Asian casino icon Stanley Ho has officially stepped down as chairman of Macau’s original casino operator SJM Holdings.

The 96-year-old Ho signaled his intention to relinquish his chairman’s seat in April, and the move was formally approved at SJM’s annual general meeting this week. Ho’s daughter Daisy was duly elected to her father’s former position, while directors Timothy Fok and Ho’s ‘fourth wife’ Angela Leong will serve as co-chairs.

SJM elevated Ho to the newly created position of chairman emeritus in recognition of his “invaluable contributions” to the growth of not only SJM but the entire Macau market. SJM lauded Ho as “the founding father of Macau’s gaming industry” and credited his “visionary leadership” for helping SJM achieve its “significant growth” over the past decade.

SJM may have grown in relative terms but its share of Macau’s overall casino market has shrunk dramatically in recent years, hitting an all-time low of 16.1% in 2017. The company is the only one of Macau’s six casino concessionaires yet to open a property on the Cotai strip, and the in-development Grand Lisboa Palace won’t launch until 2019 at the earliest.

The World Series of Poker Europe will return to the King’s Casino in Rozvadov in the fall with ten bracelets and €13m in guaranteed prize money up for grabs.

I wonder if I carefully pulled my eye out of its socket, and moved it around the room with my red right hand would I still see things? Is the frog whose life I saved by moving him from my backyard to the safety of the local park, suffering from depression because I tore him away from his family? And what do you do in Rozvadov when you aren’t playing cards?

Or maybe that’s the magic, right there.

Away from roving eyeballs, and heartbroken frogs, perhaps the key to creating the most vibrant poker rooms in the world is to erect them in the towns where the most exciting thing to see are the mice you find when you lift up zinc roofs dying in the fields.

Doyle Brunson announces his retirement from poker and in his last World Series of Poker hurrah, makes the final day alongside his son, Todd in the $10k No-Limit Hold’em 2-7 Lowball.

Joanna, from Colombia, sits by the window, dressed like Johnny Cash, poking a mobile phone. I wonder if she misses her family, living 5,000 miles away in God’s country. What will she say when she stands by the graveside of a mother or a father, umbrella in hand, as the world weeps?

And what will happen to Joanna when it’s time to call it quits. She won’t be serving my decaf coconut latte’s, so what? What will any of us be doing for the last time, once we finally listen to our body and give up?

Charles Bukowski died of leukaemia, and wrote about his experience in a series of poems, daily, until cancer took his pen, and out went the lights. Tommy Cooper collapsed and died on stage while millions of people watched on TV.

The Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) has opted to strike a middle ground on online sports betting point of consumption taxes (POCT).

On Tuesday, The Australian reported that NSW — Australia’s most populous state — will introduce a 10% tax on all online betting revenue derived from NSW punters. The tax, which won’t apply on the first A$1m of revenue, will be formally unveiled during next week’s state budget and will take effect on January 1, 2019.

The announcement will actually come as something of a relief for online bookmakers, given that as recently as March the NSW government was talking about either a 15% POCT or a 2% tax on betting turnover.

Already this month, a 15% POCT was introduced in both Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), matching rates previously imposed in South Australia and Western Australia. The state of Victoria opted to cut bookies a break last month by imposing a less severe 8% POCT.

Russia’s licensed online sports betting operators are expecting a surge in activity during the 2018 FIFA World Cup, but they still think the government isn’t doing enough to help them beat back international rivals.

Last week, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Oleg Syromolotov gave a speech at an anti-sports corruption conference in Vienna, in which he projected that Russian-licensed bookmakers will see betting volumes rise by 50% during the month-long World Cup, which Russia is hosting.

Russia’s online bookmakers were already enjoying a traffic surge ahead of the World Cup, and that was before the formal imposition on May 26 of new restrictions barring local financial institutions from processing payments between Russian punters and international gambling sites.

Syromolotov’s optimistic view was echoed by Yuri Krasovsky, president of the First Self-Regulatory Organization of Russian Bookmakers (First SRO), who issued a statement last week saying the new restrictions “will definitely complicate the activities” of non-Russian operators and “increase the inflow” to Russian-licensed sites.

Sports betting could be on the November 2020 election ballot in California if a coalition of local card rooms and unidentified online gambling operators gets its way.

On Monday, Russell Lowery, president of Sacramento-based consultants Competitive Edge Advantage Inc., submitted a proposed revision to California’s gambling laws that would allow for legal sports betting in the Golden State.

Specifically, Lowery’s proposed Gaming Fairness and Accountability Act would empower California legislators to “authorize banking and percentage games including and not limited to sports wagering.” Lowery aims to get the roughly 500k signatures needed to the proposed constitutional amendment on this November’s ballot and then let voters have their say.

Lowery told the Los Angeles Times that he wasn’t yet at liberty to divulge the names of the parties he approached about supporting the initiative, saying only that he’d spoken with “in-state gaming interests, out-of-state gaming interests and the sports leagues” and that he’d found “enough interest to try and build a coalition” they’re calling Californians for Sports Betting.

Sweden’s government has launched a review of the effects of its new online gambling liberalization on current betting monopolies Svenska Spel and ATG.

Last week, Swedish legislators unanimously voted to approve the country’s new gambling law, which will open up the online market to international gambling operators for the first time. The new rules are set to take effect on January 1, 2019.

Following the vote, the government announced a review of what impact the liberalized market will have on state-owned operators Svenska Spel and AB Trav Och Galopp (ATG), which currently hold monopolies on sports betting and horserace betting, respectively.

The review will examine what the end of these monopolies will mean for funding of both sports and racing. The latter is of particular concern to the government, given that ATG provides 87% of racing funding, and the government is proceeding under the expectation that a new funding mechanism will be necessary.

Thailand police are reportedly targeting over 1,000 women for using their social media profiles to promote illegal sports betting.

This week, Thai media outlets reported that local police have begun cracking down on so-called ‘web pretties’ aka pretty girls who are using the assets God gave them to promote illegal online betting sites to their social media followers. Depending on the media outlet, police have issued warrants for either 100 or 1,000 of these ‘pretties.’

The move follows media reports last month that the girls were writing the domains of online gambling sites on their cleavage or other desirable body regions, then posting photos or videos of themselves to their online profiles. One girl claimed to be earning up to $250 per week via these promotional activities.

The Bangkok Post, which reported the 100 figure, quoted Metropolitan Police Bureau deputy commissioner Phanurat Lakboon saying police would begin summoning girls next week, bringing them in 10 at a time for questioning and possible charges.