The World Game Protection conference ended Wednesday with a focus on new technologies and a push for casinos to go chipless on table games.
Las Vegas-based Dallmeier Electronic USA, Inc., which supplies the casino industry with surveillance technology, announced a new analytic product to protect blackjack games. It will be introduced to a yet-to-be-determined Las Vegas casino in the next six months.
“I will be ready to do proof of concept with blackjack at a property and in order to do this you have to sit down with the property and ask, ‘What do they want to get?’” said Dallmeier President Joe McDevitt. “Do you want ratings or surveillance? There are so many options that are so customizable. I think any property that has more than 20 table games is a candidate.”
Dallmeier has installed similar technology over the last three years in Macau on 1,100 tables to protect baccarat. The firm showed off the blackjack technology at the conference’s expo at the Tropicana Las Vegas by running hands and demonstrating results.
“It can recognize cards. It can recognize suits and what card is being played, and it can also interface with a smart shoe, McDevitt said during an educational session on casino video analytics and artificial intelligence. “If you’re using a smart shoe that’s reading the cards coming out, we can use that to improve the performance results of it.”
The system recognizes chips so when it’s looking at the table from an overhead camera or side camera, it can count the denomination of each chip and each position being bet, McDevitt said. It can interface with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips as well to improve the accuracy.
“Currently, the accuracy rate (in the chip rack) from the overhead camera is 99 percent and position bet is about 90 percent without RFID,” McDevitt said. “While it’s not completely bullet proof, it’s fairly reliable to give your fairly accurate data coming off the table rather than a rating system of a floor supervisor looking and writing down what they think is being bet. If the table is down, we know somebody is cheating so we have to look at that table and that tape. It can find payoff inaccuracies and alert surveillance.”
The technology incorporates facial recognition to see if someone bought in for $1,000 and cashed out for $100,000 and only played a $5 blackjack game.
“We can automatically comply with anti-money laundering,” McDevitt said. “That helps monitoring and pace of play and overall inventory on the game all helpful for operations. In marketing, the big deal here is it rates you, so I know what each position is betting and more accurately calculate what comps are and what their loyalty is.”
The demo showed an overhead high-resolution and high definition camera on the table. It has two pole cameras on either side of the table that can be installed in existing signage.
“An analytic is going to say if this table is losing money,” McDevitt said. “We’re not in the business of losing money. If it’s losing money, there’s a reason why. It could be somebody’s lucky, but usually somebody’s cheating so we need go look at that table. To do that now, you need to get a report from a floor supervisor, or an operator had to be really watching that game to see what was going on.”
During another seminar on technology, Willy Allison, founder of the World Game Protection conference, said he would like to get rid of chips on table games for protection.
“There are number of game protection reasons and there’s comping,” Allison said. “I can’t believe in 2019 we give back millions of dollars all over the world to our customers by guessing how many chips they’ve been playing.”
Allison talked about electronic transactions like a debit card or Apple Pay. People won’t face the risk of being robbed if they win because no one will know if they won or lost if they don’t have to cash in chips.
“The reason I think we’re at a tipping point is anti-money laundering,” Allison said. “I believe if we got rid of chips, we could have some serious video analytics going on our tables. One of the indications of card counting is the bet spread of the player.”
Allison said 90 percent of the transactions in the U.S. are digital and the industry needs to “clean up its act and stop kidding ourselves that our marketing systems are accurate.” It would help prevent collusion between players and dealers because it would track if someone keeps following a dealer, he said.
“All of this technology would help in detecting collusion,” Allison said.
Darrin Hoke, vice president of operational protection at L’Auberge in Lake Charles, Louisiana, said table games are dealing with the same opposition casinos experienced in the 2000s when ticket-in-ticket-out was introduced to for slot machine play, eliminating coins.
“That’s the Holy Grail of table games,” Hoke said.
McDevitt said if there was a move to chipless tables, that would still have to be done electronically.
