Table game management is the technology that runs a casino's card tables: machines that shuffle the cards, and chips with radio tags that let the casino track every bet on a table and pay it out automatically. It is also called table game tracking, or smart table systems.
At a card table, a casino employee called the dealer deals the cards and handles the chips. Players place chips on marked spots on the table to bet. Without technology, the casino knows very little about each bet. A supervisor watches several tables and writes down rough estimates of how much each regular player bets.
The first tool is the card shuffler. This is a machine that mixes the cards into a random order. It is faster than a dealer, and it cannot be trained to leave the cards in a pattern. Some shufflers also check that no card is missing and that no extra card has been added.
The second tool is the smart chip. Each chip carries a small radio tag, a technology explained in RFID. A reader under each betting spot reads every tag on that spot without touching the chips.
Consider a baccarat table at a casino in Macau, in China, where chips are in Hong Kong dollars. A player places three chips of HK$1,000 each on the spot for the player's hand. The reader under that spot reports HK$3,000. The player's hand wins, and this bet pays one to one. So the system tells the dealer to pay HK$3,000, and the dealer can see the amount on a small screen. The bet and the payout are recorded against the player in the casino management system as exact figures, not as a supervisor's estimate.
Smart chips also catch problems. A fake chip has no valid tag, so the reader rejects it. Chips stolen from the casino can be blocked in the system. At the end of each shift, the chips in the table's tray must match the bets that were lost and paid; if they do not, the system reports the difference. Cameras over the tables add video analytics, which can spot, for instance, a chip added to a bet after the result was known.
The same records support responsible gambling, because the casino can see a player whose bets keep rising. They also feed the house edge figures for each table. Much of this technology is developed by engineers in Delhi and Bengaluru.