Anthony Apicella has won the French Poker Series Main Event, and first prize of €197,000, after beating the German Felix Lambertz in heads-up action.

Rather predictably, the French dominated the final table of the €1,100 French Poker Series (FPS) Main Event, with six of the final eight players hailing from the land where men like to play in women’s poker tournaments.  What was not so predictable was the make up of the winner.

Prior to this event, 32-year old Anthony Apicella had only ever cashed in two other live poker tournaments. What was the reason for his lack of activity? His priorities lie elsewhere. Apicella only plays a handful of live poker events, each year, because he is busy running a bar in Corsica.

Apicella’s stunning success is once again proof that you don’t have to be a full time grinder to win one of these things. It’s what makes poker such a beautiful game. 1,355 players entered the event, and that created a total prize pool of €1,300,800. It was another record-breaking field for the European Poker Tour (EPT) organizers, surpassing the 1,095 entrants the last time the FPS put on this particular show in Jan 2014.

“This is a victory of love; love of my family, and love of my friends who all supported me throughout the event.” Apicella told PokerStars after his win.

It seems that every day I sit down to write a tournament recap, this week, I am writing about German poker players finishing second. It’s unusual. They usually have their towels draped over the first place spot nice and early – not this week though.

The 2015 Aussie Millions Main Event saw Lennart Uphoff have to settle for second place; the 2015 Aussie Millions $100k Challenge saw Ole Schemion doing likewise, and the FPS Main Event saw Felix Lambertz also filling in that role. Not that he would have minded. His €125,500 was easily the largest single score of his live tournament career.

Casino operator Wynn Resorts saw revenue fall in both Q4 and FY 2014 as the record downturn in Macau took a big bite out of business. For the three months ending Dec. 31, revenue fell 25% to $1.38b, adjusted earnings fell 39.3% to $352.5m and net income fell by half to $109.3m. Revenue at Wynn’s operations in Macau fell 32% while Las Vegas properties fell a comparatively mild 5.8%.

For the year as a whole, revenue fell 3.3% to $5.43b and earnings fell 2.1% to $1.77b. Wynn Macau earnings fell 5% to $1.26b while Las Vegas properties reported earnings up 5.9% to a record $515.2m.

Wynn Macau’s VIP turnover fell 39.9% in Q4 while VIP win rate slipped 0.12 points to 2.8%. Wynn decreased its VIP table ranks to 244 from 273 in the same period the previous year due to renovations on its casino floor, a process Wynn expects to complete before the Lunar New Year celebrations kick in.

Wynn Macau’s mass market revenue fell 15% to $249m in Q4, due to a 8.3% decline in mass market table drop to $634.4m and a win rate described as “the lowest hold rate since the third quarter of 2013.” Slots handle fell 19.5% to $1.1b and win fell 20.9%. Occupancy rate rose 1.9 points to 98.6% and non-gaming revenue fell 1..6% to $95.9m.

In Las Vegas, gaming revenue was down 15.5% to $171m. Table game turnover fell 11.8% while slots handle rose 5.2%. Room revenue rose 6.3% to $95.5m and occupancy rose 1.3 points to 82.1%. Food and beverage revenue was up 5.3% to $103.3m and entertainment, retail and other revenue was flat at $57.4m.

STEVE WYNN SAYS CHINA’S RICH ‘DESTABILIZED’ BY CORRUPTION CRACKDOWN

Speaking on the earnings call, Wynn boss Steve Wynn said he wasn’t threatened by two new projects announced for Las Vegas by Crown Resorts and Genting. Steve noted the proximity of those proposed developments to Wynn properties and said he’d rather see shiny new resorts there than empty lots. Wynn believes that the two new resorts would ultimately enlarge the Vegas pie and potentially add as much as $50m to Wynn’s bottom line each year.

The 2015 World Series of Poker will be another record breaking series with 68 events, 11 new formats, and everything but the kitchen sink.

“If you’ve never thought about coming to Las Vegas for the WSOP, this is the year.”

Those were the words of the World Series of Poker’s (WSOP) Executive Director Ty Stewart, as the full 2015 WSOP schedule started hitting e-mail boxes all over the globe.

I have to agree with him.

After gathering some professional thoughts, and weighing in with my own more recreational ones, I have come to the conclusion that the 2015 WSOP will be the most memorable of my short existence on this planet.

It will be a record breaker.

It’s already a record breaker.

Victor Ilyukhin Sr. wins the Grosvenor United Kingdom Poker Tour opener in London after defeating the Sky Poker UK Poker Championships Main Event Champion, Alex Spencer, in heads-up action.

It’s not often that I am happy to see a larger than life Russian staring out of my computer screen, whilst I chow down on my scrambled eggs, but I’ll make an exception for Victor Ilyukhin Sr.

I absolutely adore the fella.

But it wasn’t always like that.

At first I thought he was a right pain in the ass.

I had seen Ilyukhin on the World Poker Tour (WPT) on many occasions. He stood out because my wife owns Revive Touch and Ilyukhin would hire a masseuse to work on him most of the day.

After Ilyukhin was eliminated he would pull up a pew, next to his son, and watch him play until he was also eliminated. I never had the need to place either of them into my chip counts. Then, one day, Ilyukhin started to grow a stack worthy of mention. Then his son did likewise. As I went to enter them into the back-end of the WPT blog I realized that they both have the same first and last names: Victor Ilyukhin.

I don’t know if this is the perfect time to talk to Seattle Seahawks fans, but I did try to console a buddy of mine who watched the game with me at a packed sports bar.

“Hey, at least the Seahawks are the favorites next year,” I said. It did little to cheer him up. Actually, he might have become even more depressed, knowing that Seattle’s next shot at the Super Bowl, if it makes it that far again, would be a full year from now.

At that time, I didn’t even know if the Seahawks were favored to win in Super Bowl 50 (Quick tangent: God bless the NFL for finally doing something right! No more Roman numbers!). All I knew, and frankly, all I cared about was basking in the atmosphere of the room.

Pats fans were whooping it up like they were going to receive their own Super Bowl rings. Seahawks fans either sat stunned, heads bowed, hands  covering their faces. I overheard a couple in the other table talking about the Malcolm Butler’s incredible interception that sealed New England’s victory, asking themselves if what they just saw really happen?

Then there was my buddy, completely catatonic, unable to even comprehend the dramatic turn-of-events that swung Super Bowl XLIX at least three or four times in the final minute of the game.

“Hey, at least the Seahawks are the favorites next year.”

Turns out, they are.

Cocaine, pornography and reminiscing over past glories are strict no-nos if you want to be a successful gambler. That said, they’re invaluable if you’re looking to get high, hard or allow yourself a brief respite from your mind-numbingly boring current existence, so to each his own.

Dr. David Greenfield, a director at the Center for Internet Technology Addiction at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, told Vice that watching your favorite porn star plugging various orifices with various cylindrical objects activates the limbic parts of the brain. But this cuts off the brain’s prefrontal cortex, where decisions involving moral choices are made.

Greenfield told the Christian Post that when your prefrontal is disengaged, you “don’t have access or full control over [your] judgment,” causing you to do dumb things, like taking a hit on 19. So as tempting as it is to keep that PornTube browser tab open while you’re gambling online, this would be a good time to zip it. If it helps, use this handy mantra: bank now, spank later.

COKE ADDS ERRORS

Meanwhile, a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai shows that cocaine use impairs the brain’s ability to predict losses. The study involved 50 coke addicts and 25 control subjects playing a gambling game while their brains were wired to detect electrical activity. The participants were asked to predict whether or not they’d win or lose money in each trial.

The addicts who’d snorted some blow in the previous 72 hours displayed much higher electrical activity from an unexpected win than a predicted win, similar to the control subjects. The coke users who’d abstained in the previous 72 hours failed to display this activity, suggesting that they used cocaine to normalize a certain brain function.

But bottom line, the results showed the addicts displayed “impaired loss prediction signaling in the brain.” The addicts had a much harder time than the control subjects “computing the difference between expected versus unexpected outcomes.” This impairment suggested these individuals were more prone to disadvantageous decision making, so lay off the blow before you blow on those dice.

Australian casino operator Echo Entertainment saw its profit spike nearly 78% in its fiscal H1 thanks to record spending by Asian gambling whales. Normalized domestic gross revenue – which strips out the wild variance of the VIP market – in the six months ending Dec. 31 rose 12.5% to $824.4m while international VIP revenue rose 96.7% to $332.2m. Earnings rose 31.5% to $261.4m and net profit after tax hit $112.6m.

Echo CEO Matt Bekier (pictured on the right) credited Echo’s flagship Sydney property The Star for bringing in the bacon. The Star’s normalized revenue was up 38.8% to $820m while earnings rose 54% to $136m. The property is finally living up to the performance envisioned when the company completed its $870m refurbishment of The Star in late 2011. Echo’s Queensland casinos added revenue of $340m (+8.6%) and earnings of $78.1m (+19.1%).

While VIPs have drastically reduced their spending in Macau, VIP turnover at Echo’s properties rose 97.2% to a record $23.2b in H1. Sadly, win rate fell to 1.33% from 1.41% in the same period the previous year, but VIP overdue loan markers fell from $40.9m to $21.4m, which Echo credits to strong credit risk management and collections.

Looking forward, Echo says H2 has carried on where H1 left off. Priorities for H2 include expanding the Jupiters Gold Coast property and convincing the Queensland government to award Echo the right to develop the Queen’s Wharf Brisbane project.

PACKER PISSED AT SYDNEY POLS

Echo’s competition for the Brisbane casino derby is rival Crown Resorts, which is also scheduled to end The Star’s monopoly in Sydney come 2019. That is, assuming the local government gets around to granting planning approval on the $2b Crown Sydney project. Speaking at this week’s opening of the new City of Dreams Manila, Crown boss James Packer (pictured left) said he no longer views 2019 as a viable opening date unless the Barangaroo Delivery Authority (BDA) and the Lend Lease property developer learn to make nice.

Lend Lease won a profit-sharing contract dispute with the BDA last August but unspecified outstanding issues have prevented a permanent resolution. Despite Packer claiming that there was “nothing more important to me than Crown Sydney,” Packer declined to offer specifics on the nature of the BDA/Lend Lease dispute, saying he was “not in the middle of it.” Packer hasn’t been shy about publicly sharing his disdain for government regulation of the gaming sector in recent months.

On February 20, 2015, a hospitable capital of Georgia will play host for Georgia Gaming Congress, a professional international forum devoted to gambling business. Both international and Georgian experts in all market segments of gambling will visit the event. In particular, Nicolas Fleiderman, current Europe-bet.com’s CEO, will deliver his report within the framework of the event.

Nicolas Fleiderman is an Israeli/Argentinean gaming veteran with more than 10 industry experience. Nicolas has more than a decade of experience in the igaming market. He has operated, counselled, and revamped a number of new and established gaming operations during his career. His clientele includes expekt.com, Net Entertainment, Boylesports, Netrefer, William Hill Online, WinUnited-Youwin.com, Interwetten and CityClubCasino. He has founded CBN Gaming, a technology company broadcasting live games from traditional casinos to the internet.

Europe-Bet.com is one of the leading organizations in the market of betting and online gambling. Its services combine a wide range of online products such as betting, online casinos, roulette, blackjack and classic games of the region (backgammon, dominoes, borax and seca). In January 2011, Europe-Bet.com launched online poker. In June of the same year, it launched the online version of one of the most popular game of the region – backgammon. In May 2012, Europe-Bet.com launched online slots of the world’s leading manufacturers.

Main values of Europe-Bet.com, in particular, honesty, integrity, pioneering spirit and commitment to new technologies and techniques, help to provide the best quality in betting and online gambling.

Do not miss the speech of Nicolas Fleiderman at Georgia Gaming Congress; discover new opportunities and solutions for your business.

Buy a ticket now

Detailed information about Georgia Gaming Congress and all the speakers can be found on the event website g3congress.ru.