Great Chips Have Little Chips....

Gambling Magazine reports that Shuffle Master has aquired patents for the use of RFID technology in casino chips, which would enable casino management using the technology to track betting and chip movement throughout the establishment:

"Say I sit down at a black jack table and I have a player's card. I place it and a $100 bill on the table. My card is swiped which places me at that table," explained [Shuffle Master CEO Paul] Meyer. (A player's card is another way for casinos to track frequent gamblers. They earn points on the card for free meals, or other rewards.)

Without RFID, "as I play over time, the only way the casino can estimate the kind of player I am, is by using pit boss estimates. That's a pretty rough estimate. That's where table tracking comes in. Every chip is associated with me and is tracked using a reader. Exactly what I'm betting and losing or winning is tracked automatically. Without tracking, they (casino) don't know what I'm betting." In other words, the reasoning behind RFID utilization is that the casino will know what every player is doing at every table.

"Say you move away from one table with $500 in chips. You now go to cash in those chips. Those RFID chips can be read at the cage and associated with you. In your moment of generosity, you give a cocktail waitress a $25 chip. When she cashes it in, we know how generous a tipper you are."

The article also mentions security applications, such as being able to know when a dealer has covertly palmed and pocketed a chip.

There's another "security" application that goes unmentioned: When you can track players wagers, wins, and losses on a bet-by-bet basis, you can see who wins and who loses over even comparitively short times. The winners will stand out. If a blackjack shoe were to have an optical reader that tracks every card dealt, the house could follow when the card count favored the dealer and when it favored the player. The bet-tracking would be able to correlate player betting patterns to deck quality. It would show that the "drunk" staggering around the casino floor, occasionally making a big bet at a table, was picking out the tables with favorable point counts, tipping management off to the activity of a card-counting team and helping to finger which players were on the team.

"Abdul Jalib" once wrote that he thought that casino managers could make more money by lessening the heat on individual card-counters, most of whom are amateurs and are prone to making expensive mistakes when they get the count wrong. This technology could make this possible while still protecting the casinos from the ravages of coordinated counting teams.

(via boingboing)