July 10, 2006
Increasing RFID Tag Use in Gaming Chips and Tables
Online casinos may be suffering from legal issues, especially in the United States, but bricks-and-mortar casinos are doing booming business. With such business there's always the chance that someone will try to cheat with counterfeit gaming chips, steal chips, or inadvertently take them to other casinos. Thus, some casinos are realizing the value of using an RFID tag in their poker/ gaming chips.
One of the companies that has benefited from this interest in RFID technology is Gaming Partners International Corporation (Nasdaq: GPIC). GPI operates out of France and formed from the merger of US-based Paul-Son Gaming Supplies and several other companies. A considerable quantity of GPI's orders for RFID and non-RFID gaming chips are coming from Macau, a "special administrative region" of China, well-known for casinos.
Besides security and anti-counterfeiting uses, RFID-enabled gaming chips can also speed up the process of counting the holdings of a player, especially if the RFID tags are short-range. Players immersed in their game may not always have the presence of mind to add up the value of their chips. An RFID scanner could be waved over a stack or even a heaped pile of gaming chips and a total value generated almost instantaneously. At a larger cost, new gaming tables could have built-in RFID scanners, one per seat, including the dealer.
In fact, American company Shuffle Master (Nasdaq: SHFL) purchased RFID patents in 2004 from ENPAT, Inc. related to RFID use in casinos, specifically gaming tables. (Note: GPI has exclusive license to use these patents in the manufacture of RFID gaming chips and readers.) Such gaming tables can also track short-term betting habits, which would be a boon for casinos, always eager to understand their players.
The incredible amount of information that can be gained by data mining betting habits is of great value and interest to both casinos building profiles of average players as well as psychologists studying gambling addiction. RFID technology in this case does not correlate the betting data with player's personal information, thus there is no issue of privacy violation.
It should be noted that RFID use in gaming chips is relatively new, and not necessarily fully embraced yet in casinos around the world. In fact, in the US, according to a GPI representative, it's mostly the Native casinos that are using RFID technology. There are also two different frequencies, 125 Khz and 13.56 Mhz, being used for the RFID tags. This may change, as common standards are eventually agreed upon in the RFID industry
[Additional sources: PR Newsire, Technovelgy, Information Week]
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