In keeping with the legacy borne from the name, controversy over the demolition of the Trump Plaza Casino and Hotel in Atlantic City has crept up. The property has been shut down since 2014 and is now owned by Carl Icahn, the multibillionaire entrepreneur and Trump associate. Plans to bring down the building gained momentum following an Atlantic City order to raze the property last March, and a plan was hatched. An auction would be held that would benefit the non-profit Boys & Girls Club of Atlantic City, allowing the highest bidder to push the button when it came time to level Trump Plaza. However, with the auction set to end today, in-fighting has caused issues that have forced the auction to be canceled. 

Bodnar’s Auctions of New Jersey was brought in by Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small to oversee the auction, working out a deal that would have all the proceeds go to the Boys & Girls Club. The event began in the middle of last month and should have been able to run its natural course, which would have allowed it to end today. However, Icahn, or at least someone involved in his operations, reportedly caused a scene and forced the auction to be canceled. 

A statement provided by Bodnar’s gave the reason for the cancellation, explaining, “Shortly after announcing the auction, the attorneys for IEP AC Plaza LLC, a subsidiary controlled by Icahn Enterprises, sent a letter stating that IEP AC Plaza LLC was not on board with the situation and would in no way participate or help facilitate, citing safety issues. After exhausting every avenue to bring the parties together to make this exciting event happen, we received the final decision from IEP AC Plaza LLC that we must cease and desist.”

It’s unclear what type of “safety issues” might arise from pushing a button, but perhaps that will be revealed in time. As it stands now, the auction had attracted substantial attention, with the highest bid coming in at $175,000. This wasn’t quite the $1 million that had hoped to be raised, but it’s still a lot of money that would have gone to a worthy cause. Now, the Boys & Girls Club will need to figure out how to make up the difference after a bitter 2020. 

After more than a decade in the industry, Unibo co-founder Alex Wicen believes that you can’t put a price on the importance of player incentives. Wicen sat down with Calvinayre.com lead reporter Becky Liggero Fontana to elaborate on the types of player incentives that continue to be a drawcard in the gambling industry.

There’s more than one way to keep players involved. Wicen explained the differences between incentives that encourage brand loyalty, as opposed to the type that encourages players to continue spending. “All incentives are there to in essence get players staying longer or playing longer or having more fun. This hopefully leads to the player coming back more often and if you have more fun playing you should come back. But regulatory jurisdictional people are very much against the things, that kind of make you change the idea behind the casino game,” Wicen said.

https://youtu.be/dlJyqX1hMv0Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Alex Wicen believes you can’t put a price on player incentives (https://youtu.be/dlJyqX1hMv0)

Wicen elaborates further on how some casino bonuses aren’t providing the long-term value to players:

Just like last year at this time, it has taken awhile for casino operators in Macau to figure out if employee bonuses were going to be on the table. SJM Holdings got the ball rolling this year when it announced at the beginning of the month that it was going to stick to its long-running plan of offering extra cash to its employees, and three more operators have now spoken up, as well. 2020 was a difficult year because of COVID-19, but Macau’s casino operators are doing their best to live up to the promises they have made annually to their employees. 

SJM said a couple of weeks ago that it would be paying out the “living subsidy” in accordance with an employee’s tenure and salary with the company, with half of the payment to be made this month and the other half in July. MGM China was the next operator to join in, announcing yesterday that it was prepared to give a “discretionary bonus” to certain non-management personnel. Those eligible to receive the money, approximately 90% of the workforce, can expect to start seeing the payments within the next couple of weeks. 

MGM China will offer one month’s salary to those employees, with plans to distribute the bonuses before and after the upcoming Chinese New Year (CNY) next month. There will be two installments distributed to all of the eligible workers, one before CNY on February 12 and the other after. However, exact dates weren’t provided. 

MGM China Executive Director and co-Chair Pansy Ho showed her appreciation for those employees who have helped the company overcome the challenging year, adding, “We thank our team members from the bottom of our hearts for staying united, as well as being loyal [to] contribute their best to the company.”

To those who look carefully enough, history is poetry. Most often the poem woven by the sands of time looks nebulous at first, only to become clarified later on in hindsight, when the fuller pattern emerges. It is perhaps fitting that Sheldon Adelson passed away just about one week before the fall of his largest political benefactor, U.S. President Donald Trump, from power. The Jewish mourning period of Shiva, literally “Seven” (it’s the same word in both languages actually), ended yesterday for the Adelson family, and Trump now has 24 hours to tie any loose ends and get out of Washington DC.

Coincidentally or not, depending on how you see history, his second most notorious political ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has also fallen on the rocks at about the same time, again, as the Netanyahu government coalition has fallen and the fourth Israeli election in two years will take place in March. When three world titans all fall at the same time, while the entire global economy is so obviously being completely restructured in unprecedented ways, it is hard not to see Adelson’s passing at precisely this time as part of a wider historic transition into something else. What exactly, we do not yet know, but the old world order looks like it’s being swept away. It’s a heavy, dangerous gauntlet to pick up, and whoever raises it is going to have to be sharp, nimble, and most of all humble. None of us know how this is going to end, least of all the people on top.

The damage to Las Vegas Sands over the last three quarters has been absolutely immense. Lockdowns hurt everyone, even and especially the world’s most powerful. It may not seem like that from an individual consumer standpoint. The rich still have their yachts and mansions and all the rest, but consider this. Las Vegas Sands’ retained earnings since inception, representing the amount of value produced by the company in pure profit, has been obliterated by nearly two thirds over just the last three quarters. Two more quarters of this and the amount of money that Sands will have made over the course of its entire history will be less than zero. That’s how quickly the most powerful can fall. Perhaps Adelson has been mercifully spared the worst of it.

It is perhaps also fitting that Adelson, the arch enemy of online gambling, has left this world at precisely the time that online gambling is pretty much the only remaining functional outlet for the industry, while his casinos are being smashed like never before. This is now a world that Adelson perhaps, deep down, no longer really wanted to be a part of. It is very difficult for us to see him as simply an elderly man, the powerhouse that he was, but as most of us are not octogenarian billionaires and most of us never will be, we simply do not know what it’s like to see your empire under attack and your political allies get flushed out and your competitors rise in a world under paralysis.

It’s almost business as usual for the Pearl River Resort’s sportsbook, nearby Philadelphia, Mississippi. After months of closure, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians’ run casino is now humming along just as it did before Covid-19.

“When college football came back, followed by the NFL, we had everything going on, and that’s when everything started picking up for us,” Director of Sportsbook Chris Hopwood said. “All of the customers started coming back, and it became fun again.”

“Our location at Bok Homa was really busy, and here it slowly started coming back because we’re more of a transient, tourist place, so we get big crowds from Louisiana and Alabama,” added Hopwood. “We were a little slow to start with here, and if you watch our table games or slots, it’s still a little slow, because those customers haven’t quite come back, but for me, it’s been going full steam ahead.”

Employees have returned from furlough, customers are coming in, and it’s almost the same as it ever was. “It feels the same, except we have to wear masks now,” said employee Toni Eaves.

Esports betting has grown and grown during lockdown, and with more money flowing into the industry during the global COVID-19 pandemic, games such as League of Legends, Fortnite and Call of Duty have been popular destinations for sports bettors looking to broaden their betting scope.

Which game has been the most popular across the board? Well, it’s a close run thing further down the list, but LOOT.BET have looked at all the analytics and come up with some great information about exactly where esports bettors money has been going in the last 12 months.

Over the past year, as you can see below, it’s been a year dominated by bettors investing in CS:GO, or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to you and me.

As you can see, CS:GO saw by far the most money changing hands, with 53% of the total money placed on Esports during this period. Coming in second was the phenomenally popular Dota 2 with 35%, and those two games were predictably trailed by some distance as League of Legends (LoL) scooped up a further 7% of the bet slips.

Lithuanian player Paulius Plausinaitis took control of the $1,700-entry WSOPC Winter Main Event on Sunday to take victory and claim the $1,236,361 top prize on GGPoker.

With nine players making the final table from a mammoth 6,395 total entries, the biggest prizes of the $10.3 million prizepool were up for grabs on Sunday and some superstars of the game were at the virtual felt on GGPoker to battle it out for the title. 

The action was fast and furious, with the final playing out over just three hours and it was ‘BetAddict’ from Israel who busted first. Starting with just 20 big blinds, they couldn’t resist moving all-in with ace-king and the pocket jacks of Artem Prostak held after the Belarussian called to reduce the field to eight.

Next to go was ‘DaiMing141319’ of China, who dwindled down to just a couple of blinds before they moved all-in with king-queen, which couldn’t hold against WSOP bracelet winner Joseph Cheong’s eight-ten. Cheong scored a second consecutive elimination when Alexandru Papazian lost out with ace-five as Cheong had pocket jacks soon afterwards.

Last week, we spoke to The Secret Coach about how kids who are missing playing football can turn their hobby into more of a career choice during lockdown.

This week, we’re looking at the top end of the best league in the world and asking them which EPL teams have come out of COVID stronger.

The Secret Coach is a professional football coach in English football… who will remain anonymous. The Secret Coach has worked with some of the biggest names in the game, been through the coaching badge courses and is currently part of the coaching team at an English league side… and that’s all we’re telling you. As ever, this week, The Secret Coach pulls no punches! 

We start by tackling two of the favourites for the Premier League title. Liverpool and Manchester United have emerged largely unscathed in terms of Coronavirus and sit comfortably in the top four and are chasing that title. Is that a coincidence or evidence that staying as virus-free as possible has a positive effect on each team’s title chances? 

UK online gambling operators’ claims of a thriving unauthorized black market are being refuted by their own regulator ahead of the government’s review of gambling laws. 

Shortly before Christmas, the UK’s Betting & Gaming Council (BGC) lobby group circulated details of a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report that claimed some 200k UK punters spent around £1.4b on unauthorized internationally licensed online gambling sites in a 12-month period spanning 2018 and 2019. 

The PwC report further stated that internationally licensed sites not authorized to conduct business in the UK accounted enjoyed 27m visits from UK punters during the period in question, equal to 2.5% of all online betting visits. These sites also claimed a 9% share of all UK gambling search results. 

BGC CEO Michel Dugher claimed these statistics should help guide the government’s review of the Gambling Act 2005, which promises to severely clip the wings of UK-licensed sites. Dugher said the PwC report demonstrated “the danger of unintentionally driving punters into the arms of the illegal, online black market – which offers none of the protections of the regulated sector.”