The American Table Games and Surveillance program is designed to impart the best and latest information to the Table Games, Surveillance and Compliance sectors of the Gaming Industry so that they may perform at optimum levels moving forward. By combining the most integral elements of what we’ve learned and what we’re going to learn at this conference, all of our operational goals will be in reach. We will discuss much about new technologies gaining footholds in these three vital sectors, with heavy emphasis on Artificial Intelligence, Facial Recognition, IT, and all the new and developing technologies that will safeguard our casinos from criminal and dangerous activity, and also the dangers that these technologies can pose to ourselves.
*Updates coming!*
Michael Chapman will give his points on where we are, where we are going, and where we may fall short. There certainly are advantages of the online presence in gaming, however, it is often lost in modern pursuits of profitability that our industry has been built on and continues to be the human experience. Diving into the advantages and disadvantages that each have, Michael will show how the partnerships and continuity of experiences can keep your properties at the sharp end of the spear in gaming. He will get into the continuous and rapidly increasing technology that drives the societal shift to online gaming, and how to use that to drive your Table Games revenue. Driving home the very real human need for interaction, he will explain his points on how to collaborate with and benefit from the online reach in your Brick and Mortar.
Nick Ippolito is not shy about saying what he thinks. Perhaps that’s why he’s the busiest Player Development trainer and consultant on the planet. And there’s one element that Nick never fails to mention when talking about Player Development or Marketing…and that’s Table Games. If there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s Table Games Depts adhering to ineffective policies vis-a-vis their players. So, he says, “Directors…Marketers, two things you are doing inefficiently with table games players: sending them free play and sending them match play. I encourage you to get creative. Step outta the box and come up with something big. If your casino, state or commission doesn’t allow promo chips, which is ridiculous, what else can you do to stimulate play that is worthwhile to your casinos? What could you send to table games players in lieu of Free Play and Match Play? Well, I have plenty of ideas!” Nick obviously does and more and more TGs executives are listening…Ok, Nick, let’s hear some of those ideas!
In this presentation, Gus will explore requirements and how they are the same and different from traditional Game Protection, and what is needed today for Electronic Game Protection. As the industry becomes more and more electronic, thus more and more vulnerable to Cyber and digital attacks, a series of protective standards and protocols must be maintained in order to protect the integrity of our Table Games, Electronic Table Games, Slot Machines and Kiosks. At the same time, Traditional Game Protection does not go away. Keeping up with those long-established protection procedures is just as important as the implementation of the new and evolving procedures on the Cyber front. Gus has vast knowledge and experience with information and network security and all aspects of IT, which serve his Bulletproof company well and will come to light in his presentation.
Are you familiar with either or both of these versions of Artificial Intelligence? Have you heard how they can help with different segments of your casino operation? Are there drawbacks? Well, Mridula Rahmsdorf is one of the top experts in these usages of AI who work with the casino industry, and she will share her vast knowledge on it with you. As Mridula explains, “Generative AI can uncover new personas and build creative, targeted content and campaigns within minutes. It’s highly effective in augmenting and accelerating traditional methods of marketing segmentation. However, it does not understand the cause-and-effect relationships and the “why” behind customer behavior. This differentiation is key in how causal AI helps casinos set a new standard for customer engagement.”
Instead of looking for correlations and patterns, Causal AI analyzes data by looking for clear evidence of causality. For example, this enables a casino to uncover exactly which customers play baccarat because they are dedicated followers of fate and superstition, not because they like squeezing the cards. Understanding such a correlation allows casinos to adjust their strategy to focus on those players who do like squeezing their cards, and may lead to the placement of more baccarat squeeze games on casino floors. By drilling down to individual motivations within that group, the casino could build targeted ads identifying players who might prefer the EZ baccarat version of the game over traditional baccarat, and then offer promotions tied to EZ baccarat. The key is to identify groups of players’ inclinations and preferences.
The cutting-edge technology provides casinos unprecedented opportunities to understand, predict, and shape customer behavior, which is becoming crucial for competitiveness and success in a shifting landscape. According to Mridula, casinos that rely on Casual AI to deliver the right experience to the right customer at the right moment for the right price, promotion or markdown are the ones that are poised to come out on top.
The Las Vegas shooting on October 1, 2017, was the deadliest mass shooting incident in U.S. history. The tragedy has had a profound impact on the victims, families, and the community. The incident itself tested the strength and resilience of law enforcement and first responders who rushed in to help that day. This session takes you away from a review of the traditional tactical and operational response to a mass casualty event and focuses on the lessons learned from a private sector company perspective. MGM Resorts International was at the center of the Las Vegas shooting. As owners of the Mandalay Bay Resort, as well as the site where the Route 91 Music Festival was hosted along the Las Vegas Strip, MGM was the company in the middle of the response and aftermath. This session takes you into a review of lessons that can assist to better protect and educate your business and key stakeholders if a mass casualty incident occurs. Participants will gain a comprehensive perspective, from processes in place to detect risks and threats, to an understanding of the importance of communication and protecting your brand reputation while supporting the community through a tragedy as part of your business continuity plan.
This round table will highlight the unique challenges and strategies for integrating physical and digital security in the casino and gaming industry. Panelists will discuss how casinos— with their reliance on surveillance, access control, and emerging technologies—are increasingly vulnerable to cyber threats that target these physical systems. Panelists will emphasize the necessity for casinos to adopt a converged security approach, where cyber and physical security teams work together to protect both the gaming floor and digital assets, including customer data, financial transactions, and player rewards systems.
Table Games have certainly been up against in recent times. It’s not just the increase in cheating and advantage play. It’s also the invasion of iGaming, Live Gaming, eGaming, ETG Gaming, Hybrid Gaming and every other letter prefixing “Gaming,” and that’s before we get to the threats from within, mainly ourselves implementing bad policies lacking proper customer service or too much customer service lacking game Protection. Then add to that inattentive and uncaring personnel who are not up to snuff in running their Table Games pits efficiently. So, that’s a mouthful of bad taste but what can we do to refreshen those TGs pits and make them less vulnerable? This team of experts has ideas and suggestions. Listen up!
Richard Marcus has been telling attendees at his on-property game protection training sessions all over North America that they depend too much on the high-technology and let their human brains melt by the wayside. In fact, he says boldly, “I’ll tell you what…I can go out right now and cheat casinos out of more money than I did during my 25-year professional casino-cheating career, when the casinos’ best defense equipment was grainy video images from analog cameras. “I don’t care what they have now,” Marcus says. “You think they’re gonna catch me with AI, FR and RFID? Not a chance! There’s one piece of equipment in my cheating arsenal that beats all theirs. It’s called psychology.” This ex-master casino cheat turned game protection trainer will show you exactly what he means.
We all know that modern-day casinos use cameras, and these cameras are utilized for recording and monitoring all kinds of activities on the gaming floor. In fact, more than likely, the casino floor has more cameras per square foot than any other environment we have public access to. But surprisingly, until quite recently, we have been unable to embed any kind of computer vision or AI to monitor what’s occurring on the casino gaming table. You would think that a place that has had surveillance for hundreds of years is the one place where an AI computer vision model would go first. But it turns out the real world is a lot more complex than an AI model. So, what do we do? Well, we start by listening attentively to Nasr Sattar’s take on this crucial Table Games and Game Protection issue.
Ari Mizrachi: Is yours a casino that protects against advantage players? Are you watching your blackjack and carnival game tables? You are…great! But guess what…more important than that when it comes to Advantage Play just might be watching your slot machines. And we all know that you probably don’t do much of that, right? All this might sound a bit whacky, but Ari Mizrachi, the wizard of analytics in advantage play, will explain it to us.
Matthew Carrier’s mandate in the casino industry is to help casinos protect against internal and external fraud and other financial crime, and there are loads of different kinds of each victimizing both casinos and their players. In this session, Matthew will take us through the always-evolving world of Facial Recognition, which is such an invaluable tool in combatting casino fraud. For starters, ask yourself this: What is the most important element in a fraud investigation emanating from casino activity, be it cheating casinos or laundering money? The answer is: The need to identify who the perpetrators are, and the first step is not usually putting a name to the fraudsters but rather identifying who the person is by being able to recognize his or her face, which is done by analyzing facial features and comparing them to faces already in the database or entering new faces into that database. We will learn how the FR system connects to casino management systems and identity databases to automatically generate alerts for tagged individuals, both VIP players and bad guys alike.
When you work security or surveillance at casino properties, you deal with threats to assets and humans on a daily basis as well as the realization of those threats on a recurring basis. However, the reality is that the majority of those threats turn out to be nothing more than threats. What the ratio of real threats carried out or foiled is to bogus threats is not available here, but we surely know that a slew of false bomb scares, false reports of shootings, false fires and false a-lot-of-other disasters and catastrophes are quite commonplace in casinos and hotels inside casino resort complexes. And the common denominator of these is usually chaos and panic that sometimes turn into real disasters and catastrophes. One obvious example of this is a human stampede of people running frantically away from a perceived danger that does not really exist.
So, when this does occur, security and surveillance personnel have an enormous undertaking of responsibility to protect humans and assets at risk. Taylor May and his distinguished group of panelists take a good hard look at these situations and give their thoughts on how to handle panic situations which bring with them crowd control and other vital issues. The goal here is to help casino resort security and surveillance professionals develop their response operations and training programs to be updated as more knowledge comes into these departments through both real and fake threats.
When it comes to the rapidly growing issue of Cybersecurity for casinos, we have been focusing primarily on what that Cybersecurity is and how it works to keep our casinos as humanly and “cyberly” protected from attacks as possible. With all the elements of the culture of computers, information technology and virtual reality, this becomes a complicated task that must be subject to regulatory measures and standards that protect us from the protection itself. This talk is geared to examine that part of the issue and will help operators, suppliers, and regulators better understand the information security requirements and best practices. Special focus will be placed on Tribal regulations.
Scrolling through your feeds on LinkedIn, you can hardly ever go through a dozen posts without seeing one containing a quote on what it takes to be and stay a good leader. One you’ve seen countless times is “a real leader is not afraid to hire someone smarter than him.” Another is “a good leader is the first to admit he made a mistake and to praise the employee who corrected him.” These examples are all fine and good, but they may also be too often. So, what are the best ways to inspire people to want to perform their best with the common goal of contributing positively to both their operational teams and their own careers? What is the difference between simply managing an operation and effectively leading one? Quay Eady is one of the most well-known leadership and motivational personalities in the casino industry and she will explain this. She has also been a Table Games Analytics Director at MGM Resorts, thus she is uniquely qualified to bring her leadership expertise to the casino executives attending her session.
It’s fascinating how the CSM emerged as a response to the increasing skill of card counters in the early 2000s. With Advantage players using strategies that were undermining the house advantage, casinos had to devise new tactics to protect their profits, and the CSM became a widely adopted tool. By constantly reshuffling the cards, it seemed to eliminate the possibility of counting and thus prevent players from tracking advantageous situations. While it definitely made traditional counting difficult, some players have found ways to still gain an edge. The CSM was, and still is, considered bulletproof and is used in casinos throughout the world. This is a misconception. Advantage players can gain an edge playing on tables using CSMs with certain observation and strategies. Glenn will explain, discuss, and expose the vulnerability of CSMs. And he will also discuss solutions to protect against this vulnerability.
One of the major facets of keeping the Table Games industry intact is the expansion of new casino table games that talented developers introduce to casinos each year. The key to the success of these new games is that they adapt to the changing faces of the Table Games customer base, and by doing so help draw younger players, who otherwise might stick solely with iGaming, into B&M casinos. Our panel of new table games developers will explain how they determine which types of new games casinos need, how they go about the process of developing them, and what it takes to finally get these new table games installed in North American casinos. Then finally, the importance of properly training Table Games Staff once they’re on the floor.
more new table games developers…
Michael Chapman took part in a dynamite round-table session on Table Games at the 2024 G2E. But as an emerging top leader in Casino Operations, he has a keen interest in Game Protection and Surveillance as well, and he spent 3 days at the trade show examining and studying the emerging technologies he saw there. His talk today will focus on his findings vis-à-vis these GP technologies and how proper use of them will enhance the power of humans instead of replacing them. Michael is a firm believer that in the end, it comes down to the working relationship of people with technology rather than their complete dependency on that technology. He will also look into the convergence of Table Games Protection and Player Development/Hosting through the use of technology, and then devote the end of his presentation to explaining why operators need to drive the vendors to offer the products they need and not the products the vendors want to offer, while suggesting that menial tasks be removed from supervisors so that they may perform better in the areas of Game Protection and Hosting.
Chris will take an in depth look at this, detailing instances of such cases, and you will leave the session wondering if your casino workplace is vulnerable.
Details soon
One of the newer buzzwords to hit the casino industry is “influencer,” which means exactly what it spells. This influencer trend is quickly becoming a major player in casino Table Games and Slot Machine Marketing. Much like vendor “integrators” have been doing since that became a buzzword, influencers are showing casino marketing departments new and more personable ways to market their casino play. Be it Table Games, ETGs or Slots, influencers have personalized the components of casino play, giving it a character of its own. One of its facets is introducing Table Games and Slots as group play, showing clips of people gathering around a hot craps table, cheering on the shooters and rooting for the dice. Same in blackjack when the dealers bust out their hands during a hot shoe. Is your casino up to snuff with influencer marketing? Well, after this session, it will be.
Our group of experts coming from Artificial Intelligence, Facial Recognition and other high technologies will let us have it…all of it!
The major difference between the incredible expansion of Artificial Intelligence up until 2022 and its expansion thereafter is that the constantly modifying technologies now carry some very serious threats that go way beyond the big worry that casino staff is going to be replaced by AI robots. During the last few years, we have seen this frightening side of AI rearing its ugly head in our presidential campaigns, showing videos of candidates saying or doing something they never said or did. We’re seeing the ability of AI to create fake, faker and unlimited fakeness. We’re talking about fake images, fake voices, fake scenarios, all of which seem as real as the latest video high-density quality. This misuse of AI technologies can give rise to controversial and provocative video clips and sound bites that can lead to terrorist attacks and war.
But on the other side of the coin are the incredibly positive enhancements to AI and Facial Recognition. With Casual AI, new Facial Intelligence and other developing technologies, we may soon see completely new prototype casinos, the likes of which we may still not be able to imagine right now. Our formidable panel of experts will get into this as well.
During a scrumptious meal, the winners of the “Best New Table Games Contest” will be announced and the champion will deliver a quick speech…Let the best new table game win! And then maybe we can get Paul Mollo and Nick Ippolito to do a little comedy routine!
Program subject to change
Contact to richard@globaltablegamesprotection.com
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