Gambling supplier Shufflemaster announced that they will begin to deploy RFID tags on Casino chips.

The advantages for casinos doing this are manifold. Gambling Magazine reports:

“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.

In conjunction with RFID table tracking, “that literally means tracking player performance at the table and all around the casino,” said Mr. Meyer. “There has been an enormous amount of attention given to this,” he added. “New technology takes time to be adopted and I think it’s very clear that Shuffle Master’s reputation as the leader at deploying technology in the table area” could drive the move towards this new technology. “There has been a lot of buzz. People look at the adoption by Shuffle Master favorably because they know it will be deployed quickly.”

[via boing boing<---the wireless weblog]