Inside Asian Gaming

November 2012 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 13 SHFL standards of speed and efficiency to the processes of setup and closing. It’s twice as fast as its predecessor, the DeckMate, and can shuffle a deck in just over 20 seconds. Other highlights from this core component of SHFL’s business included the MD3 baccarat and blackjack shuffler, which can count and shuffle up to eight decks of cards simultaneously; the one2six multi- deck continuous shuffler; and the i-Deal for single-deck specialty games. The months ahead will also see greater global traction for an expanding menu of proprietary table games—“the ones that people take for granted in America,” Mr Isaacs says, “but the rest of the world doesn’t really know—the ones like Three Card Poker, Ultimate Texas Hold’Em, Four Card Poker, Mississippi Stud, great games that generate the bulk of our money in this sector”. And it’s about building on them, he says, with imaginative side bets and the perennial lure of local- and wide-area progressives powered by technologies like Game Manager Nexus, which can link up to seven separate specialty games in a single jackpot, and a new progressives management software package called Game Manager 2, a network-based system that enables multi- level jackpots and fully configurablemultiple reserve pools so players can compete in real time for multiple incrementing meters with just one wager on all specialty poker games. Speaking of specialty games, SHFL introduced eight at G2E, including: two new 21 variants (House Money, Free Bet Blackjack), two new poker games (Raise It Up Stud Poker, Face Up Stud Poker), plus a new fun way to play Three Card Poker called Three Card Mulligan, and the pai gow- inspired 6 Card Fortune Pai Gow Poker. Asia’s casinos can expect a lot of this to be heading their way in the months ahead, including improved versions of Vegas Star, a mainstay electronic table game platform for SHFL inmarkets like Singapore and Australia, and a new version of the live dealer Rapid Multi-Game called Rapid Fusion, which was first shown at G2E Asia in May and offers players the ability to bet four games simultaneously, a technology the company calls “concurrent gaming”. “Obviously, in Asia we do very well with our electronic tables. But as a company we hadn’t invested.Well, wehave investednow,” says Mr Isaacs. “We have a new platform with a brand new wide-screen cabinet which is going to be common across all our products. One cabinet across all. The platform inside it, the board and all the mechanics are the same that we use in our Equinox slot machine. So we’re down to one platform. The software’s been upgraded. It’s all written within our Unity back end. So, effectively, we can build games for online, for electronic tables or for slots. They can all go across the platform.” The innovative iTable, which combines a live table with an intuitive touchscreen betting interface (available in roulette, The DeckMate 2 shuffler The MD3 Free Bet Blackjack The iTable Vegas Star