There’s less staff required, and electronic table games can bridge the gap between the internet players and the land-based casino players. They certainly have a place in the modern casino, though it’s doubtful that they will ever replace genuine human interaction.

DigiDeal’s product combines the best of all words, and all combinations therein. And they’ve been doing it for a long time – it’s probably fair to say they are at the forefront of the electronic table game’s steady rise.

Casino International: What is DigiDeal’s core product?

Michael Kuhn: It’s the Digital Table System (DTS). Our initial product was called the Digital Cards System, or DCS, and we made some amendments to our intellectual properties and some continuation coverages, and some enhancements to the ability to put other game types on the platform... It’s now called the Digital Table System and it has either real chips, with embedded sensors so it recognises there is a bet, with virtual cards and have a host or dealer, or they can have virtual chips with money in ticket out, or virtual chips and virtual cards still with a dealer or a host. On some of our products, we have an option where you don’t need a dealer or a host and the players themselves can control the flow of the game. We prefer the hosted product of course, we think that the casino should have a little bit of entertainment value and a little bit of hospitality, and the excitement of a live pit and someone hosting the game.

CI: A good dealer or host can really make a table work, after all.

MK: It all helps the ambience of a casino. When I walk into a casino if the crap table has got a lot of noise going and there’s something going on here and there and the pit’s alive, it just feels like a casino as opposed to a slot parlour. We’re a great proponent of having a hosted situation and the productivity is so much stronger. With a host, they can entertain and they can be hired for different reasons – personality and the like, versus the dexterity and the ability to shuffle, for example. It’s interesting because the dealers have no pressure on them from making mistakes and so they’re at ease with the players and, in fact, rooting for the players in a lot of cases.

CI: How long has your product been around?

MK: The company was formed in 1998, when we started the development process and had product in the field in 2001 so we’ve had product in the field for almost six years. We’ve just recently become more commercialised because of regulatory reasons, we had a lot of restrictions on where we could get the product approved. In a lot of cases we had to change the regulatory, or not necessarily the regulatory but the laws of the state. For example, if a law read that cards must come in paper or plastic and wrapped in cellophane and a standard deck of 52, something like that, it now says that cards may come in paper, plastic or digital facsimiles. So we did a lot of work getting our product approved in various states under different rules and regulations. We’ve got a lot of product in Asia and South America because we had the path of least resistance, if you will, to get into the field with the regulatory requirements. Just recently we’ve become approved in more and more states and we’re starting placements in many areas in the US and opening up some new markets internationally as well.

CI: The increased competition in the field, for example the PokerPro table, surely raises the profile of your product as well?

MK: We have a lot of similarities in a product we call our DTS-X, where we offer a very similar product to PokerPro and some of the others that are out there. We open doors for each other as the exposure gets out there. From a product awareness standpoint, we were the only player in the arena for a while and we predominantly focus on the hosted platform, which is different. But we welcome the new technology that’s out there because it’s just more awareness for the old school, traditional, ‘this is how we’ve done it forever’ kind of arena.

CI: So would you say you’ve broken ground for others to follow?

MK: I’m not going to say that this is a revolutionary product, but this is definitely an evolutionary one and someone always is the pioneer, someone always has the early struggles and opens doors for other people and there’s no getting around that. I think we’re fortunate to be in that position because we’ve experienced a lot of things, other than the financial struggles that go along with that and the anticipation of the market share that isn’t coming, and I think it makes us a much more mature company and we have a lot more of that blood, sweat and tears behind us so we benefit from it in the long run. There are definitely situations where people are going to have the opportunity to go in and not have to go through some of the same things we did. It is inevitable that somebody’s go to do that.

CI: Can you tell me more about chips on the DTS – what’s new, for example?

MK: There are three different scenarios there are either live chips without the RFID identification, and there’s virtual chips – where you’re just using virtual chips on the screen – and then there’s the RFID technology, which we are soon introducing on our product. We have not proceeded on that in a fast-paced way because that product itself has been evolving and we have enough issues pioneering this particular platform without introducing another evolving platform. Though we’ve had our opportunities to partner with various entities that have the radio frequency technology, we’ve elected to focus on what we have, then wait until that product matured and the industry was accepting the product and offering it on our platform. We have a relationship where we can that now. So I think in the next 12 months we’ll probably make that offering where you can use either real chips, no chips or radio frequency chips.

CI: When you bring in the RFID angle, do you think it will give the product a boost?

MK: It’s going to be an easier transition. The decision is still out there. The technology is there, we can readily adapt our tables to that technology because we have the computer power to do that. But the transition and the introduction to it on our product will be a lot easier that if we had done it several years ago. We get requests for it but we don’t get total accountability requests. A lot of people are talking about skipping right over the chips right to virtual chips because of a lot of the internet-based players, they’re not really concerned about the touch and feel of the chips. So in some cases you’ll find some areas that’ll skip over that technology and in other areas it’ll be the life blood.

CI: Have you had good feedback from casino staff on the tables?

MK: Well we’ve got some installations where the dealers have had both paper experience of cards and then deal our tables and, not to sound like I’m offering a biased opinion, but we’ve actually had a lot of those folks say they prefer to deal our tables because they’re not as concerned about mistakes. They still have to deal with the chips and they still have to cut checks on the table and that kind of thing, but word comes to the cards and the counting and recounting and different things that they have to do, it’s a lot less stressful and they can be looser and more entertaining. Some of these guys have it down that have been on our tables for a long time, they have their own rhythm and their own style. One of the things we were concerned about was tips and how they were going to get treated in terms of tipping and it’s been strong, very strong. Also, there’s a separate pot that goes to the dealer for tips, which is a very good tool for the house to measure who is performing well and obviously is pleasing to the players.

CI: What’s next for DigiDeal, then?

MK: Had we had the regulatory approvals for our game and for the company to be licensed and all the regulatory areas we would have product in every jurisdiction already. We recently aligned ourselves with IGT to do distribution for us and that will get us in all the regulatory areas and sales and service et cetera, and we’re starting to get a lot of opportunities from that.

It’s interesting, that when the table first goes into a casino it can sometimes be seen as a novelty item, so they put it down as a three- or five-dollar minimum bet table, while their other tables might be $10 or $25. But even so, our table will prove to be one of the most profitable in the casino because of the added speed. It usually comes out as one of the top two or three performing tables in a casino, once players and staff get used to it.

Things are moving along well though – it took us about five-and-a-half years to get to 300 tables installed – and we’ve now got about 300 tables on order.

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