Casinos Watch Employees and Players Through RFID

Filed in archive Sports on January 24, 2005

Shuffle Master recently purchased two RFID-related patents for $12.5 million. Shuffle Master provides gambling supplies to casinos.

An article in Gambling Magazine illustrates how RFID will be used in casinos:

'So how do RFID-enabled chips and tables work?

"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 Mr. 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."

But not only does RFID allow casinos to track players, it also can track employees.

"You have an executive host hanging out with a big-time gambler who might lose $1 million a year. Say he gives the executive host a $500 tip. Most casinos don't allow executive hosts to accept tips."

Another example: "If a dealer during a shift change tries to leave the table with a $100 chip, he'd be caught," said Mr. Meyer. "Every chip has a unique serial number, which is tied to the player card. If I don't have a player card, it's difficult to associate an RFID chip with me, but a very high percentage have player cards," he added. If the player doesn't have such a card, he would simply give the dealer his first name and last initial before buying the chips and they'd be tied to him in that fashion.'

Link via Boing Boing.