Author Topic: RFID Poker Chips  (Read 1661 times)

HugginsPoker

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RFID Poker Chips
« on: March 26, 2020, 05:14:26 PM »
I am building some poker tables and wanted to experiment with RFID for Chips. Alot of my players do not like the idea of the cards they are playing being scanned etc, which I understand. However I am intrigued by the idea of using a scanner to capture chip count.

This data could be shown on a LED screen in the rail perhaps.. or ideally ingested into TD to update peoples chip counts.

Wanted to see if anyone has any experience with this at all.

shushs

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Re: RFID Poker Chips
« Reply #1 on: March 27, 2020, 07:42:34 AM »
Personal opinion follows

I don't care for the 'pot' to be displayed somewhere. Part of the game of poker is knowing what is in the pot, what you have left, and what your opponent(s) have left. If a large pot is brewing, and you ask the dealer for a count, they will decline, and per the TDA, only spread the chips out. Don't get me wrong, I love technology and the application of tech, but some areas should stay analog.

*Edit*
Now, if you were to build a way to track the chips given to each player, sign them out, then sign them back in at the end of a tournament, you could find out if someone is skimming chips from you... (We had this problem years ago) and when the chip is eventually logged back in, you can find out your cheat! That would be a use I would be interested in employing.
« Last Edit: March 27, 2020, 07:45:13 AM by shushs »

HugginsPoker

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Re: RFID Poker Chips
« Reply #2 on: March 27, 2020, 12:30:04 PM »
That makes sense - The biggest use I was interested in was to capture chip leader rankings etc plus playing with tech and building an interesting / unique table.

I did reach out to VideoPokerTables.net and asked if they had a chip count solution and in short they said the technology isnt good for poker chips. Of course this is caused by people playing with chips but also height and count of chips on a reader appear to be an issue.

@Correy - Currious though if there was a way to capture the count of players chips, is there a systematic way of updating TD player chipcounts?

Corey Cooper

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Re: RFID Poker Chips
« Reply #3 on: March 27, 2020, 11:56:58 PM »
@Correy - Currious though if there was a way to capture the count of players chips, is there a systematic way of updating TD player chipcounts?

Not currently, but certainly a possibility for a future enhancement now that it's on Electron.

mcfrojd

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Re: RFID Poker Chips
« Reply #4 on: April 15, 2020, 11:58:49 AM »
That makes sense - The biggest use I was interested in was to capture chip leader rankings etc plus playing with tech and building an interesting / unique table.

I did reach out to VideoPokerTables.net and asked if they had a chip count solution and in short they said the technology isnt good for poker chips. Of course this is caused by people playing with chips but also height and count of chips on a reader appear to be an issue.

@Correy - Currious though if there was a way to capture the count of players chips, is there a systematic way of updating TD player chipcounts?

An RFID reader today have problems to read 2 rfid playingcards on top of each other, that's why you see on live sent poker that the players spread their cards on the reader.
Same if you try to open a hotell door with your rfid keycard and have another card to close.
So the day a reader can scan multiple chips in a stack or spreadout but to close to each other, will take a while, maybe another technology some day.

rakrul

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Re: RFID Poker Chips
« Reply #5 on: April 20, 2020, 05:03:54 PM »
That's not really true as long as you expect multiple inputs. A friend of mine started a project like yours over 10 years ago. He got some RFID card deck samples from china and the deck was like 25 cm high.  ;D
That's obviously not a problem anymore. The thing was that you need to pass the discards through a "discard reader" as the muck pile can be too big. A couple of years ago, I saw someone testing with rfid chips (can't remember the brand, think it was Italian), and the antenna could read a 10 high stack. Anything above 10 chips isn't "seen". This requires unique IDs per chip which is both common and somewhat expensive.

Since you need to dedicate an area for the hole cards (and community cards) it's common to make them so you can fit two cards side by side. This also makes it easier for the code.

When my friend made this he had many rfid antennas but only one reader and would switch between different antennas per second. For this to work properly you need to know the power-up time for the antennas so you don't switch to the next antenna before it has time to power up the rfid antenna  and read the tag, but it shouldn't be a problem. 
« Last Edit: April 20, 2020, 05:05:30 PM by rakrul »