The Tigre de Cristal casino in Russia’s far east Primorye gaming zone has been named the best resort in the country by an international awards panel.

This week, the 25th annual World Travel Awards – considered the ‘Oscars’ of the hospitality industry, or so we’re told – were handed out at a gala ceremony in Athens. Tigre de Cristal picked up the trophy for Russia’s Leading Resort 2018, beating out three Radisson properties and two other resorts.

Tigre de Cristal was previously nominated in the category of Russia’s Leading Hotel in 2017, but failed to take home the hardware. Given the fact that Tigre de Cristal opened less than three years ago, the back-to-back nominations either say a lot about the property’s reputation for opulence or call into question the pace of development in the rest of the country.

Regardless, Stylianos Tsifetakis, CEO of the property’s management company G1 International, called the award “a great honor for us” and said it bode well for the overall tourist industry in Russia’s far east.

Another round-up from the World Series of Poker this time focusing on Phil Galfond emerging from his online poker room laboratory to capture his third bracelet in an event he never plays.

There are people in the poker world who check into a hotel room, throw their toothbrush into a glass tumbler and immediately set about finding a cobweb to Zippo to death.

Phil Galfond is not one of those people.

A 30-minute walk ago, before nipping into the dentist to book an appointment with a man who looked eerily like Omar Sharif, I wrote a piece about Neymar Jr.

After numerous quarters of the poker community alleged that Alex Foxen and Kristen Bicknell soft-played when three-handed versus Kahle Burns in a $5,000 Venetian event, Michael Watson, Justin Bonomo and Doug Polk come forward with their points of view in an important discussion.

12-years ago, a research team overseen by Dr Gemma Calvert, a neuroimaging expert who throws her coat on a hanger in the University of Warwick, and is the founder of neuroscience in Oxford, began putting smokers into a fMRI machine.

The research team, formed by branding expert Martin Lindstrom, wanted to see if the brain could explain why, despite a worldwide assault on cigarette smoking from every conceivable angle, global consumers still stuck 5,763 billion cancer sticks into their mouths.

It’s estimated that a third of males across the planet smoke, despite nine million people dying of smoking-related illness and disease every year, more than war, terrorism and murder combined.

Another round-up from the World Cup in Russia that sees Brazil and Belgium make it to the quarter-finals, after beating Mexico and Japan on a beautiful day of football overshadowed by play acting from the world’s most expensive footballer.

I’m a big fan of the Virtual Assistant Referee (VAR). Why have three people making the decisions when you can have a whole room of them making it while poring over video replays.

Like shit-stains inside UK toilets with low water marks – it makes sense.

Here are four specific circumstances where VAR comes into play:

Leading UK online betting operator Bet365 has inked a sports betting partnership with the new Hard Rock Atlantic City casino.

On June 25, the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement issued a letter approving a request by the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City and Bet365 Group Ltd to enter into an agreement to conduct a sports wagering related business.

The letter, which was first spotted by PlayNJ’s Eric Ramsey, indicates that Bet365 has applied for a casino service industry enterprise (CSIE) license. The DGE has approved Bet365’s relationship with the Hard Rock venue only until July 31, suggesting the formal approval of the full CSIE license is imminent.

The DGE letter references a Letter of Intent entered into by the two gaming operators, but the DGE’s letter states that its approval “will be for the narrow scope of approving only Article 3 of that agreement.” We’ll just have to wait to learn what other collaborations are envisioned under the new Hard Rock-Bet365 umbrella.

China’s official sports lottery continues to set new sales records during the 2018 FIFA World Cup, even as the authorities complain about rampant unapproved betting options.

According to China’s official government lottery portal, sports lottery sales over the first two weeks of the 2018 World Cup have hit RMB19.1b (US$3.9b), already eclipsing the total RMB12.9b recorded over the entire 2014 World Cup schedule. Projections are that total 2018 World Cup sales could exceed RMB50b ($7.5b), more than half of all sports lottery sales recorded in calendar 2017.

Li Gang, a lottery expert at Shanghai Normal University, told the Australian Financial Review that the increased betting was in part a reflection of the growing Chinese economy, but the rising popularity of social media was also spurring betting interest, thanks to users bragging about their successful betting picks on platforms such as WeChat.

Last month, shortly after the World Cup got underway, state-run media outlets warned Chinese social media platforms to purge themselves of unauthorized online sports lottery apps. Online lottery sales were “temporarily” suspended in March 2015 after some provincial lottery administrators were caught not reporting all their online sales.

The European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) has mounted a legal challenge of Norway’s ban on payment processing for unauthorized online gambling operators.

Over the past year or so, Norway has been clamping down on internationally licensed online gambling operators that compete with the state-run Norsk Tipping and Norsk Rikstoto monopolies. These efforts culminated last month with the government submitting its new payment-blocking plans to the European Commission for approval.

In January, the EGBA asked Norway’s privacy watchdogs to investigate whether the government’s war on payment processing had broken the law by inappropriately collecting scads of data unrelated to the probe.

This week, Norwegian media revealed that the EGBA had also filed a lawsuit in Oslo District Court challenging the government’s May 2017 ban on banks processing payments on behalf of international gambling sites. The EGBA maintains that the ban violates European Union rules on the free movement of goods and services among EU member states.