “On an EGM, you’re paying MOP1,000. The licensing fees are calculated by revenue,” explains the source. If a table product can stay close to the look and feel of a traditional table but be licensed and regulated as an EGM, then it stands a better chance of killing two gaming birds with one stone—maximising the number of players using it, and minimising the table overheads, thus boosting profit margins. “You don’t have to be a genius to realise that even with the capital costs of an electronic table, the much lower annual licensing costs to the government mean you canmaintain a reasonablemargin on amuch smaller handle than is generally achieved by a traditional table game.” Cap for electronic tables pondered The history of regulation in some markets is that tables with an element of electronic functionality are sometimes designated as slots, and sometimes as tables. How they end up being defined can depend on some extent to how well or how convincingly the manufacturer lobbies the regulator, or indeed how sympathetic the regulator is to the industry’s position. A good example recently is in the United Kingdom, where a manufacturer was able to get the regulator to designate its electronic poker table game as a table game, rather than an EGM. The advantage in that particular case was that the supplier was selling into a casino where there was a strict limit on the number of slots allowed, but a looser restriction on the table quota. Given the recent superheating of the Macau gaming market, is there even an argument for putting a cap on the number of EGMs allowed in Macau? Does it make sense to close the front door of casino expansion by capping the number of live tables, while at the same time leaving the back door open for EGMs? There is a potential political problem to that approach. Given that it seems mainly to beSandsChinathatissufferingthemostfrom the fallout of the table cap, were the Macau government now to impose restrictions on electronic games, it could look dangerously like an anti-LVS stance, rather than a policy for the good of the community and the economy as a whole. “There has certainly been some talk of an electronic table games cap,” says Ricardo Siu, Associate Professor of Economics and International Finance at the University of Macau and an acknowledged authority on the VIP gaming sector in Macau. “The progress on it doesn’t seem very advanced. That’s because of the fact that since the middle of last year the Macau government and the DICJ really wanted to focus on the VIP segment first. Whether the government would return to this issue later is hard to say at this stage.” TouchTable MultiPLAY Roulette Cover Story