Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | February 2011 14 Alfastreet V alentine’s Day marks the first anniversary of the world debut of Alfastreet’s semi-automated multi- terminal roulette machines. They went live last Chinese New Year at the casino in Singapore’s Resorts World Sentosa (RWS) integrated resort (IR). The date seems only fitting, as semi-automated multi-terminals and Singapore casinos appear to be a match made in gaming heaven. Multi-terminal products are electronic versions of popular table games, whereby players place their bets and receive payouts electronically via a computerised touch screen. Multi-terminals offer casinos several benefits over live tables, including increased game speed and turnover, reduced labour costs, greater security, and even savings on dealer mispays (after all, while players will always raise a fuss when dealers accidentally underpay them, they are often happy to remain silent when they are overpaid). Unlike Alfastreet’s previous fully automatedmulti-terminal roulette products, the semi-automated versions feature a live dealer spinning the ball, and according to Deric Goh, the company’s Sales Director for Asia, the semi- automated offering was specifically developed to gain Alfastreet a foothold in Singapore. “All this while, Alfastreet had only been doing fully automated roulette, until we wanted to penetrate this market, and we knew automated would not work as well,” he explains. “Genting [the owner and operator of RWS] have been operating in Malaysia for the past 40 years. So they have tried a lot of different products in that market. The automated roulette didn’t work—players didn’t fully trust it, because they thought the casino could control the wheel, control the ball. But when they Market Responsive Alfastreet is making an aggressive push into Asia, backed by intense research and development to gear its products to local markets The updated SLM3 single terminal