Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | June 2012 42 Interblock T he first thing that strikes you about Interblock’s products is their sleek design. But more than looks, it is performance, value and innovative features that have garnered the company an installed base of 35,000 terminals worldwide. At last month’s G2E Asia, Interblock displayed several key products among its G4 Organic range, including G4 Organic Twins featuring roulette, G4 Organic Virtual with baccarat, and G4 Organic Dice. At the show, Inside Asian Gaming caught up with Interblock Vice President of Sales Tom O’Brien and asked him about the company’s exhibit and wider plans. IAG : Your principal marketing campaign for this year is titled ‘Fight for theRevenue’, andyouarekeenly focusedon helping casino operators achieve their revenue goals. Can you give us an example of how you do that? Well, because there is a very low hold on live table games, you need a lot of volume to make money. Especially on baccarat, which holds less than 2%. What we’re doing with our baccarat game is providing a side bet that doesn’t change any of the rules or the nature of the game, which is very key to players—as you know, they’re very superstitious, so you don’t change the rules of baccarat, you leave it the same. But we have a side bet feature on there that we call Lucky Nines, where you can bet anywhere from a minimum bet of $1 up to the minimum bet of the player. All that has to happen is for both the banker and player hands to contain natural 9s. So if a natural 9 comes out, one for you [banker], one for me [player], we have two, which pays 5 to 1. If there are three, it pays 35 to 1. And if you get two natural 9s dealt and I get two natural 9s, as the banker and player, it’s 1,000 to 1. The hold percentage on that bet really increases for the operator to between 4% and 6%. Now they’ve got something to go with, and depending on volume, for example some casinos, where they’re doing US$20,000 to $40,000 a day in handle per terminal, if you can imagine getting another 4% on top of that game, instead of holding US$ 800-900 a day per terminal at some of these casinos we think we could take it up to US$1,200–1,400 a day by adding that side feature. How does Interblock keep coming up with these standout innovative products? Crazily enough, our owner is the person who comes up with most of the ideas. Joc [Pečečnik, Chairman of the Board] is actually a super-intelligent guy who comes up with a lot of side bet ideas. And we also hired a guy in the United States who’s really our game concept guy. So he’s trying to come up with ways to make the games and the features even better. That’s our primary challenge. We want to improve the games we currently have, so we can increase the hold for all the operators. Importantly, most traditional baccarat players don’t want to play Interblock’s stand at last month’s G2E Asia All Bets Are On Slovenia’s interblock strives to stay ahead of the competition in supplying eye-catching and innovative multiplayer gaming machines