Casino equipment makers team up

By Liz Benston (contact)

Wednesday, June 15, 2005 | 10:59 a.m.

Three casino equipment makers have formed a partnership in order to develop automatic table game tracking systems more quickly and cost-effectively.

Shuffle Master Inc., International Game Technology and Progressive Gaming International Corp. have struck an agreement that will allow each company to contribute its respective products and sell a combined product to casinos.

The table game systems use RFID technology, which stands for radio frequency identification tags, by embedding chips and cards with microchips. Those microchips are read by computerized accounting systems that track in real time every single hand of cards dealt, every bet placed and every chip won or lost.

Retailers such as Wal-Mart have been experimenting with RFID technology to track products as they travel from the manufacturer to the customer. A number of casinos have tested the technology, which is marketed as a better way to track dealer accuracy, detect potential cheats and dole out comps to players based on how much they gamble.

Gaming companies have been working on such technology for years but no single company had sold a significant number of such products or had created a complete system incorporating both the bet tracking features at the tables and back-office accounting systems, Shuffle Master Chief Executive Mark Yoseloff said.

IGT's system wasn't able to gather data from the tables automatically and in some cases required casinos to estimate some numbers up front, for example, he said. Progressive Gaming's chip-reading technology was only used in a handful of casinos, he added.

"This is a big, complex undertaking," Yoseloff said. "I think it would have taxed the resources of several of the companies involved, not to mention the fact that it would be inordinately costly for everybody to be doing what was essentially the same engineering."

Shuffle Master makes automatic card shufflers, card reading shoes and card and chip sorters for casinos. IGT is the world's largest maker of slot machines and Progressive Gaming, formerly known as Mikohn Gaming, makes RFID technology including chip tracking.

Under the agreement, IGT and Progressive will develop RFID technology through patents that Shuffle Master owns. IGT recently purchased a half interest in those and other patents.

IGT and Progressive Gaming have struck a separate agreement to blend IGT's accounting system for table games with Progressive's bet tracking technology. The agreement includes a partnership to sell and distribute the systems.

Over the next two to five years, casinos will begin to adopt RFID technology in a bigger way, Yoseloff said, eventually becoming "the norm."

"This was like how card shufflers were in their infancy," he said. "It took some years for them to be accepted."