RFID in Casino Chips: Tracking your every move.

[Zeno]

Casinos Bet On Radio-ID Gambling Chips
The Wall Street Journal 05/13/05
author: Peter Sanders
(Copyright (c) 2005, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

The blackjack tables at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino here were packed with gamblers and casino voyeurs on a recent weekend. But in the Peacock Lounge -- the casino's high-limit blackjack room, with minimum bets of $100 a hand -- the casino enjoyed an added advantage to its already stacked odds.

The reason involves a high-tech chip within a chip that is helping the Hard Rock learn more than ever about every move made by the high rollers. Computer chips embedded in the plastic gambling chips communicate via radio frequency with sensors placed under the felt table. The technology gives the casino's operators a trove of knowledge -- everything from a player's average bet to where each high-denomination chip is at all times.

The new chips are based on the much-publicized radio frequency identification technology. RFID has been in the news as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has adopted it, tracking products from its suppliers' factories to warehouses and onto store shelves. The technology is also widely used in aerospace and health care to keep tabs on supplies.

Until recently, RFID had been cost-prohibitive for widespread use at casinos. Three years ago, a single RFID casino chip cost about $6.25. Today, that number is closer to $1.25, versus about 70 cents for a regular casino chip.

It's a price casinos like the Hard Rock and, most recently, the brand new Wynn Las Vegas, are increasingly willing to pay. In addition to being able to track more players closely, the high-tech chips offer protection against both chip theft and counterfeiting.

Casinos have long had the ability to watch players with video cameras and closely monitor slot-machine use, thanks to "frequent player" cards that are inserted into machines, but table games have been more elusive. "The most important thing from our perspective is being able to accurately capture people's play," says Kevin Kelley, Hard Rock's president and chief operating officer.

In the past, casinos have relied on pit bosses and dealers to continually estimate how much gamblers were wagering, which in turn enabled the casinos to figure out about how much a customer spent overall, and what level of discounts and freebies he or she was entitled to. With RFID, the chips are automatically scanned at each bettor's position, and the data are displayed in real time on a personal computer behind the table visible to the dealer and pit bosses -- thus eliminating the human guesswork.

The Hard Rock has been testing a player-tracking system developed by Las Vegas-based Progressive Gaming International Corp. for the past two months or so. The system counts the number of chips each player has before a hand is dealt, and quickly disseminates a number of factors about a player's habits and fortunes. Officials can soon know exactly what the player is "worth" to the casino.

"Knowing what someone is worth to our casinos is very important so we can provide incentives and offers based on this information," Mr. Kelley says. The offers, freebies and direct marketing promotions that land in a player's email inbox or home mailbox are predicated on this information and can vary greatly between two people sitting next to each other at a high-stakes table.

Meantime, unless they are particularly savvy, or they think to ask, players don't know they are being so closely tracked from hand to hand. On the surface, the RFID chips appear no different from ordinary casino chips -- no mean feat for those who designed them.

"It took so many years to make a chip that was exactly the same as a nonembedded chip," says Gerard P. Charlier, president and chief executive of Gaming Partners International Corp., one of the world's leading chip makers, with U.S. operations based in Las Vegas.

Mr. Charlier cites the "astronomical cost" and the exacting standards expected by both players and dealers as particular hurdles that had to be overcome. "The key for dealers and players is the feel of the chip and when we tested them in Europe, casino dealers sent us back to square one more than once," he says.

The first RFID chips in North America made their debut in 1996 at a casino in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. "At the time, each chip cost $6.50, but the Canadian casino was willing to pay it," Mr. Charlier says.

Casinos in Holland also were using the technology. RFID became more common in Europe in 2001 as casinos across the Continent were forced to convert chips to the euro. RFID also trickled through Indian casinos in California, Minnesota and Louisiana and is expected to ride the wave of gambling's expansion in Asia, specifically in Macau.

To date, Gaming Partners International has sold about two million RFID chips, a fraction of the 18 million chips the company sold just last year world-wide. The RFID chips have a life span of about 10 years, and casinos see them as an "investment product," Mr. Charlier says, not something that will need to be constantly replaced.

The chips are embedded with microprocessors made by Philips Semiconductors; each has a unique serial number. Radio antennas strategically placed throughout the casino can track the location of individual chips as they move from the vault to the cashier's cage, onto the casino floor and as they arrive at specific tables.

Security, people in the industry say, is why Wynn Las Vegas chose to purchase RFID chips en masse from GPI. RFID can tell casino operators when chips are removed from the property, or, more importantly, can help them weed out fakes during manual counts.

Officials at Wynn Las Vegas declined to comment on RFID or other aspects of the new casino's operation, but people with knowledge of the details say that all high-denomination chips in the casino are outfitted with the technology and the company is waiting to decide which player-tracking system it will invest in.

The technology behind these systems is moving rapidly. Progressive Gaming's current system takes about seven seconds to read through 100 chips and a tracking-equipped table retails for about $8,000, says Tim Richards, vice president of development. But through continued innovation at both Progressive and Las Vegas-based rival Shuffle Master Inc., coming systems will be able to read an entire table of chips in about 0.2 second -- literally the blink of an eye. "Even two or three seconds to read 100 chips is too slow," says Mr. Richards.

Shuffle Master plans to unveil its player-tracking system in September. Kirsten Clark, Shuffle Master's director of marketing, says the company is building a system "to take RFID to the next level" as the biggest casino players in the game are slowly starting to climb aboard.

.

[Luv2DriveTT]

I have been tracking this technology for the past 6 months or so, this will change the way we play poker as well.

1) Comps based on wagering amounts for the first time ever

2) Ability for the dealer to know the pot size instantly

3) Speed in Pot Limit games will increase, and therefore the popularity of this format of the game.

4) The ability to track betting patterns for research

5) And this is my least favorite of them all. Eventually the IRS will get hip to this idea and ask for data.

TT [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]

[tylerdurden]

[ QUOTE ]
1) Comps based on wagering amounts for the first time ever

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't see this happening. They're not going to be getting more rake, therefor they aren't going to increase the comps for any poker players. I guess it's *possible* they might comp a maniac that plays every pot a bit more than a rock that never plays a hand, but the difference would be small.

[ QUOTE ]
4) The ability to track betting patterns for research

[/ QUOTE ]

Why would they spend time and money researching this?

I don't see how any cardroom can justify the expense of the equipment right now. The stuff is just too pricey, and they get close to zero direct benefit from it.

[tek]

[ QUOTE ]
I have been tracking this technology for the past 6 months or so, this will change the way we play poker as well.

5) And this is my least favorite of them all. Eventually the IRS will get hip to this idea and ask for data.

TT [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

As if the cashier can't write down the chip count after counting it?

[gilper]

</font><blockquote><font class="small">En réponse à:</font><hr />
4) The ability to track betting patterns for research

[/ QUOTE ]

Why would they spend time and money researching this?

I don't see how any cardroom can justify the expense of the equipment right now. The stuff is just too pricey, and they get close to zero direct benefit from it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Betting pattern research is casino jargon for tracking the bet spread of suspected blackjack card counters. It has nothing to do with poker.

[tylerdurden]

[ QUOTE ]
Betting pattern research is casino jargon for tracking the bet spread of suspected blackjack card counters. It has nothing to do with poker.

[/ QUOTE ]

Right. I definitely see how RFID will be +EV for the casinos in pit games. I was specifically talking about in the poker room since that's what TT prefaced his post with.

[Zeno]

[ QUOTE ]
Security, people in the industry say, is why Wynn Las Vegas chose to purchase RFID chips en masse from GPI. RFID can tell casino operators when chips are removed from the property, or, more importantly, can help them weed out fakes during manual counts.




Officials at Wynn Las Vegas declined to comment on RFID or other aspects of the new casino's operation, but people with knowledge of the details say that all high-denomination chips in the casino are outfitted with the technology and the company is waiting to decide which player-tracking system it will invest in.


[/ QUOTE ]


Anyone want to do the over/under, in years, before every casino chip in a poker room has a RFID embedded in it? Cost, I think, is the only prohibitive to implementing this wholesale.

-Zeno

[tylerdurden]

In a poker room? 10 years. In casinos with pit games? Probably more like 5.

[wacki]

[ QUOTE ]
Anyone want to do the over/under, in years, before every casino chip in a poker room has a RFID embedded in it? Cost, I think, is the only prohibitive to implementing this wholesale.

-Zeno

[/ QUOTE ]



Some stuff

Alien Technology, Matrics and others are now pushing the cost of the microchip down to a level that many people thought we wouldn't see for many years. If those chips are ordered in the billions, the price will fall even lower. But squeezing the size of the silicon alone won't save enough to get the cost of a tag down below five cents. The coiled metal antenna still cost a few cents. Attaching it to the chip costs a few cents, and creating a label costs a few cents.

But now we have companies attacking those costs as well. Ink makers are working on conductive inks that could reduce the cost of printing antennas on packages to next to nothing. Conductive inks have been around for a long time. Acheson Industries, for instance, has been making silver, silver-coated copper, carbon and graphite inks for more than 50 years. For the past few years, it has been supplying silver inks to the RFID and smart card industries for printed antennas.

But makers of conductive inks are now researching formulas that can be used in standard rotary screen, rotogravure and flexographic applications. We recently ran a story about Flint Ink investing several million in the research and development of new conductive inks (see Flint Bets on Printed RFID Antennas). And last week we ran an article on a company called Parelec, which has developed an ink that it says is three times more conductive than conventional conductive inks (see New Ink for Printed RFID Antennas).



Some More Stuff

WAL-MART AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, two huge participants in the global supply chain, are requiring their top suppliers to begin using RFID by 2005 and the rest of their vendors to do so by 2006.

The price will be dropping quickly.

[limon]

track your avg. bet for comps wouldn't there be a way to place and remove chips from the layout in order to fool the system into thinking your avg bet is larger than it is? like sliding out some blacks while the dealer is shuffling then moving back to green...how would the layout know it wasnt an actual bet?