October 7th, 2009
We have always been fascinated by the rise (or relative lack thereof) of even moderately advanced networked gaming in the casino industry. From our perspective, there is such a huge disparity between the games that people can play online and what they can play in a casino that it is almost laughable. Today, via Vegas Chatter, we see another report of virtual games in casinos. And, like the others before them, we really wonder who is designing these games – as the article notes, digitizing a dealer is not an innovation likely to attract players. Does anyone in the gaming industry play WoW, WII…?
Creepy or cool? A virtual blackjack game.
Recreational gamblers know and love table games because they offer the opportunity to profit while interacting with a human dealer. Perhaps this is why a bunch of new electronic table games have bettors concerned.
The latest bunch of games “virtualizes†the gambling experience, replacing real felt and real cards with computer screens and electronic images. In many cases, the newfangled devices also replace human dealers all together.
Case in point: the new Table Master Blackjack machines from ShuffleMaster. Caesars Palace is piloting two of these machines near the Pussycat Dolls pit. The benefit: Table limits are as low as $5 per hand, by far the lowest in the casino. The downside: the virtual dealers are a little creepy, and have no personality beyond that with which they’ve been programmed.
During a recent visit, players reported frustrations with these games, and wondered aloud just how well they could “trust†a virtual dealer at all. Las Vegas is no stranger to electronic table games—the poker rooms at MGM Grand and Excalibur have featured PokerTek electronic poker tables since last year, and virtual roulette tables have existed in a number of casinos since 2006.
Prevalence of these games may be on the rise. Because almost all electronic table games work off random number generators, the electronic iterations fall under the purview of slot departments. This comes in handy for casinos since most slot departments already have technicians who are trained to maintain games of this nature.
Another benefit for the casinos: electronic table games play more hands per hour, which means more profit for the gaming companies.
Personally, we’re not a fan of this new generation. For this gambler, there’s nothing like the sound of cards coming out of a shoe and the feeling of a stack of chips as it grows over the course of a night.
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