Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | May 2012 42 F ew gaming manufacturers can boast a range of solution for the casino floor as varied as Shuffle Master’s. Its innovations have impacted nearly every facet of the gambling experience. In some cases—the automatic card shuffler, the proprietary table game, the progressive side bet are three that spring immediately to mind—they’ve revolutionized it. The company has played a seminal role in the evolution of electronic multi-station table games with its popular Vegas Star and Rapid Table Games lines and promises to do the same with the i-Table, a unique blending of the communal excitement of a traditional table with the ease and security of totally automated betting and play. With the 2007 acquisition of Stargames, the company moved aggressively into the slots sector, and last year’s launch of the Equinox cabinet saw three new game portfolios introduced into Asia’s markets. These included a new linked game and the eye-catching Random Magic, an extra-tall top box designed specifically with the Macau player in mind. With the acquisition earlier this year of Ongame, Shuffle Master stated its intention to play a leadership role in online gaming as well. Ken Jolly, vice president of Shuffle Master Asia, recently sat down with Inside Asian Gaming to talk about all this and more. IAG : Obviously, we’d very much like to hear about what you’ll be showing at G2E Asia. Ken Jolly : Probably the main point about Shuffle Master is that it’s a more diverse gaming supply company than most other gaming companies. We’re a 28-year-old company. We started off in shuffling machines and today we’re in five major product lines: what we call Utilities —shufflers, chippers, products to run and manage gaming tables.There’s our Proprietary TablesGames , like Caribbean Stud,Texas Hold’em and CasinoWar, etc. We have some 19 games which casinos can lease from us and put on their floors. There is also what we call Electronic Table Games , where you can bet on a table game with a live dealer (Rapid) or a virtual dealer (Vegas Star). These are our multi- terminal electronic tables and can be configured in many layouts for different installations. The slot machines, the EGMs, include the new Equinox . And now we’re starting an interactive division , business-to- business, with the purchase of Ongame. The interactive, that’s a US play principally? It’s going to be a global play, and at the G2E this year we will have a booth on our stand that will demonstrate this offering. So I encourage everyone to come to the stand and learn more about this exciting segment of our business. Slot machines have not been an emphasis for Shuffle Master in the past. But the company is working very hard now to develop some really localized games for the Macau market. How is that effort progressing heading into the show? Certainly, we have been working on what makes, or helps make, a better slot game for the Asian market. Typically, a lot of companies have rolled products out from other markets, and not everybody has had success. Following our initial launch range the company is now focusing on trying to get products tweaked to suit the market. One of the things we’ve done, we’ve signed up a software house in China producing graphic packages and story books suited culturally to the market. They’ve produced four games already for us, and we’ve just signed on for more to be delivered. This is a strategy that the company will continue to grow, developing Chinese games to put into Macau initially, then greater Asia. The strength of those graphics will translate into other markets. Graphics content and themes will cross borders when coupled with great features and maths. One of the things we also believe is that there’s strength in the Asian player across the world. What are the challenges in introducing new slots in amarket that is so dominated by a single company as this one is? We’re obviously monitoring our products going into the casinos throughout Asia. We’re looking for what is working and what’s not working in the top10%. Andnomanufacturer has100%of their games working. That’s the nature of the slot business. I’ve seen this over 34 years, and all over the world it’s the same. It’s a matter of bringing out what you believe is right, then looking at how it performs, looking at how the players actually play the game, and where they’re betting, and then trying to understand how to tweak the maths or take that particular feature and enhance it to get a better performance. One thing about Shuffle Master, we’re very committed to getting to the top of the performance charts as a slot manufacturer. That is with Shuffle Master The One Stop Shop Shuffle Master’s innovations continue to define the look and play of today’s gaming floors Duo Fu Duo Cai—strong Chinese branding and theme