Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | July 2011 38 Advertise with Inside Asian Gaming For advertising enquiries, please email: [email protected] or call +853 2832 9980 We haven’t necessarily tried to take a slot technology and make it work for a table game. We started with a white sheet of paper and tried to create something that was relevant for table games. Based on our market research, we found the biggest need for validation of cash in table games was for the Asianmarkets.We found themost critical elements were speed and the ability to escrownotes. With that in mind, about six months ago a colleague of mine, Makoto Hasegawa, and I began a quest to find the solution for it and we’re debuting it here at G2E Asia. What’s been the response to the product? When we came out here, we really weren’t sure what response we would get to the prototype. But the response exceeded our expectations significantly. I believe that’s because of the amount of money being gambled on the tables out here. The basic concept behind the product is pretty simple—the fastest speed, the best validation, and the ability to store a large number of notes. Those are the three tenets. Since I started spending more of my time in Japan, this is the first product that we’ve designed—it’s been designed by Asians for the Asian region. It’s not a product designed somewhere else and localised for the Asian region. The Asian region and its markets are so unique that one size does not fit all. A product or concept that works in North America or Europe does not necessarily correlate to Asia because the casinos are different, the players are different, and the wagering styles are different. We started out with a total white sheet approach to gaming at a table game and we came up with this unit. It’s still in a prototype format here, but basically what it does is it takes in up to 200 notes per buy in, has the ability to escrow those notes and reject any bad notes. The speed of this validator is eight bills per second. What’s the processing capacity of the prototype? The unit can process 200 bills for each buy in, stack multiple buy ins and store up to 3,400 bills in its cashboxes How does that compare with slot machine bill validators? You can liken the current state of table games to slot machines in the US market in the late 1980s, where the slot customers had to wait for a staff member with change before they could gamble. The process really slowed down the game. Then JCM created the embedded bill validator, and slot profits dramatically increased. The number of games played per hour increased because of the bill validator. That is the scenario facing table game players in Macau today. The manual count on a buy-in is slower than necessary. We believe Project 8 could dramatically increase the number of table Project 8 instantly displays the tally of notes for the player and the casino staff