Management System Casino Chip Liquidation Monitoring with RFID and Image Analysis

This patent covers a casino floor management system that compares the chip payout calculated from the game result, the bet target, and the bet amount against the actual chip movement observed between dealer and player, and switches the system’s control behaviour when the two amounts disagree, flagging potential dealer error or fraud.

The Problem

In casinos, the integrity of every game depends on the dealer paying or collecting exactly the right amount of substitute gaming chips after each round. Mistakes and deliberate fraud both happen: a dealer pays a winner too much or collects too little, chips are slipped under the table, players past-post bets after the result, or a colluding dealer over-pays a confederate. Pit bosses, surveillance cameras, and floor managers exist primarily to catch these events, but at scale on a busy gaming floor the manual monitoring is incomplete and reactive. Existing automated approaches include attaching RFID tags to chips so that the value at a betting spot can be read electronically, and image-analysis systems that watch chip movement on the table and infer collection or payment from the visual record. Each approach catches some incidents and misses others. The remaining gap is a system that fuses the bet, the game outcome, and the actual chip movement, and that flags the mismatch automatically.

What This Invention Does

The invention provides a management system for games played with substitute gaming chips. The system includes a game table; a game determining unit that determines the game result; a bet determining unit that determines what the player bet on and how much they bet; a liquidation determining unit that determines the actual amount of chips that moved between dealer and player; and a control unit that computes a calculated liquidation amount from the game result and the bet, compares it to the actual liquidation amount, and changes its control behaviour when the two disagree. When a predetermined condition is not satisfied, the control unit performs a first control; when the condition is satisfied (typically meaning the calculated and actual amounts diverge), it performs a different second control. In practice the second control is the trigger that escalates the incident (alarm, log, alert to the pit boss, recording flagged for surveillance review). The patent is part of a family rooted in Japanese Patent Application 2017-233190 filed 5 December 2017 and tied to AU 2018378777 and AU 2024227787.

Key Features

• Result-aware payout check. The system does not merely record what happened; it computes what should have happened from the game result and the bet, and compares that against what actually moved across the table.
• Two-mode control logic. When the calculated and actual payouts agree, the system runs in its standard control mode; when they diverge, it switches to a second control mode that handles the suspected error or fraud, supporting graduated responses rather than a single alarm bit.
• RFID chip integration. The system is designed to work with substitute chips carrying RFID tags so that bet amounts and chip flows can be measured electronically, not only from camera images.
• Camera-based monitoring stack. The system is positioned alongside existing surveillance-camera monitoring of the gaming table, and references image-analysis approaches such as those in WO 2015/107902, so it is meant to fit inside the standard surveillance architecture of a modern casino.
• Per-table modular system. Each table can host a game determining unit, a bet determining unit, and a liquidation determining unit, allowing the management system to roll out table by table across a casino floor rather than as a single floor-wide installation.

Who Is Behind It?

The applicant is Angel Group Co., Ltd., the Kyoto-based gaming-equipment manufacturer best known for its Angel playing cards, Angel Eye baccarat shoe, and a portfolio of RFID-enabled casino chips and table monitoring systems used by major operators across Macau, Singapore, Las Vegas, and the Philippines. The named inventor is Yasushi Shigeta. The Australian patent attorney is Davies Collison Cave in Melbourne. The application is a divisional of AU 2024227787, which is itself a continuation of AU 2018378777, claiming priority from Japanese application 2017-233190.

Why It Matters

Australia operates a relatively small but high-revenue casino market through Crown Resorts and The Star Entertainment Group, both of which have faced significant regulatory enquiries into anti-money-laundering controls, junket operations, and the broader integrity of their table-game operations. Patents on automated table monitoring sit at the intersection of those regulatory pressures and the equipment supply chain. Angel Group is a primary supplier of RFID chip-and-shoe systems into Australian and Asia-Pacific casinos, and patents like this one cover the analytic layer that turns RFID data into real-time fraud and error detection. For the regulated Australian casino sector, automated liquidation matching is the kind of technology that regulators are increasingly likely to expect as a control, which gives the IP material commercial weight.

Related Concepts

Automated payout matching is one strand of a wider modernisation of casino surveillance, where RFID-enabled casino tokens feed real-time analytics that pit bosses and compliance teams used to do by eye.

In Australia, the same technology layer intersects with AUSTRAC-led anti-money-laundering oversight of operators such as Crown Resorts, where automated table monitoring is increasingly treated as a basic control rather than an upgrade.

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AU 2026201852 was published in the Australian Official Journal of Patents on 2 April 2026 and is open for public inspection. Patent applications represent inventions that are sought to be protected and do not necessarily reflect commercially available products.