One of the highlights of the recent ICE show in London was Interblock’s Organic range, much of which had raised eyebrows and excited visitors the year before. But a new addition to the range is their G4 Organic Blackjack, an electro-mechanical solution to the perennial casino favourite.
Elektroncek CEO Thomas Zvipelj took the time to explain to Casino International just why this machine is so special.

Casino International: Tell us a little about your mechanical Blackjack machine…
Thomas Zvipelj: It’s a machine with real cards, so it’s a different product to anything else that’s currently available in the market, especially from the video Blackjack products which we also have in our portfolio and also some other companies already have. The unique feature of this one is it uses real cards, or live cards.

CI: There are a few electronic Blackjack games on the market. What are the benefits of your electro-mechanical system over an electronic system? After all, Interblock also offers an electronic system.
TZ: In some jurisdictions, you have what is called an ‘arcade market’ and in those arcades live games are not allowed. So you can only have machines. So those venues are not allowed to have live games – therefore with our products and implementation of those live games we also bring them closer to this market segment.

CI: Are the player stations limited to seven?
TZ: The game itself is a Blackjack; when we implement our transformation of a traditional game into our multi-player machine, we still want to keep all the features and rules of a traditional game. So like traditional Blackjack, this can be played with up to seven players, and you can have up to eight decks of cards. Also, you can double, split and so on, everything is the same as the traditional game.

CI: How does it work, in terms of randomness?
TZ: We have a software number generator that actually randomly chooses the positions of the cards, but once it does that the cards are placed in a deck after they are shuffled, so they’re not touched any more and then the machine is only a physical display of the results of that outcome. So it’s a software-based random number generator with real cards, and once you have cards placed in a deck the machine does not interfere with them any more.

CI: How many hands can this deal per hour?
TZ: Based on our calculations, our machine will be at least as quick as a live dealer.
What is important is the initial shuffle where the players and the dealer get the first two cards – this is at least as fast if not faster than on the live table. I would even say that it’s about 10 to 15 per cent faster.

CI: What’s the cost of the machine?
TZ: The list price is 750,000 Euro, and it’s by far the most expensive machine in the world so far.
But as a company, we are not interested in selling these products. You have some jurisdictions where the casino owner has to also own all of the machines, you cannot have participation or revenue split. So for those markets we will probably also need this strategy. However, it is not our intention to just sell the machine to the owner. What we want to do is also to take part of the risk and to be on, subsequently, part of the long-term profit, and share that risk with the casino owner so that he will basically rent the machine from us. If you want to buy, there is a price tag on the machine and you can have it. However, if you calculate it, it will be even in a total sum much more affordable to disperse this into the monthly revenue share or rentals of the machine.

CI: So there’s real potential for this product…
TZ: It is our estimation that the live Blackjack market is about three to five times bigger based on the live machines that the casinos currently have versus Roulette, so therefore also we are assuming there is big potential for this product worldwide. Also, it is a unique product, at least to our knowledge such a product does not exist at this moment, and it’s another step closer to also implementing a whole new range of traditional casino games, so we started with Blackjack, next project is Poker and Baccarat, where we will be able to use the same platform.

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