Smart-table technology is expanding the number of games casino supervisors can oversee while allowing them to focus more closely on guest service and game integrity, according to Walker Digital Table Systems (WDTS) Asia-Pacific president Graeme Croft.
Smart-table systems now cover virtually all baccarat tables in Macau. Five of the city’s six gaming concessionaires use WDTS technology, while Sands China uses a system supplied by Japan’s Angel Group.
In a LinkedIn article, Croft said the technology’s reliability was no longer hypothetical.
‘The “if” has already been answered,’ he wrote.
Croft spent a decade as MGM China’s vice president of table games and helped oversee its transition to radio frequency identification-enabled tables. He said MGM compared its traditional operating model with a connected-table model in 2017.
The former relied on estimated player ratings, handwritten records, manual chip-tray counts and table-by-table shift reconciliation. Connected tables introduced accurate ratings, automated counts and real-time alerts.
‘We were defining how operations should run once information was captured as play happened in real time,’ Croft said.
Connected tables can record wagers, sessions, buy-ins, payouts, chip movements, game pace, tray inventory and operational exceptions.
‘The supervisor begins with a record of what happened instead of trying to recreate it from partial observations,’ he added.
WDTS technology is installed on more than 5,000 tables across nine jurisdictions, with committed deployments expected to bring the total closer to 6,500, according to Croft. He said operators were already using the systems to process several billion dollars in daily handle.
Croft said the technology could allow the same supervisory capacity to cover more open tables, reducing management costs per table. However, staffing decisions would still depend on the property, gaming-floor layout and service model.
‘A premium room may keep tighter coverage because personal attention is part of the product,’ he wrote. ‘A mass-market floor may choose broader coverage.’
The objective was not to place supervisors ‘behind another screen’, Croft added, but to free them from routine counting and checking.
‘Technology cannot make those decisions,’ he said. ‘It can point to the table that needs attention and provide the record needed to act.’
