The Netherlands gambling regulator will be spending much of its time on the internet during the 2018 FIFA World Cup, monitoring all online gambling operators’ marketing and advertising practices.

On Monday, the Kansspelautoriteit (KSA) announced that it will be keeping a close watch on gambling activities before and during the World Cup to ensure that online gambling operators will not lure minors to gamble.

Under the current Dutch gambling law, minors aren’t permitted to participate in any games of chance such as betting on sports competition. Online sports betting operators that aren’t licensed in Netherlands may not offer games of chance to Dutch consumers.

The law only authorizes Toto, which is part of the Dutch Lottery, to offer bets on the results of sports competitions. Anticipating the surge of online bets placed during the World Cup, Kansspelautoriteit warned that unlicensed gambling operators who will target Dutch national consumers will be slapped with a hefty fine.

Another review from the World Series of Poker, this time focusing on Jeremy Wien’s against the odds performance in the $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em event where he bested a final table that included David Laka, David Peters, Shawn Buchanan, and Jake Schindler.

Akimbo.

It’s a position that one takes when they stand with hands on hips, elbows turned outward. It’s also the name of Seth Godin’s podcast. It’s the best podcast this side of Robert Hanson’s Great Filter.

In one of his earliest episodes, Godin talks about how systematised the world is, and how we are expected to ‘fit in’ to the shapes carved out for us. We call people who refuse to conform: special snowflakes.

A Cambodian court has prevented Star Vegas’s Thai vendors from terminating the casino’s 50-year land lease.

In a disclosure to the Australian Stock Exchange, Donaco International announced that the Bantaey Meanchey Court of First Instance has issued an injunction order stopping Star Vegas casino landlord, Lee Hoe Property Co. Ltd., from ending the lease.

Lee Hoe Property is owned by Thai shareholders Somboon Sukcharoenkraisri, Techatut Sukcharoenkraisri and Bhuvasith Chaiarunrojh. Donaco earlier sought the court’s intervention after the lessor threatened to terminate the lease, on contrived and spurious grounds.

The largest live tournament for bar poker players in the United States is underway. The Bar Poker Open (BPO) is being held at the Golden Nugget in Downtown Las Vegas and saw 1,000 players descend on the casino for the start of competition last Sunday. It will wrap up in two days, and is part of the Golden Nugget Grand Poker Series, which runs from May 29 through July 3. The BPO’s Invitational National Championship highlights the series, and offers a $200,000 guarantee.

The invitational is open to players who participate in local bar poker leagues. Players who finish in the top three places of any nightly tournament, and win a free weekly BPO online event, will make it to the final round of qualifications. From there, the top 4% of all players—four out of every 100—earn a place at the $200,000 championship game. According to the BPO, there are typically around 28 qualifiers each week. Each weekly top finisher also earns a travel package to participate in the tournament. The package includes hotel accommodations for six nights, $400 in travel money and a seat at the tournament.

This is the fourth year for the BPO, and it has consistently grown since its inception. The BPO Championship tournament attracted 365 players in 2016 and 565 last year. The league has grown substantially, climbing from 180,000 players to its current amount of over 1 million and has over 40 bar poker leagues as its members.

The BPO is led by Glenn McCrory, who founded and is the current owner of New England’s Eastern Poker Tour. McCrory is joined by the owner of the Riverchasers Poker Tour, Andrew Griffith, and Gorilla Gaming. McCrory commented about the BPO, “When league owners use Bar Poker Open properly as a tool to market and promote their events, our leagues have seen exponential growth. We have some leagues that have gone from three events a week, to over 50 games a week by embracing our championship and working hard on their bar poker business.”

Lu Hou Tsai, senior vice president of operations for Imperial Pacific Holdings Ltd. (IP), has confirmed that the company is moving forward with plans to build a permanent casino resort on the island of Saipan. The statement comes at the same time that Imperial Pacific announced that it is going after Bloomberg and two of the media outlet’s reporters over a series of critical articles regarding the company.

In an interview with GGRAsia, Tsai said, “This project will go through. We are working diligently to get the hotel up, because once the hotel is up, that will further assist us in increasing our cash flow.”

IP has been working on the Imperial Pacific Resort for some time, but has had a series of setbacks along the way. Nonetheless, the company’s final design for 350 hotel rooms and 15 villas is progressing forward.

“It’s not conducive to business when you have customers staying at ‘this hotel, that hotel,’” noted Tsai, referring to the present need to accommodate its existing gambling customers in other hotel properties. “Right now, we have over 1,000 construction workers on site, and our construction company is a U.S.-based construction company.”

The deputy governor of Russia’s Primorsky Territory, Andrei Larin, recently said that the development of the Primorye Integrated Entertainment Resort (PIER) zone is one of the primary focuses of the local government. His comments were provided as part of a press release on the PIER project that was distributed by Primorsky Krai Development Corp. (PKD), which also confirmed the plans for an additional casino project for the Russian Far East development.

PIER sits about 31 miles from the Russian port of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. The newly added casino has been dubbed “Shambala,” and is a project of Shambala CJSC, a Russian firm that operates casinos in other parts of the country where gambling is legal. According to the press release, Shambala will include “a large-scale project of a hotel and entertainment complex” involving an investment of at least $128.5 million. It will also include a minimum of 270 hotel rooms and no less than 50 gaming tables and 500 slot machines.

Shambala will be constructed on two parcels of land that the Shambala firm won during an auction that ended May 28. The land measures 34.1 acres, and construction is scheduled to begin in September. Shambala was the only company to bid on the property.

Larin said that PIER “is of a great importance for the social and economic development of the region.” He further stated that the local government is focused on “providing the most comfortable conditions for cooperation and any kind of support to our partners implementing tourism projects in the Primorsky territory.”

The bad blood between Australia-listed casino operator Silver Heritage Group Ltd. and its former partner in the Tiger Palace Resort at Bhairahawa in Nepal is already a thing of the past after both parties have decided to settle their dispute.

In a regulatory filing, Silver Heritage announced that its former consultant to the Nepal casino project, Rajendra Bajgain, and his brother, Nabaraj Bajgain, agreed to sell their shares in SHL Management Services (KTM) Pvt Ltd. (SMSK) to Tiger Kathmandu Investment Pvt. Ltd. (TKI) for an undisclosed sum of money.

SMSK is a subsidiary of Silver Heritage that operates the casinos at Tiger Palace Resort and The Millionaire’s Club and Casino in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal.

The share purchase was approved by the Department of Industry in Nepal, as required by law, according to the Australian casino operator.Following the settlement, TKI now owns a 10 percent shareholding in SMSK, with the remaining 90 percent owned by Silver Heritage.

When it comes to the health of the kids, a clean break and amicable divorce is much better than a broken marriage with nothing carrying it on but inertia. The House of Commons is voting on Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit proposal today. If it doesn’t pass, the United Kingdom is in danger of staying in a marriage its people do not want, and this could have bad long term consequences for the UK gaming industry, and for gaming in the rest of Europe as well.

Two reasons. First, and less controversial, is that not knowing will keep businesses guessing instead of doing business. Second, and more controversial (agree with me or not here), the Eurozone and by extension the EU itself will eventually break up anyway because it is inherently unstable. Better to start that process now in an orderly fashion rather than have it disintegrate with all countries previously part of it turning inwards in a fit of protectionist xenophobia, wounded, and reluctant to do business with one another after it happens.

Let’s deal with the less controversial reason first. Whether you are rabid Brexiteer who believes Brussels is taking over the United Kingdom or a Remain fanatic who believes that leaving the European Union single market will be worse than the Blitz and cause mass starvation in the streets, the two sides can probably agree on one thing. Not knowing is not a good thing. The vote today, June 12, in the House of Commons on Brexit could really scramble the entire process and keep the UK in a state of market limbo for years. If Theresa May loses this vote, we’re going to see more bookies fleeing to Malta, and further disruption of business across sectors. Bet365 and William Hill are already putting one leg in Malta so as not to get stuck in jurisdictional limbo for too long, “Hovering between two sides of the fence” to paraphrase Elijah the prophet of all people.

Why does it look like the UK could get stuck in limbo if the vote doesn’t go May’s way? Establishment media is starting to put out feelers about a second referendum vote with their typical hypocritical selective nonsense about foreign interference. The straws they’re grasping at are so thin you can barely even see them with an electron microscope, which the floaters of these public trial balloons freely hand out so you can catch their drift.

Two stories from the World Poker Tour including a victory in New Zealand from a dentist with a taste for cards, and a female winner in San Remo.

Daniel Neilson is the link.

In 2011, I was in San Remo, eating at Mare Blu, biking down that very long coastal path that seems to lead to the end of the world. So was Daniel Neilson.

I was writing about poker.

Hong Kong’s prisons are once again a hive of cigarette-fueled gambling activity as the hours count down to the start of the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

As police forces across the Asia-Pacific region brace for this month’s expected onslaught of illegal football wagering, Hong Kong authorities are once again reminding the world that where there’s a will, there’s a way (to wager).

On Monday, Hong Kong’s Correctional Services Department announced that its officers had conducted over 3,000 prison searches in the first five months of 2018 that uncovered 45 inmates running some form of illegal gambling operation despite their limited freedom.

The guards reported that the total sum being wagered via these illegal means was over HK$1.3m (US$166k), with most of these wagers using cigarettes as currency. For the record, while the number of would-be bookies nabbed was roughly the same as in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup, the total handle was HKD300k higher this time around. (Clearly, Hong Kong is imprisoning a higher class of criminal these days.)

Virtue Poker has announced that brand ambassador, Phil Ivey, will play in the $1m buy-in Big One For One Drop, and the cryptocurrency based online poker room is offering a percentage of his action to ten lucky sweepstake winners.

On my morning Montenegro runs, I would see Phil Ivey eating breakfast in a small cafe away from the very public setting of the Maestral Resort & Casino.

It looked like a dive.

The Maestral is five-star.