Monthly Archives: March 2018

NCAA Tournament round of 64 Thursday betting preview

March Madness really begins around the NCAA Tournament on Thursday with the first 16 games of the Round of 64. And two of the four top seeds will be in action: Villanova and Kansas. Of course, a No. 1 seed has never lost to a No. 16 and just four of the past 80 No. 1 vs. 16 games have even been decided by single digits.

Odds courtesy of OddsShark.com

Villanova’s line is TBD against the winner of LIU Brooklyn-Radford in Tuesday’s First Four, but it will be massive. Kansas is -14 against Ivy League champion Penn.

One of the shortest lines on the Thursday board has No. 7 Rhode Island as a 2-point favorite over No. 10 Oklahoma. The Rams were the Atlantic 10 regular-season champions but lost by a point in the conference tournament final to Davidson. The storyline to watch there is in the backcourt with Rhode Island’s excellent senior duo of Jared Terrell and E.C. Matthews against Sooners freshman sensation Trae Young.

Chasing a pot of racing gold: Irish punters try their luck at Cheltenham Festival

Racing fans place 98 bets per second on Gold Cup day

14th March 2018 – LONDON — Worldpay is predicting a bumper week for Britain’s bookies, as punters go for gold during the Cheltenham festival. New figures from the payments leader reveal a 45% surge in online betting activity during the four-day festival, as racing fans seek to beat the bookies.

An analysis of gambling data from the 2017 event found that Irish punters are most likely to try their luck. While the Cheltenham Gold Cup gets plenty of betting action from all over the world, bookmakers saw a massive 126% increase in the volume of online bets placed by Irish cardholders, compared to the previous week.

Racing fans from the Emerald Isle are also playing for much higher stakes than their UK counterparts. Worldpay’s data revealed that the average deposit on Irish cards was €112.36 (£98.90) on Gold Cup day– more than double that of UK punters (£38.72).

3:Barrels: PokerStars play money event; London Series update; Neymar in action

3: Barrels of a PokerStars flavour including the first-ever Play Money charity event, Gareth Gardner wins the London Live Series, and Neymar Jr makes an appearance on the online tables.

I hated school. I didn’t see the point. Then again, my ‘needs’ aren’t anchored to my education. I live in the UK, meaning I can sit on my arse doing nothing but sneezing when I eat dairy, and the government would still throw me a few quid.

But what if I lived in one of the poorer countries in the world.

How vital would education be then?

O’Kane wins partypoker Grand Prix; Irish judge refuses roulette payout

Two tales with an Irish twist including another fantastic turnout for a partypoker LIVE event, and an Irish judge siding with the casino in dodgy Dublin roulette case.

It seems Laurence O’Kane has spent the past few decades in a poker cocoon, but now he’s out, and O’Kane is a very hungry little caterpillar indeed.

O’Kane had nothing on his record except for a few piddly little cashes until he entered the PokerStars MEGASTACK Ulster in January. The Irishman nearly turned a €170 investment into a $30,000 Platinum Pass but had to settle for a fourth-place finish worth €6,680 (his record score).

Now he has a new personal best.

March Madness 2018: People’s mad love for filling out NCAA brackets

Here’s what everybody can agree on: March Madness is fun, especially when there’s a little money on the line.

March Madness is so fun that even Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffet doesn’t mind dangling a $1 million-a-year payday to those who can pick a NCAA tournament bracket through the Sweet 16.

To make the contest sweeter this year, Buffet said he’ll double the prize if Creighton, the team of his hometown Nebraska, emerges victorious in the conference. He is also willing to pay $100,000 to the person whose bracket stays intact the longest.

Unfortunately, the contest is only open to all Berkshire Hathaway employees.

Making crypto cooler than kimchi: potential South Korean u-turn on ICO ban

The Korean Times alleges that the South Korean Financial Services Commission are on the verge of reversing the Initial Coin Offering ban rolled out in September, and Donald Trump reminds people that Olympic viewing figures will be down if you think someone is likely to drop a bomb on your head.

He’s picking his ear again.

I watch to see what he does with the wax. Predictably, he wipes it on the apron covering a cream-coloured shirt stretched over an enormous gas-filled gut. I hope I don’t get too many flakes in my Flat White Coconut Thingamajig. I close my eyes. I don’t want to see it happening.

The Internet doesn’t work.

What’s next for Bitcoin BCH? Fungible cash, says Dr. Craig Wright

The next upgrades in the pipeline for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) will finally pave the way for people to start treating the cryptocurrency as what it is supposed to be—cash. And a fungible one at that.

That’s the declaration made by Dr. Craig Wright, chief scientist at blockchain research and development firm nChain Group, during a recent talk as part of the “We are Fascinating Project” series in London.

“We’re collaborating with a lot of groups at the moment. We’ve just announced the Electrum Cash project which is going to sort of increase private transactions fungibility and much more within Bitcoin (BCH), so what that will actually allow is people to start treating it as cash,” Wright said. “We’re going to make it back to fungible cash.”

Currently, Bitcoin Cash development groups like Bitcoin ABC are gearing up for a series of protocol upgrades happening every six months starting May 2018, which will see the developers re-enabling a whole host of opcodes in the scripting language, among other things. Restoring the opcodes is important for the network because they will enable Bitcoin Cash to become more than just a currency.

Florida lawmakers pull the plug (again) on gambling bill

The bill that would have paved the way for gambling expansion in the state of Florida died on Friday after a long bout with legislative impasse. The bill was already a month-old.

Palm Beach Post reported that the lawmakers pulled the plug on the measure after it reached the 11th hour over the weekend. Gambling, according to state legislators, remained to be one of the most difficult issues they faced as a legislative body.

“Despite the good faith efforts of both the House and Senate, a gaming bill will not pass the Legislature this session,” Senate President Joe Negron and House Speaker Richard Corcoran said in a joint statement.

Similar to what happened in the previous years, Florida’s House of Representatives has shown less enthusiasm about gambling expansion from the very beginning.