Monthly Archives: December 2020

BetConstruct holds the CIS Online Poker tournament

Ahead of the New Year, the award-winning gaming and betting technology provider BetConstruct has announced the launch of its flagship event of the year – CIS Online Poker Championship, December 19, 2020 – January 10, 2021. 

The event is a series of poker tournaments with an unprecedented total guaranteed prize pool of 500,000 EUR and a 30,000 EUR GTD bonus for the main event. To build an added level of entertainment for players and provide them with incredible experience, each week will be highlighted with the ​Grand Cup events​ with buy-ins as low as 0 EUR, resulting in higher competition and bigger winnings. 

During the Championship, tournaments of various types will be offered to players of every skill, level of professionalism and bankroll giving equal chances for taking their share from the GTD to all of them. This will undoubtedly fuel participants’ interest and have a positive effect on operators’ profits. 

With the CIS Tournament, BetConstruct continues its global expansion and connects the whole industry, giving the operators an opportunity to benefit from the events and contribute profits to their business.

Rabbit Entertainment appoints Tal Zamstein as new CEO

iGaming operator Rabbit Entertainment has appointed Löwen Play Managing Director Tal Zamstein as its new chief executive effective immediately.

iGaming operator Rabbit Entertainment has appointed Tal Zamstein as its new chief executive effective immediately

Gambling entertainment company Rabbit Entertainment and its brands Lapalingo and Lord Lucky has appointed Tal Zamstein as its new chief executive. As leader of Rabbit Entertainment and its renowned brands, Tal Zamstein plans to invest in infrastructure, expand in key markets, and continue to focus on achieving operational excellence in a regulated environment.

Zamstein is a gambling industry professional having occupied executive positions at Fortuna Group as Group Head of Gaming, Operations Director at Merkur Interactive, Head of Operations at Intertain, Retention Team Leader at BWIN and Head of Games at WIN United, amongst other senior postings. Zamstein is an economist who speaks 6 languages, with a track-record that is focused on growth.

How COVID-19 has shaped the gaming and betting landscape

When 2020 started, the gaming and betting industries were on track for a great year. ICE London 2020 was showcasing some promising new technology and it looked like the gaming sector would continue its upward trajectory in 2020. Unfortunately, the unexpected arrival of the COVID-19 virus flipped everything on its head. Almost every sector was impacted in some way, and the gaming and betting sectors were no exceptions.

Casinos, especially those located in major, tourist-reliant cities, like Macau, saw the biggest impact, with reported revenue loses by as much as 97% year-on-year due to the impact of COVID-19. However, it wasn’t just casinos that suffered, as the suspension of most sports meant that bookmakers also saw losses. William Hill reported a 57% year-on-year decline in net revenue due to the virus, and in August, Veikkaus, the Finnish monopoly operator in this space, projected a loss of over €300m in profits in 2020.

There’s no escaping the fact that the gaming and betting industry has been hugely impacted by COVID-19 however, in other areas of the sector the story has been very different.

Welcome to the digital world

Kalamba Games sees more than 100% growth in 2020

Malta, 15th December 2020 – Kalamba Games, the innovative slots and casino content supplier, is closing this year in its strongest position yet as it forecasts a 100% business growth in 2020. 

The growth has been primarily driven by the introduction of Kalamba’s proprietary Bullseye remote gaming server, which has made a strong market launch this year despite the disruption caused by COVID-19.

The company has also expanded its global reach over the last 12 months to now supply content to more than 300 online casinos across the world. The supplier’s impressive games portfolio will see the addition of 14 new titles by the end of the year, with Blazing Bull, Sky Hunters and Sadie Swift: Guns ‘n Glyphs ranking as its three most successful launches this year. 

Kalamba has recently increased its focus on developing unique features and promotional tools, many of which will be rolled out in 2021. It has also collaborated extensively with other key industry players such as Kindred and Wildz Casinos, and launched Sadie Swift: Guns ‘n Glyphs, a title co-developed with Twitch streamer CasinoTest24 and the result of the industry’s first collaboration with the streaming community.

Spain sees fewer problem gamblers, more cocaine users

Fewer Spaniards are reporting gambling problems although more of them are drinking alcohol and snorting cocaine. 

On Monday, Spain’s Ministry of Health published the XIII Survey on Alcohol and other Drugs in Spain (EDADES) 2019/2020, as well as the first study of addictions prevalent among residents aged 64 years or older. The survey queried nearly 18,000 respondents aged 15-64 between February and March, plus another 1,443 seniors for the 64+ portion. 

The survey found that some 6.7% of respondents had engaged in real-money online gambling in the previous 12 months, up from 3.5% in the 2017-18 survey and from 2.7% in 2015-16. Males (9.1%) were more than twice as likely to have gambled online than females (4.2%), while the 25-34 age demo had the greatest participation at 9.3%. 

There was much greater participation for land-based gambling (63.6%), which was up marginally from 2017-18 (59.5%) but significantly higher than 2015-16 (37.4%). The gender divide was split far more evenly – 65.9% male, 61.2% female) – while each successive age demo featured greater participation, peaking at 77.1% in the 55-64 group. 

Aussies curbed gambling during COVID, but those who gambled were happier

Australians dramatically curbed their gambling activity during the pandemic and gambling participation remains below pre-COVID numbers despite options returning as the country reopens. 

New research released Tuesday by the Australian National University (ANU) queried over 3k adult respondents in each of two surveys in May and November to determine their level of gambling activity during the pandemic. The figures were then compared to a similar survey conducted in April 2019. 

Last year’s survey found nearly 66% of respondents admitted gambling at some point in the previous 12 months, but May 2020 found this figure to have dipped to 53%, in part due to the closure of land-based gambling options in March. By November, this figure had inched back up to 58.7%, although that’s still significantly below the pre-pandemic norm. 

The April 2019 to May 2020 decline was fairly evenly split between genders but, while female gamblers showed a negligible rise in gambling activity between May and November 2020, male gambling was up 7.4 points, only about 3.3 points below where it started in April 2019. 

Neymar “Excited” to return to PokerStars as ambassador

From the Champions League final to winning an Olympic gold medal, Brazilian striker Neymar is a global superstar almost without parallel in sporting terms. On the poker felt, he’s a passionate player who for two years was a PokerStars ambassador for the brand until leaving in 2017.

That move coincided with a switch from Barcelona to Paris as Neymar left behind the world’s most famous attacking trio, ‘MSN’ (Messi, Suarez & Neymar) and linked up with Kylian Mbappe in the French capital.

The fourth highest-paid athlete in the world in 2020 according to Forbes magazine, Neymar has rejoined PokerStars as their sporting ambassador, and sounds very excited to be back under the banner of the Red Spade. Heck, he even looks excited, judging by his Instagram. 

Poker Idols – Justin Bonomo

Sitting in second place on the all-time money list for live tournament winnings, Justin Bonomo is a poker phenomenon. At one point and at his busiest, it looked like he couldn’t lose. But who is Bonomo and how did he become such an incredible poker player?

We look back at the life and times of a bona fide poker idol – Justin Bonomo.

The Fateful Game

Justin Bonomo was always playing games as a kid and similarly to Bryn Kenney, who we also profiled in our Poker Idols series, went from playing Magic the Gathering to poker. That transition happened when Bonomo cold an online character of his in Everquest for $500, depositing the fund on Paradise Poker. Once online, Bonomo quickly ran up a $10,000 bankroll and was inspired by television broadcasts of World Poker Tour shows.

Jealous online gamers contributing to DDoS attack surge

Online video game portals are increasingly finding themselves under malicious cyber-attack as COVID-19 forces individuals – not all of them honourable – to seek out digital forms of entertainment. 

The third-quarter threat report from distributed-denial of service (DDoS) mitigation specialists NexusGuard found that real-money online gambling and free-play/virtual currency online gaming operators were the two most popular DDoS targets in Q3, although the real-money boys are doing a much better job at defending their turf than their recreational counterparts.

NexusGuard’s numbers show online gambling accounted for 45.2% of all DDoS attacks in the three months ending September 30, while online gaming accounted for 31.7%. Non-gaming sectors such as business, government, education and finance were subject to dramatically fewer attacks. 

The report claims the overall number of attacks remains high, up over 287% from Q3 2019, but represented a 51.3% fall from Q2, during which the pandemic lockdown was more severe and individuals came to rely more heavily on digital connectivity, particularly in terms of entertainment options. 

Russia’s new sports betting rules chase VulkanBet from local market

Russia’s bookmaker ranks are already thinning in response to the government’s proposed new regulatory environment. 

On Tuesday, Russian-licensed betting site VulkanBet.ru announced that it would “cease to operate on the territory of the Russian Federation from January 1, 2021.” The site has already stopped accepting new wagers and customer registrations, but promises to honor “all obligations to players and contractors” by December 31. 

VulkanBet.ru launched in June 2019 and the company humble-bragged that it had since become one of Russia’s top-three eSports betting platforms. But the company said it plans to “focus its development on markets with more loyal conditions for conducting betting business.”  

The message didn’t explicitly say so, but VulkanBet was referring to Bill No. 1055657-7, which (for starters) aims to impose a new 1% tax on betting turnover to fund contributions to local sports bodies (with significant quarterly minimums per league per operator), while also scrapping the country’s two rival betting industry groups in favor of a new Unified Gambling Regulator. 

WSOP main event day 2 sees Joseph Hebert lead Vegas final table

The race to become World Champion in Las Vegas may have taken all year, but we’re just eight eliminations from finding our who will wear the crown… at least for a couple of days! 

Don’t worry, this is no jibe at the fact that Stoyan Madanzhiev still considers that the $3.9 million he won back in the summer makes him the real World Champion. In fact, we won’t even mention it.  

The final nine players are set for a Las Vegas at the Rio showdown on December 28th, which takes place just two days before the 30th December showdown between the WSOP.com and GGPoker World Champions. That heads-up showdown will produce the ‘Hybrid’ world champion, awarding them an extra $1 million.  

Day 2 of the WSOP Main Event, held on WSOP.com in Nevada and New Jersey saw the final nine players emerge from 71 players who kicked off the penultimate day of the event.