T
SHUFFLE MASTER’S iTABLE
here’s a lot of electronic gaming product around, and most of it is excellent quality, so it takes something really special to stand out – like Shuffle Master’s iTable, which the company describes as a gambling apparatus. It’s a tool which allows a dealer the freedom to entertain and service your customers, among other things. The benefits of iTable are numerous, as Roger Snow, Executive Vice
President, Shuffle Master, explains. “iTable is a gambling apparatus that combines a real dealer in a real gambling device – be it cards, roulette wheel, or dice for Craps – it’s a real gambling device for automated, or electronic wagering. Instead of using chips to wager you’re using an electronic interface.” As one might expect from a Shuffle Master product, early signs are promising for its
success. Pennsylvania saw its first iTable installs in summer 2010 with several tables in the Parx casino, and California’s Barona casino thinks very highly of the product, not to mention Vegas’s Red Rock. The table has launched with just two games
available, Blackjack and Three Card Poker, though a suite of games is currently in development. Roger continued: “The next game rollout will be Ultimate Texas Hold’em, one of our most popular proprietary titles, and we’re working on Blackjack Switch, one of our newer proprietary titles, plus Roulette, and also Craps. We have a prototype for iTable Craps in the field at Bill’s Casino in Las Vegas. On this you have live dealers, live dice – and electronic wagering.” But Roger’s favourite is Roulette, which we will be seeing in early 2011; he adds: “iTable Roulette is going to be a blockbuster; it’s a derivative of Rapid Roulette, but it takes the same square footage as an existing Roulette table. Live dealer, live wheel, live ball and fully electronic wagering. It means you can double the handle and resolve the bets with 100 per cent accuracy. It will be out early in 2011, and we are very, very excited about it.” The benefits of iTable, interestingly, lie with whichever game the table is being used for.
For example, with games like Roulette, Three-Card Poker, and Ultimate Texas Hold’Em, where there are a lot of wagers that pay off differing amounts, the obvious asset is the
speed of bet resolution. But what about a game which is already quick, like Blackjack? Is an electronic version redundant? Not according to Roger, who maintains that Shuffle Master can now bring a raft of analytical tools to assist the casino through iTable Blackjack. “Most Blackjack payouts are even money, and a dealer can get around the felt very quickly. In Blackjack what we think the value is, is in the information we can provide. We can give the casino a wealth of data they cannot get any other way. With iTable, we can tell them how many games per hour the
dealer is getting out; which side bets are popular, and which are not; and in certain jurisdictions, we can tell the casino how well or how poorly some people play Blackjack. We can suggest when it’s best to raise their limits, and when to lower them, which is simple yield management. There’s a raft of analytical data we can provide the casino to help them run their Blackjack games better.” Roger’s take on the appeal of the table is both simple and, frankly, correct – after all, the
table must simply function as a table, not a novelty item, and players must adopt it as a working table. He concludes: “We don’t want people to love iTable – we want them to not hate it. For example, you don’t go up to a table and play because it’s got a top-grade shuffler on it. We just want them to see the iTable and accept that it’s a Three Card Poker game – we don’t want players to draw any distinction between iTable and a felt table, which is why we spent so much time working on iTable’s appearance. If you look at some previous attempts to make electronic table games, many have failed because people don’t like the presentation – it doesn’t feel right, doesn’t look right, the dealers don’t like it. Fortunately that has not been a problem for us, people do play it and it’s easy for dealers to get used to. But that just gets you in the door; in order for us to stay on the floor and become mainstream worldwide, we have to provide value. With Blackjack it’s become apparent that you’re not going to just pump out a lot more hands and generate a lot more accuracy. So what can iTable provide? All the data that can help the casino optimise their yield on Blackjack.”
www.shufflemaster.com
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