Inside Asian Gaming

Tournament appeal On the main floors of Macau casinos— in contrast to VIP rooms, where players like their privacy—crowds attract more crowds, as reflected by the familiar scene of players jostled three-deep around one sic bo table, while the adjacent table sits empty. Observing that gambling in Macau is a spectator sport, casino architect Paul Steelman came up with Sands Macao’s revolutionary stadium-style design, which is considered one of the main factors behind the property’s tremendous popularity among Chinese visitors—and is clearly the major influence on the design of Las Vegas Sands Corp’s latest property, Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. Slot tournaments have the potential to create crowd-pulling excitement among the participants, and are set to become more popular in Macau and the rest of Asia. “We believe that tournaments are one of the most under- developed and under-exposed parts of the slot business [in Macau],” suggests Weike Gaming Technology CEO David Kinsman. “New South Wales in Australia, as you know, has been a very strong slot jurisdiction for fifty to sixty years. Tournaments have always been a very big part of gaming machine promotions in Australia, especially in New SouthWales. Here [inMacau], there’s been very little.We know that Atronic did a product which was basically just a tournament product, and you couldn’t use it for anything else. You only switched it on when you wanted to play a tournament. They have a single-use package, which is very different to what we have here [with Winner Takes All]. What we came up with was a 50-line package that is a dedicated game. “Now one of the important things is it’s got to be one game for everybody. If you have different games, some players wrongly or rightly may think one game may have an advantage over another. So it’s only one game. We have back-up games that are available, so we can change it. We’re also able to theme the tournament to a particular [casino] site, so it doesn’t have to carry the Winner Takes All brand. “One of the good things is we work together with Paltronics in almost a joint development project, andwehave a long-termcontract with Paltronics that means all of the patented sections—and there a lot of patents involved in the package—are completely protected. So we can’t be copied, we can’t be plagiarised. And it’s interesting when I see two other manufacturers here [at the G2E Asia show, held in Macau last month] that have rushed so-called tournament products onto the market, knowing that we were going to launch this here at the show. It’s also interesting to see that the other manufacturers’ products are not available, whereas in eight weeks time, we’ll start rolling out our product into venues in Macau, Singapore and possibly the Philippines.”