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Shuffle Master
Roger Snow, Senior Vice President of Products at Shuffle Master, speaks frankly to Casino International about his role in the company and exactly what his role entails – and the future for the company's table games…
Working as Shuffle Master's primary developer of table games, Roger Snow has quite a responsibility. The creator of popular specialty table games like Ultimate Texas Hold'Em, Four-Card Poker and many more, he's partly responsible for 1,100 tables and 15 different games being played successfully worldwide. His job, in short, is to come up with game ideas that will make money for you, the operator. His remit has broadened since joining the company in 2000, as he became Senior Vice President of Products mid-2007.
Roger recently spent some time with Casino International's Jon Bruford for a chat…
Casino International: Where are the ideas for table games and innovations and side bets born? Is that something that comes from you? How do you work?
Roger Snow: Typically, I sit down with a deck of cards and try and think of something that hasn't been done before. A lot of people look at this and say well, you're in the shower and you've got an idea and you'll write it down, but it doesn't happen that way. A lot of game creation is just sitting down and playing, dealing cards out over and over again and eventually something will click that you follow until it leads to a dead end. But then, something else will click, and you just keep following these little clicks of inspiration until at the end you come up with something.
I’ve always found the game development process analogous to writing, with the hallmark of good writing being when you read it, it appears to have come right off the top of the head because it flows beautifully and smoothly, but in reality it is the result of numerous revisions, edits and restructuring. This is completely analogous to how I develop a game because often it ain't pretty, it is a lot of mess and there's a lot of blood on the walls after it’s done.
The favourite game I’ve developed is UltimateTexas Hold'Em which took three months to develop because we just could not get it to work mathematically and we didn't want to duplicate what had been done before. The only game I’ve ever done that was relatively easy was Dragon Bonus which is a side bet for Baccarat. I literally sat down and said "I'm going to do a side bet for Baccarat", and within 20 seconds I had the idea. Everything else has taken a lot of time and effort, and often a lot of failure. For every game of mine that has succeeded, there are probably two or three games that have failed in the market and ten or 20 others that never even made it that far. With Ultimate, I had developed four other hold'em games before that and they all stunk, but you just kept trying and eventually you find something worthwhile.
I can't speak for others that do this for a living, but for me it would be easier if the games were the result of some brain inspiration—it would cut out a lot of pain and anguish. But typically it involves a lot of perspiration over inspiration, and it's not a fun process as such.
CI: What’s the journey for taking the game from the basic idea, to the finished idea, to the casino floor?
RS: Once the game concept is complete, other pieces like the mathematical analysis and game artwork have to be completed. Because I’m not capable of mathematically analysing these games even though I've got a pretty good feel for where games fall in mathematically from having played, I work with our math guy to conduct the math analysis. For Ultimate, he and I went back and forth for a month on the math because it's not as simple as making a game that players would like; you have to contort it so that the house has an advantage, which in that game in particular was not easy to do without destroying the game.
Once the game math is finished there is a pretty quick process internally of designing a game logo and layout which we do here [in Las Vegas], and when that's done and you file your patent, take care of all the loose ends, and the game is marketable. Then you put on a good pair of walking shoes and you go out and start banging on doors.
There’s no secret formula and no shortcut. For every new game that we've launched and everybody else out there that has launched, there are a lot of guys out there doing the same thing.
I’ve been developing games for seven years, and not once have I ever picked up the phone and had a casino guy on the other end saying "Hey, have you guys got any new games? I’m really interested in something brand new that no one's ever seen before". It doesn’t happen that way. Casinos typically shy away from new games, so they're not going to ask for them. You have to go out and present the new games and hopefully you're convincing enough to get them to take the game, and it's a grind.
Take Ultimate Texas Hold'Em for example. It’s the fastest growing new game we've ever had, and it took us two years to get to 200 tables installed and that was by far a record. Four Card Poker took us a year to get two tables, but now Four Card Poker has over 300 installed tables. It's not easy to get people to take something that's new and unproven, so you just simply do that with hard work and pitching the game enough times so that somebody takes it. The second install becomes easier, and the third one easier still because they can ask you where it is installed and how it’s performing. And, once you've got 60 or 70 installs, the game has momentum on its own. But getting from zero to ten, 20, it’s a back breaker.
CI: Once you can say, "It's in the Mandalay", it becomes much more attractive…
RS: Exactly. We were fortunate in that regard with Ultimate, especially in Nevada. I think our first install in Nevada was in The Mirage. Once you get in Mirage, that carries quite a bit of weight. A few times the games have just flat out failed: you get it to ten or 12 installs and they all start coming out, it's happened more than I wish to recall. But it takes a while before you know the game is a success. The first year you don't know, it could be a passing fancy, people might try it, might not. It takes a good two years before you know if the game is really going to be a lasting success. Failures are easy to spot; you put a couple games in, they come out.
CI: It's a hard business then, but when you get it right it must be a great feeling.
RS: This business is great, it really is. You start with an idea, you patent it, you trademark the name, and you put this all on a felt, and go out there and that's what you've got. For new table games, there’s an extremely low barrier to entry, and with a successful game like Ultimate Texas Hold'Em or Four Card Poker it might cost ten thousand dollars to develop, but you could make millions. The flip side of that? It’s very easy for anybody to do this. There are easily a hundred other developers out there right now with new games trying to sell them, but usually over ninety nine percent of them will fail because it's very difficult to capture the attention and the loyalty of a table games player.
In my opinion there have probably been only about 15 successful games developed to date even though there have probably been over 10,000 invented with only about 10% of those even making it out onto the casino floor. The successful games are the ones that make maybe half million dollars a year or more for the owners. Very few of these games will make any kind of a dent, and most of the power is consolidated in the top five, top ten big games that everybody knows. That's what I love about developing table games; it's relatively easy to do but very hard to succeed at.
That's why you've got to try hard: you have to try something new, try something different, push yourself. You can't just say "I’ve got a game; you take three cards and add them up, and if you get a higher score than the dealer you win. If you don't you lose". I deal with a lot of inventors and I’ve got almost no tolerance for people who develop games like that. I like the guys that even if they've overdone it, at least they've thought of something creative and haven’t just burped out a couple of cards and created a pay table like there's nothing to it. Think of something original, please.
CI: How does this work as a financial model? I'm assuming the games are leased rather than sold, and you [Shuffle Master] take a royalty or rental payment. What kind of deal do you do to get a game into a casino in the first place? Presumably incentives are important.
RS: Typically on a new game we'll offer a free trial because we understand that the casino is taking a leap of faith on the game and so we make it easier for the casino to put it in. Usually we’ll give them a free trial for a few months and reduce our pricing for a few more months after that. This is what I call ‘greasing it in’, because we know it is an investment for the casino since they're going to have to take a game off the floor that is already making something and are going to have to train their dealers and their floor supervisors and surveillance operators to offer the game, and that has a value associated with it. So there's a fair amount of commitment from the casino to put a new game on the floor, and it’s important that we make it worth their while. In my opinion, this is the only way you're going to successfully roll a new table game out, because if you've got a new game and you go out at full price right away, you've got no chance.
CI: What's the process when a game fails? Do you look at things like table position, dealers, any problems the game might have encountered and all the possible variables?
RS: When we hear a game is failing, especially a new game, we’ll ask questions to try to identify what the issues are. For example, is the game not holding enough, not winning enough; is it a game that no one's playing, is it confusing, are the dealers making mistakes. When we hear a game is not working, we’ll investigate why.
We had a game recently that was going to come out of a casino in Detroit, and after further investigation we discovered that dealers were making mistakes which were causing the game to have a very low hold percentage. Even though it was getting good play, it was only holding about five or six percent which didn’t make sense based on the amount of time the game had been on the floor. So, we started asking questions and had the casino pull some surveillance tapes and within five minutes of viewing the tapes realised that the dealers were making the same mistake over and over, and once the mistakes were corrected, that solved the problem.
Sometimes a game will have what I call internal bleeding, where everything’s fine on the outside but on the inside the game is dying. This has happened to me unfortunately more times than I wish to admit, but when a game starts to show a pattern of poor performance, you’ve got to stop the fight. I’ve thrown the towel in before: one of my favourite games of all time went into two casinos and only lasted about six weeks in each of them so I chose not to offer it anymore. I don’t want to violate the trust that the casinos have in Shuffle Master with coming up with good games, and I also don’t want to see my idea, something I worked really hard on, just be ignored. Casinos take games out for one reason: they don’t earn enough money. That’s it, they don’t care about anything else. I’ve had games that have failed, and you know why? They failed because they weren’t good enough, end of story.
When I started in this business, someone told me that table games players are idiots and will play anything as long as it’s simple which is just not true at all. If it were true, Casino War – which we own – would be the biggest game of all time, but it’s probably fifteenth or sixteenth instead. People like games with a little complexity to them. Sure, there’s a segment of the population that likes simple games, but what I’m seeing more and more, especially in the game arena, is that games with strategy and a little bit of complexity to them are more popular because they create a very interesting gambling experience.
CI: Are there any significant developments looking forward for Shuffle Master for table games? What do you thinks going to be exciting in 12 months?
RS: Without question, no doubt about it, it’s the progressives. We have an initiative underway to add progressive jackpots on all of our table games. We have more than 5,000 specialty table games in the market and it’s our intention to upgrade all of those with a progressive side bet. That’s the goal.
CI: A local progressive side bet?
RS: Yes. We've started installing progressives on Fortune Pai Gow Poker already and already have a bunch of tables in the market. And, we recently introduced a progressive side bet on Royal Match 21 blackjack which we feel will be a big hit. We have two progressive systems that we are marketing; one is a standard progressive like what is used on Caribbean Stud and we also offer a slightly different progressive technology developed by DEQ that has some benefits over the standard progressive system. The DEQ G3 progressive system is more slot like because you don’t actually bet with dollars – you give the dealer money and you get credits on your meter and with the various bets and mystery bonuses, you can win without winning. Those are our two primary progressive offerings that we’re promoting, and progressives are bar none, one of the most important table games initiatives we are undertaking right now. This doesn’t mean we’re not trying to capture new real estate, but that we’re trying to take the real estate we already have and increase the value of it with new options.
CI: It’s an incentive as well for the casinos to have more of your tables, one assumes.
RS: Correct, and that is where this is going. I’ve had people say to me that we’ve got to keep coming up with new games. Why? Fifty percent of the table games market is Blackjack, and we haven’t got that yet so that’s what we’re chipping away at with progressive options. There are casinos that say, "I’ve got to keep a certain amount of my floor Blackjack" – we’ve got to chip away at that. But, if we start coming out with garbage games just to introduce new titles to the market, we’ll fail. There’s a tremendous amount of pressure on us to ensure that this happens the way we want it to happen, which is that we have to come up with ways to gain real estate on these blackjack tables or introduce games that are both better than Blackjack and better than other people's specialty games.
Somewhere in our batch of new games is the next Ultimate Texas Hold'em or the next Fortune Pai Gow, and if it’s not we’ll get another batch going. We’re in this to see the industry change, and it is happening, whether people acknowledge it or not. The industry is changing from a Blackjack model to a Poker model. My theory is that Poker is a language, it’s a beautiful language and you can do anything in it. Blackjack or Baccarat are limited languages, they’ve only got a couple of words, while Poker is like the English language, there are hundreds of thousands of words. It’s not an accident that of the top ten games, nine of them are Poker variations, the only one that isn’t is Spanish 21 which is a Blackjack variation.
