Tangam attended the second annual ASEAN Gaming Summit in Manila, Philippines from March 20-22. The theme for this year’s summit was Tech Trends, Convergence, Strategy, ROI and many of the educational sessions focused on emerging trends and disruptive technologies.

With over 300 industry attendees, Tangam hosted a panel discussion entitled, Maximizing Yield, moderated by Ari Mizrach (SVP of Operations & Casino Strategy, Tangam) and featured Brad Waldron (Group Head of Table Game Optimization, Crown Resorts), Varun Nayak (SVP of Gaming Strategy, Tangam), Alidad Tash (Senior Vice President of Gaming & Strategy, 2NT8 Ltd) as panelists.

This session focused on how to maximize yield within the casino setting specifically using innovative technology.

Yielding table games on the casino floor is the science of offering the right product at the right price at the right time to enhance the player preferences and maximize revenue while minimizing operational costs. With fluctuating demand every hour and every day, multiple games, price points, areas, dealer start times, maximizing yield for table games is complex.

The panel began with a presentation from Alidad. He walked the audience through a real-world example of how betting minimums, game pace, and preferred experiences have a profound impact on casino profitability and Hold%.

Brad then discussed how Crown Resorts have been sensors for automated data collection as well as the pros and cons based on their experience.

The discussion moved to yielding and Varun argued that the goal shouldn’t be to maximize yield from players but rather to segregate demand based on willingness to play table games at a price so that the casino can make appropriate trade-offs.

Varun also gave the example of the hotel industry. It’s a given that there is more demand on the weekends than weekdays and therefore, patrons can expect to pay more for the same room on those days. When there are table or labor constraints based on the demand, casinos are able to prioritize the availability of seats to the most valuable segments by yielding. This enhances the patron experience as well as improve the casino’s bottom-line.

Ari posed a question to each of the panelists: What is the biggest sin when it comes to yielding? Each of the panelists spoke to a different point, whether about patron experience, changing table minimums, educating floor staff, understand patron value and what that means for the casino when trade-offs must be made.

Alidad: the biggest sin is not changing table minimums on the fly. It’s not like a bus where the more, the better. It’s important to yield based on trends and the demand of the floor to provide the right experience for patrons.

Brad: educating the floor staff to understand how yielding works. At Crown, the floor staff will receive notifications to change the floor in real-time. They should understand yielding in order to take the information they’ve received and based on their gut feeling, determine what should be applied and in what manner. We don’t want them making changes blindly but to fully know why they’re making the changes and what is appropriate based on the current conditions.

Varun: confusing traffic for profit. A busy casino isn’t necessarily the most profitable. If you don’t offer the right price to the right people, at the right time, there is a huge opportunity cost, particularly for high-value players. If they leave because they can’t find a seat or they don’t have the right experience, trying to get them back is a losing proposition and your acquisition costs go up considerably. The worst part is that this doesn’t show up in your data and they would probably be shown as a low value player, not because they would give a small share of their wallet, but that they weren’t able to.

Finally, the last question of the panel, Varun spoke to what the biggest challenges faced by casinos today are and how they should go about addressing them. He centered around the difference between data and information to decision making. There is so much technology that is producing reports and providing a lot of data — but what should you be doing with it? The challenge isn’t getting the data, but being able to know what the right decisions are and when they should be executed.

If you would like to learn more about yielding management, check out some of Tangam’s available resources such as the blog and Tangam Academy. Stay tuned for more videos posted from the panel.

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