Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | 74 G2E ASIA 2013 T he vast majority of casino revenue in Asia derives from baccarat. And with the proliferation of high-rolling Chinese players over the past few years, major casinos in the US and elsewhere are also becoming increasingly reliant on the game. Baccarat is big money, and in order to safeguard the integrity of the games, most of the world’s baccarat tables employ state-of-the- art electronic baccarat shoes rather than regular ones. The biggest supplier of these is Japan’s Angel Playing Cards Co., Ltd, which has shipped around 8,000 of its ANGEL EYE shoes, giving it a roughly 90% share of the global electronic baccarat shoe market. The ANGEL EYE was developed specifically in response to customer requests for a product to prevent “card switching”—a cheating method where a player covertly swaps a live card on the table with a concealed one. Angel began development of the ANGEL EYE in 2002, and the following year released the ANGEL EYE I, capable of not only thwarting card switching, but also reducing dealer mistakes and detecting counterfeit cards. According to Yasushi Shigeta, Angel’s President and CEO, the first generation ANGEL EYE “was designed to be attached onto a normal baccarat shoe. The rank and suit of the dealt cards and the game result was confirmed, and could be shown on an external monitor.” Angel thus paved the way for the development of detailed baccarat results displays, which help feed the appetite for baccarat among Chinese players who look for patterns in the results to predict future outcomes. Angel took the feedback and experience from the first generation shoe to create ANGEL EYE II, released in 2005. “The shoe integrated the card dealing compartment with the central processing unit, and enabled the results to be calculated and displayed through built- in LED lights and an LCD monitor on the same device,” explains Mr Shigeta. “The integration allowed the shoe to become more secure, with no risk of hacking during data transmission, and forgery of game results becoming difficult. “The market response to the ANGEL EYE II was overwhelmingly positive,withmuchfeedbackfromcasinosinformingusthatinstances of card switching decreased dramatically; and miscalculation and mis-payouts by dealers due to wrong interpretation of results decreased dramatically. “The subsequent generations of ANGEL EYE, such as ANGEL EYE II-EX , ANGEL EYE III, etc., added a new security feature called the “Casino Reference Code” function which enables the detection and flagging of any cards with incorrect codes. Currently, most Macau casinos utilize the ANGEL EYE with this function.” Safety First Angel Playing Cards has become the biggest supplier of playing cards to the global casino industry thanks to its leading reputation for protecting baccarat games Game protection— the ANGEL EYE shoe