Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | November 2012 22 USPC T he Bee-Tek™ Intelligent Electronic Baccarat Shoe is a new piece of The United States Playing Card Company’s (USPC) mission to increase its share of the Macau market. Macau’s casinos currently consume about 100 million decks of playing cards a year, with the vast majority of that provided by a competing supplier. USPC believes it now has the right offer to challenge that competitor’s dominance. In pursuit of that goal, the company set up a Macau office in December last year, and in February hired Adam McGregor as vice president of sales for Asia, based out of that office. USPC also has upgraded its entire baccarat solution, with the new Bee- Tek™ shoe, which, according to President of Global Sales Retail and Casino Michael W. Slaughter, is not only more secure and less vulnerable to degradation over time than competing products, but is also based on an open-architecture platform to enable upgrades and expansion and facilitate working relationships with partners. “The partnerships are how we build our business. We’ve found a number of organizations that want to work with us because we operate in an open environment,”explains Mr Slaughter.“We’ve got the ability to work with more partners because we do share information. So if you think about how Android went about building their business, they’ve made the architecture open to the developers. So we’re asking, ‘How can we work together?’ versus ‘How do we close off the technology loop and keep people away.’” USPC has found many eager partners in the e-table realm, says Mr Slaughter. “You might see our shoe on the tables of some electronic games where they chose the path of using cards because a lot of their players wanted the real feel and touch of cards involved in their digital game versus a digital card. So you’ll see those developers out there that we’ve partnered with.” Among several other technology partnerships USPC has formed recently the new functionality offered by its tie-up with eConnect, displayed at last month’s Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, stands out in particular. The new innovation comes from the integration of the Bee-Tek™ shoe and eConnect’s Dragon Baccarat software, which allows operators to monitor their casino floor for live game statistics tied to surveillance video and gives them immediate information that protects the integrity of the games. It lets the casino see The Benefits of Openness The United States Playing Card Company has been busy forming value-added partnerships in an effort to augment its Bee-Tek™ Intelligent Electronic Baccarat Shoe The Bee-Tek™ Intelligent Electronic Baccarat Shoe Real feel—Bee® Brand Playing Cards