Gaming Key
Your Casino Chips Reveal All About You
Every casino player knows about the common security safeguards: the pit bosses, house detectives, surveillance cameras, even the "eye in the sky" hidden behind one-way mirrors. For over two years now, however, playing chips with RFID tags embedded have given cheats, chip forgers, counters and conniving dealers one more thing to fear.
The trick lies with RFID tags or transponders. These stand for "Radio Frequency Identification". The most widely-used type is passive, a silicon chip and minuscule antenna. Theoretically, these could be embedded in animals and even humans.
Because it is very hard for the layman to read and duplicate the embedded information, RFID tags have also been adapted to make tamper-proof employee security ID's, passports, speed up toll road payments, track products and livestock in the supply chain, and books in libraries.
At the very least, the kind of RFID-tagged chips introduced by casino owner Steve Wynn in 2005 should stop counterfeiters in their tracks. Figures are hard to come by but chip counterfeiting seems to be a growing problem internationally.
The Nevada Gaming Commission chief of enforcement, Keith Copher, comes across an even dozen complaints each year. In 2004, a Reno casino reportedly lost $26,000 to a counterfeiting gang.
It is a relatively straightforward programming task to let dealers, players only poker and casino cashiers immediately know that the chips they handle contain fakes since the scanner total would not match the physical count.
Keeping a serial number record of chips received on credit by one person and cashed by another would also enable casinos to put a stop to this practice. There is a reason, after all, why pit bosses and floor managers carefully screen players to whom they grant credit.
Thirdly, the technology could catch in real time players who habitually sneak extra chips onto their betting pile after the hand is dealt. It also thwarts the dishonest dealer who connives to overpay a winning player, a problem occasionally observed overseas. The cost to install a reader and video terminal at each table, as well as antennas under each player's place, has been estimated at $8,000.
Yet a fourth application is generating a scatter plot in real time of the amount bet versus the count at the time the bet was made so as to detect a card counter right in the middle of a "hot shoe". So RFID chips could conceivably enable them to ask a card counter to stop, transfer tables or leave the casino much earlier than using other countermeasures. More positively, casinos now gain an automated and accurate way of rating their high rollers and heavy-spending "VIP's".
Since a centralized server could tally what such players lose in real time, the casino could then hand out the appropriate "comp" - a room night, dinner chits, a limo, show tickets, extended credit just as a player runs out - with complete confidence. Previously, such tallies were done by hand and they were prone to both honest errors and collusion, especially when the players moved from table to table. Consequently, casinos frequently found out they had "overpaid" anywhere from 20% to 30% relative to what a recognized "VIP" had actually spent at the tables.
Even better, the more aggressive and pro-active casinos have a tool to detect new players and otherwise anonymous faces who lose rapidly enough to deserve comps. All these in the name of keeping the big spenders coming.
In fine, playing chips embedded with passive RFID chips help casinos cut losses due to forgery, cheating, collusion and errors in calculating the complimentary rewards given to heavy-spending high rollers.