Pennsylvania gaming regulators levied over $1.1m in fines against five casino operators, with the bulk of those fines going against the operators of Mohegan Sun Pocono.

On Wednesday, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) announced that it had imposed a $1m penalty on Downs Racing, a subsidiary of Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment, which operates the Mohegan Sun Pocono casino in Wilkes-Barre.

The bulk ($550k) of this fine stems from the casino’s “failure over a multi-year period to follow approved internal controls regarding free slot play, the main bank and internal audits,” while the rest ($450k) was for “conducting business with unlicensed gaming service providers.”

The casino was embarrassed last year by the arrest of its Robert Joseph Pellegrini, the casino’s former VP of player development, for his involvement in a free-play slots scam that took the casino for over $422k and ultimately netted Pellegrini a 32-month jail sentence.

Clearly, God, or maybe just that giant statute of Christ the Redeemer that hovers over Rio de Janeiro, does not want Brazilians to have legal gambling options.

Wednesday’s scheduled vote on the Brazilian Senate’s oft-delayed PLS 186/2014 gambling legislation by the Constitutionality and Justice Committee (CCJ) was abandoned shortly after the CCJ began its weekly meeting due to legislators being summoned to an urgent plenary session of Congress.

For the record, this marks the third straight week that the CCJ scheduled a vote on PLS 186/2014 without actually taking a vote. There’s a small chance that the CCJ could discuss the bill at a possible hearing next Wednesday (20), but according to Games Magazine Brazil, CCJ president and Senator Edson Loboão didn’t leave much hope of that happening when he wished all those present a Merry Christmas before leaving the room.

PLS 186/2014 would authorize a massive expansion of Brazil’s legal gambling options, including land-based casinos, online sports betting and casino games, and the jogo de bicho ‘animal game’ lottery. Similarly delayed gambling legislation in the Chamber of Deputies (PL 442/1991) appears equally unlikely to make any further progress until 2018.

Atlantic City casinos posted modest revenue gains in November, and for once the numbers are asterisk-free.

On Wednesday, the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) posted its casino figures for the month of November, during which AC’s casinos generated land-based gaming revenue of $185.8m, up 3.2% from the same month last year. Slots revenue improved 1.5% to $131.8m while table games jumped 7.6% to $54m.

This is the first time this year that the year-on-year monthly figures are directly comparable, and don’t require one to factor out contributions from the Trump Taj Mahal, which closed its doors in October 2017.

The numbers look even better when you add the $20.6m generated by the casinos’ online gambling sites, which brings November’s total gaming win to $206.4m, up 4.6% year-on-year. For the year-to-date, brick-and-mortar gaming revenue at the market’s seven surviving casinos is up 6.5% to $2.23b, while total gaming win is up 8.1% to $2.45b.

New Jersey’s regulated online gambling market posted its ninth straight month of +$20m revenue despite the online poker vertical posting double-digit year-on-year declines.

Figures released Wednesday by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) show state-licensed online gambling operators generating revenue of $20.6m in November, up exactly one-fifth from the same month last year, while roughly flat from October 2017’s tally.

The online casino vertical posted its usual gaudy gains, rising 24.6% to $18.8m while online poker tumbled 13.1% to $1.8m, not far off the poker vertical’s historic low of $1.73m set this June. For the year-to-date, overall online revenue is up 26.1% to over $224.8m, with casino rising 31.6% to $202.5m and poker falling 8.6% to $22.3m.

As market watchers have come to expect, the Golden Nugget’s casino-only online operations – which include the Nugget’s own site plus Betfaircasino.com and Playsugarhouse.com – outpaced all comers with just under $6.2m, a mere $50k off the market’s all-time individual operator monthly record, which was set by (you guessed it) the Nugget this July.

Revenues of Detroit’s three casinos took in little gains in November compared to the previous month, according to the Michigan Gaming Control Board.

Aggregate revenue of MGM Grand Detroit, MotorCity Casino Hotel, and Greektown Casino-Hotel is up 0.4 percent to $113.1 million November. The combined revenues of Detroit casinos also grew by 1.4 percent year on year.

Revenues of MotorCity, which had the second biggest November market share, climbed by as much as 2.7 percent to $38.2 million compared to last year’s results. MGM, on the other hand, managed to eke a 0.8 percent revenue gain after it took in $48.6 million.

Greektown registered the lowest revenue of all the three casinos with $26.3 million.

Beleaguered daily fantasy sports (DFS) operator FanDuel has shown a number of its staff the door just weeks after its former chief executive officer, Nigel Eccles, said adieu.

It isn’t clear how many FanDuel workers have lost their jobs this month but the layoffs – particularly on the product development side of the company – appear set to continue going into the New Year. It’s the bitter pill FanDuel has to swallow to stay afloat.

A month before Eccles left the company, auditors warned that FanDuel had turned from a DFS giant into a flailing company after a series of financial missteps.

FanDuel remains embroiled in legal battles left and right, particularly in the United States, as it tries to convince each state to authorize DFS within their borders. At present, 18 states have enacted laws to regulate daily fantasy sports.

Michigan legislators are making a late run at passing intrastate online gambling legislation but the odds are heavily stacked against this attempt making any headway this year.

On Wednesday morning, the Michigan House of Representatives’ Regulatory Reform Committee voted 12-3 to approve the latest version of the HB 4926 online gambling legislation introduce this September by Rep. Brandt Iden.

Iden’s original bill got a hearing with the same House committee in September that ultimately led nowhere, in part due to tepid support from Detroit’s three commercial casino operators and outright opposition from the state’s tribal gaming operators.

As initially reported by GamblingCompliance scribe Chris Krafcik, the changes to Iden’s legislation include a new requirement that online gambling servers be located on casino property, presumably to address concerns that the Michigan state constitution requires casino gambling to take place “in the casino.”

Turkish lottery players are betraying their Muslim faith, according to the country’s top religious gatekeepers.

Turkey’s Milli Piyango lottery monopoly is scheduled to hold its annual special drawing for the New Year holiday, and recently announced that this year’s draw will feature a guaranteed jackpot of TRY 61m (US $15.9m). This is more than twice the sum the New Year’s draw promised as recently as 2009.

But the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), the country’s top religious body, has issued a new fatwa (religious decree) reiterating its stance that purchasing lottery tickets is ‘haram’ (forbidden) because “all gambling games are based on one of the sides winning and the other losing.”

The Diyanet diatribe went on to say that lottery winners had won their windfalls “undeservingly” and that lotteries were worse than other forms of gambling because “masses participate in them,” meaning “the damage of such gambling is more widespread.”