Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | July 2012 32 Abbiati E legance, craftsmanship and reliability play well everywhere, so it’s no surprise that what scores of casinos in Europe and on the high seas have known for years about Abbiati’s tables, chips and plaques is quickly spreading across Asia. Headquartered in Turin, Italy, Abbiati Casino Equipment now has an office in Singapore to better serve the region and has secured the services of veteran industry marketeer Christophe Leparoux—who was instrumental in establishingGaming Partners International in Asia—to exploit what the company sees as a prime opportunity to grow sales in its traditional product lines for the pit and, importantly, to test its mettle as an innovator in advanced RFID and laser sensor technologies. The company came to this year’s G2E Asia with an array of both. “Our specific focus [in Asia] is chips and plaques,” Mr Leparoux said during a break in the three-day event, held at The Venetian Macao in May. “We have a very wide range of state-of-the-art plaques and jetons in the European-styleaswellasarangeofAmerican- style chips, in all different colors, diameters, styles, finishes and security features.” Sixteen varieties of them, in fact: plaques richly crafted in traditional mother of Setting the Table Abbiati blends technological innovation with traditional craftsmanship to produce the finest in furnishings, layouts and accessories for the pit solution for tracking, accounting and game management. The same advanced thinking characterizes Abbiati’s approach to the delicate mechanics underlying the accuracy of its roulette wheels. An ongoing process for Abbiati’s engineers, it took a leap forward over the last year with the introduction of an electronic leveling system that makes it possible to continuously monitor wheel performance from a position parallel to the wheel’s conventional supports. More recently, this has been enhanced with an innovative and sophisticated system of laser sensors embedded within the wheel. The system is composed of three elements: • The first is a rigid support system that operates independently of the gaming table. Sitting at a 120-degree angle on the concentric circumference of the wheel, it adjusts levers that control three antimagnetic, minutely precise lifting groups to eliminate vibration and maintain flatness, which is defined as perfect parallel to a plane. • The electronic level, which rests on the wheel, is connected to a portable PC whose software guides the operator to pearl and fitted with UV-sensitive links for enhancedsecurityandserialization;andchips manufactured under a computer-controlled CNC injection molding process that ensures state-of-the-art consistency and durability, each piece carefully ground on its face to just the right thickness for smooth handling and uniformity, and along its edges to guarantee that size and diameter never vary. More recently, Abbiati has begun investing these finely honed products with a package of sophisticated security and tracking technologies which it characterizes as a “revolution” in radio frequency identification for the industry. At the heart of this patented Chip Inventory System, as it’s called, is a 13.56 MHz PJM-enabled tag, a microchip, embedded in the game chip, a “DNA” of sorts, that makes it possible for a casino to confirm the identity and location of the piece and monitor its travels throughout its daily life cycle, from vault to table to cashier. Every wager can be followed, each tag transmitting its unique data in real time to special high-frequency antennae concealed beneath the table layout—the chips are capable of being read at an amazing 800 pieces per second— that work in conjunction with monitoring software to provide a completely integrated