“The player first creates the drop and then management must deal as many hands as possible during this window of opportunity that the player has afforded the casino.”

--Jim Kilby, Boyd Professor of Gaming UNLV

For table games operations, Rounds per Hour (RPH) represents a zero-sum game between time and money. To achieve gains on the money side of the equation, time must be subtracted from dealing for each round of play as much as possible. Conversely, adding time, prolonging the duration of each Round per Hour dealt, will diminish the monetary gains.

A savvy operator needs to empower their team to understand the financial impact that can be created with just a few extra rounds per hour. For a typical North American casino, managing to speed up the game by ~4 extra RPH, or dealing faster on average by less than 10 seconds per round, can amount to millions in incremental gross gaming revenue!  

In this blog, we will explore the simple math that any operator can apply and provide suggestions on Baccarat game efficiencies that can help a gaming operator to gauge performance improvement. As an added bonus, we've provided a tool that you can use to reproduce these scenarios using your own operational data. So, let's get started and discover how to increase gaming revenue.  

Money

For a typical North American Baccarat operation, dealing one extra hand per hour will amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars at the end of the year.

To help illustrate our point, we've used data from a North American casino with 7 Baccarat tables. For this example, we'll be using rounded figures that cover 12 months.

Using the above information, we can calculate an overall average RPH, as an Overall Game Pace, by dividing the Total Win to the Hours Open, Average Occupancy, Average Bet/Player and House Edge%.

For this exercise, we have fixed the HE to 1.5% by assuming a 1.15% HE for Banker/Player bets with an additional 0.35% to account for participation on tie and side bets.  This $10 million per year Baccarat operation resulted in 38 rounds dealt per hour.

Note: we acknowledge that the hour-by-hour RPH varies as a function of table occupancy, dealer skill, and other factors. However, this value calculated above is an Overall Game Pace calculated over a long period with a large sample of data. This value should be seen as your current operational benchmark. Next, we discuss the financial impact of improving this value.

One Extra Round/Hour

Conversely, starting with the overall average Game Pace RPH and using the same formula, we can calculate in reverse: the increase in Win if we were to deal one extra hand per hour (from 38 to 39), by multiplying the same variables as shown below.

Given all other things equal, dealing only one extra hand per hour would generate an extra $270K/year, an increase of 2.7%.

The Million Dollar Question: could we find ways to deal an extra 2, 3, 4, or 5+ hands/hour by reducing the idle times on our Baccarat tables?

Time

Expediting each Baccarat hand by only a few seconds can increase RPH by one extra round per hour.

In the example above, we increased the overall RPH by one extra round/hour and obtained an increase of $270K GGR/year. Irrespective of the size of a Baccarat operation, by increasing the overall RPH, operators will reap the rewards of an increase in Win.

Continuing with our example and repeating the same calculation, we can derive the following results:

Next, let's examine the amount of time that needs to be trimmed in order to increase the RPH from one level to the next, as we did in the previous example (i.e., from 38 to 42). To calculate this, we simply divide 3,600 seconds (which is the number of seconds in an hour) by the RPH value. By doing so, we can now see how many seconds need to be trimmed as we strive to achieve higher levels of RPH.

From the chart above, we can see that:

1. Expediting each Baccarat hand by only a couple of seconds will increase RPH by 1 extra round per hour;
2. Trimming approximately 9 seconds off each hand dealt is the answer to our Million Dollar Question!

Note: as an interesting use case, operators can also use this same logic to help assign a cost to any procedure or equipment that may slow down the game. 

Time and Motion: Baccarat Opportunities

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. --Benjamin Franklin

While each game must be analyzed separately to reduce seconds, there are a few suggestions that apply specifically to Baccarat and can have a direct or indirect impact on the game speed:

Five Ways to Speed-up your Baccarat Games

1. Timely calling of "No More Bets"- to reduce some of the Baccarat player’s tendency to control the pace of the game.

• A simple workflow on how to achieve this in our blog post, How to Take Control Over the Game Pace in Baccarat
• Some operators have introduced timers to create a source of urgency. This may carry some risk of customer acceptance, so may be best to trial at lower price points to start with.

2. Introducing No-Commission Baccarat- it has high global acceptance amongst players and can be up to 35% quicker due to a simpler pay out process.

• Read our blog on the topic: It's Time to Adopt “No Commission” Baccarat

3. Open more tables- more tables will create more trends that will spread customers out, reducing clumping and increasing game speed.

• Check out our TYM Planning Module that has helped operators across the globe improve their spreads.
• There is a misconception that tables must be full and nothing can be done because that is what Baccarat players want. We cover this fallacy here in our case study: Baccarat Revenue Management 

4. Review Procedures and Internal Processes

• Starting of a new shoe, procedures for changing cards between shoes, introduce pre-shuffled cards, offer initial free hands at the start of a new shoe, etc. More Insights in our blog The Romance with Baccarat

5. Consider creating a Buy In facility nearby- reduce buys ins from tables that stop the flow of the game.

• This solution is widely adopted in large Baccarat operations in Asia and Australia.

Tool to Calculate Overall Game Pace

We have covered how an operator can calculate their overall game speed, but more importantly, how to measure the financial impact. We also have a tool that operators can use to help calculate their Overall Game Pace benchmark.

We hope this blog provided you with some helpful strategies that can be applied to your Baccarat operation. If you have any questions or have additional ideas on how to reduce dealing time while keeping Baccarat exciting, feel free to contact us.

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