Casino equipment supplier Angel Group has expanded its ‘smart table’ offer to cover the dice-based games sic bo and roulette, using tableside cameras it says capture information that can be analysed via artificial intelligence (AI).
Angel also displayed at last week’s casino trade show Global Gaming Expo (G2E) Asia 2024 in Macau, its smart table offer for blackjack play. The dice-games smart tables and the blackjack ones, respectively combine radio frequency identification (RFID) technology for chip security, and cameras for AI analysis of functions such as player ratings, noted Angel Macau Ltd president and chief operating officer, Asuka Kurahashi, in comments to GGRAsia.
She stated: “For blackjack, as with other game types, Angel uses a hybrid solution with AI-cameras and RFID.”
“A blackjack smart table is difficult [to develop], especially because blackjack involves complicated game transition like ‘split’, ‘insurance’, and ‘bust’,” explained Ms Kurahashi.
She also noted: “In roulette and sic bo, you can see several cameras installed on the [smart] gaming tables. Because they are bigger [gaming] tables,” relative to other casino games, “and there are a lot of chips on the betting area.”
“So we use several cameras to capture the bet area,” in order to avoid risk of “blind spots”, said the Angel Macau executive.
Angel’s baccarat smart table has two poles – one at each end of the table – for mounting cameras to monitor the action.
Training AI
Variation in lighting conditions on casino floors is a technical challenge for effective use of cameras for AI analytics, said Ms Kurahashi, adding that Angel had tackled this via “training” AI to deal with it.
This related to factors including AI’s recognition – across a variety of lighting conditions – of gaming chip quantity, denomination and manufacturer type.
Angel had already spent “more than 10 years” developing its proprietary combination of AI and RFID technology, and a mathematical framework for “maximising the benefit” of a smart table, Ms Kurahashi said.
At the trade show, Angel also showcased enhancements for the smart tables it already has in the marketplace.
One is the “chip association” function, to be installed in a live gaming floor setting “very soon”. Angel says it can link an individually-tagged chip to a unique player, regardless of whether the player is registered or unregistered – ‘carded’ or ‘uncarded’ in industry jargon.
Ms Kurahashi stated chip association is “important” so that the casino “knows and tracks chip movement history”. That can assist the house in addressing the risk of money laundering by clients, and chip theft, as well as for marketing intelligence such as patron ratings.
Graeme Croft, a former vice president of table operations at Macau casino licensee MGM China Holdings Ltd, mentioned in a G2E Asia panel on smart table technology that in the city’s high-volume and high-intensity market, it is common to have gaming chips passed from one player to another once chips are released from the cage or issued via table buy-in.
Angel’s Ms Kurahashi said that Angel’s ‘Bet Attributor’ function associated with its camera-based monitoring system at tableside can “enhance the accuracy of each player rating”.
She stated: “By recognising the person’s body through human pose estimation, an exact connection to the chips and patron can be made.”
