A new ingredient is being added to the gaming industry: silicon. Betting chips were usually made of plastic or fired clay, from now on, one can play roulette with silicon chips. Over the past five years, different casinos studied the possibility of adding radio frequency identification tags to the chips. Such chips would transmit information to the dealer’s personal screen, in order to enable tracking the amount of money a player is betting while playing roulette or blackjack. This possibility did not get far, for the RFID chips were very expensive and very slow at transmitting data.
However, Progressive Gaming International has come up with a cheaper and faster betting chip for all the players who cannot wait to play roulette and other casino games with technology-based chips. Instead of $4 a piece, the new chips cost $1.25 and the chips’ data can be read in millisecond instead of several seconds it took a couple of years ago.
It is now possible to play the roulette and other table games at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. Gaming tables with Progressive Gaming International’s chips have antennas installed under the surface. The chips transmit signals to the antennas and the system converts it into information, made of the player’s identity and the amount of his bet, that are being displayed on the dealer’s personal computer. The dealer can then know if the player is a regular customer, entitled to special prizes or favors, or a new customer deserving special attention, an added value of these tech-based chips.
Progressive Gaming International charges its players an $8,000 one-time cost per gaming table. There are other costs which depend on the data used to transmit. The company expects to have 10,000 gaming tables using RFID chips in casinos around the world within the next five years, a quarter of all casino gaming tables in the world.
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