At this point, it would almost be a surprise not to hear that some person or company was suing Imperial Pacific International (IPI). The casino operator behind Saipan’s Imperial Palace has been called out for a number of violations and mounting debt, and has already admitted that it virtually has no cash left in the wallet. At this point, deciding to enter a business relationship with the company would be about as productive as hitting your head against a brick wall, but there are some firms that previously entered into contracts with IPI in good faith, only to now learn that their faith may have been misdirected. Pacific Rim Land Development, a major construction contractor, has already learned that lesson, and staffing firm Fritz Pacific Project Development Services is now finding it out, as well. It has launched a lawsuit against IPI, arguing for $750,000 in outstanding debt and damages. 

Fritz Pacific’s owner, Alfredo Cabael, accuses IPI of breaching its manpower contract, which had begun in the summer of 2018. The company was providing construction workers, including carpenters, electricians, crane operators and more, and all of the work invoices were approved by IPI management, according to Cabael in his complaint. However, he adds that the company only paid part of its invoices before dropping Fritz Pacific to create its own manpower company, AM Group, in November of last year. 

Cabael indicates in his complaint that he has tried to rectify the situation with IPI directly, but has never been able to make any headway. As a result, he was left with no alternative but to lodge the complaint, requesting $745,303.94. That amount is to cover the outstanding debt on the company’s staffing services, as well as interest and other associated costs. This case will be added to the growing pile on the desk of Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands judge Ramona V Manglona, who has had to deal with IPI more times than she would probably like.

IPI is going to have to figure out how to defend itself legally against the continued onslaught of bad news. In another case involving questionable labor issues, the attorney representing IPI has dropped out and, if the company doesn’t have any money as it has claimed, finding someone willing to defend it pro bono or on the promise of a future payment might be difficult. In this case, IPI has been sued by the U.S. Department of Labor for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, but attorney Michael Dotts no longer wants to have anything to do with the company. In a statement he sent to Marianas Variety, he explained, “I have suspended working for IPI. I am still counsel of record for IPI in a number of cases and I must remain as counsel of record until the court allows me to withdraw.”

As time goes on, the world is increasingly having its conversations online. Gambling conferences have gone digital, Presidents prefer Twitter over interviews, and family members share big news on Facebook and Instagram, rather than the hand written letters of yester-year. It’s important then that we re-learn the skills that kept us civil, and not further deepen divides that are already being created by our little digital bubbles.

To help that effort, we’ve gathered a few tips to follow so that you can keep friends and stay close with loved ones online.

Keep everything separate

Although it can be a bit annoying at times that social media has fractured itself, there’s some convenience in having different social media platforms for different purposes. LinkedIn for work, Facebook for family, Instagram for friends, and Twitter for the rest? That’s one way to do it. If you are a social media power user and have multiple platforms, you probably don’t have the same audience on all of them. Use that to your advantage, and only post what your audience would expect in each place. Family photos on FB, you’re most controversial opinions on Twitter and you should be fine.

Getting a new CEO may have done Donaco International some good. Lee Bug Huy was given the position this past September and the casino operator has now moved into better times in the fourth quarter of the year. According to a filing with the Australian Securities Exchange (ASE) from today, Donaco has hit positive EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) for October and November and expects the trend to continue through the end of the year.

Donaco’s casino efforts are primarily centered on the Asian market and it runs the Star Vegas Resort and Club in Cambodia and the Aristo International in Vietnam. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the Star Vegas to close this past April, only finally reopening at the beginning of September and, since beginning to welcome back gamblers is “no longer making a loss.” The company added in its filing that the shift to a positive EBITDA was “driven by business initiatives implemented by the new board and executive team” that include “a shift in customer targeting, with a renewed focus on attracting clientele from the local region to Star Vegas, to in turn reduce the company’s international staff expenses and provide a solid platform for growth.”

The company had a lot of difficulty due to the coronavirus pandemic and, in September, indicated that it had a loss of $43.5 million for the 12-month period that ended on June 30. That led to the implementation of a “continued cost control strategy” that, combined with the reduction in pandemic restrictions, had “improved the position of the business” and allowed it to narrow its fiscal-year loss to $41.6 million. Some pandemic restrictions are still in place; however, Donaco is confident that it will be put things back to normal soon. 

The filing also addressed the ongoing disagreement with former business partners and outstanding debt owed to one of its creditors, Mega International Commercial Bank out of Taiwan. The bank is working with Donaco to facilitate payments negotiated between the casino operator and the former partners, and previous discussions between Mega International and Donaco have addressed how best to handle the situation amid the global pandemic. The lender has already made arrangements to give Donaco a little flexibility with its outstanding credit debt and Donaco added in its filing that it has “continued paying down of debt with Mega Bank.” It expects to be able to pay the outstanding balance – around $7.8 million – sometime during fiscal year 2021. 

The Americas

Flutter entertainment has been left reeling after a Kentucky court reinstated an $870m judgement. The court ruled the company owed the state $1.2B in damages stemming for its PokerStars brand’s legacy operations.; New Jersey sports betting set a new record for November as operators continue to ride the turnaround. Figures released by state regulators show that sports betting handle raked in $931.6m for November; Hard Rock International has launched a new iGaming and sports betting joint venture and nabbed a trio of TSG execs to lead the new venture. TSG’s ex-CEO Ragi Ashkenazi has been tapped to head up the operation; Sports data company Genius Sports announced their intention to purchase Sportzcast. The deal will see them take over the widely-used Scorebot scoring system; Ahead of Maryland’s expected legalisation of sports betting, Penn National Gaming (PNG)have entered the market. PNG recently acquired the operation rights to the Hollywood Casino Perryville; Compare.bet has taken the leap into the Brazilian market as part of its global expansion strategy. Over the last 12 months, the company has made solid ground in Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.; Youtube star Jake Paul is desperate to land a mega-fight against Conor McGregor. Paul has made a number of attempts to goad the UFC star into a $50m mega-fight; FanDuel Group has inked a deal with Cage sports for the Caribbean and LATAM region. The deal will see FanDuel gain access to the sports betting market in a joint venture operation in the Caribbean.

Europe

Electronic Arts has succumbed to pressure from regulators and is set to ban FIFA loot boxes in selected territories. The move comes as Dutch authorities labelled the loot boxes as a form of gambling in the popular franchise; Italian gaming company SISAL SPA is set to partner with Scientific Games in Morocco. The deal will allow SISAL to introduce a range of lottery games to local retailers; Tougher government regulations have forced Russian bookmakers to close their doors. Russian-licensed betting site VulkanBet.ru announced it would cease operations at the end of 2020; PSG superstar Neymar is returning to the poker world. The Brazilian was announced as the brand ambassador for Pokerstars;

Finland’s Veikkaus gambling monopoly will lay off up to 800 staff in January while the country is being shamed as the only remaining European Union country clinging to a state-run monopoly model.  

On Thursday, Veikkaus announced that the ‘cooperation negotiations’ it launched with its retail staff earlier this month had concluded with plans to begin laying off up to 800 betting employees starting early in the new year. The layoffs are slated to last no longer 90 days, provided Finland can regain some control over its COVID-19 infection rate. 

Veikkaus director of channels and sales Jari Heino said the layoffs would target staff “for whom we cannot reasonably arrange other suitable work or training.” Heino said Veikkaus would utilize paid leave to reduce the number of redundancies. 

The layoffs will mirror the pandemic’s spread across Finland’s 20 hospital districts. Once a district signals that infections are under control, Veikkaus will reopen its local branded arcades and its decentralized slots network – restaurants, service stations, other retail stores – and staff in those districts will return to work. 

Sports betting operator SportPesa’s fight with Kenya’s government keeps getting uglier, as a cabinet minister ordered the deportation of foreign nationals connected to the firm. 

On Wednesday, officials representing multiple government agencies raided SportPesa’s offices in Nairobi. Initial reports indicated the officials, who were accompanied by police, were seeking documents related to the company’s recently relaunched online betting operations.

However, Kenyan media reported Thursday that the raid resulted in the arrests of an unspecified number of foreign nationals, believed to be primarily from Eastern Europe. The arrested individuals were among the 14 foreigners that Interior Minister Fred Matiangi (pictured) ordered deported Thursday for allegedly operating in Kenya without proper work permits and for their involvement in illegal gambling. 

SportPesa was founded by a number of Bulgarian nationals, including Guerassim Nikolov, who remains a major shareholder in SportPesa. Nikolov is believed to have been among the 17 foreign directors of betting companies who were deported in the summer of 2019 for a variety of cited justifications, including expired work permits, lack of any work permits whatsoever and evading local taxes.  

Illinois bettors pushed their state’s sportsbooks to new heights in October, with both handle and revenue setting new records. 

Figures released Thursday by the Illinois Gaming Board (IGB) show the state’s eight licensed sportsbooks handled wagers worth $434.6m in October, 42.4% higher than September’s previous record. Revenue was up over six-fold from September to a record $42.2m, with the state’s share coming to $6.3m. 

Retail betting accounted for less than $25m of October’s handle, a share that will grow even smaller in November as casinos were forced into their second pandemic lockdown on November 19. All the more reason to celebrate Gov. J.B. Pritzker having once again extended the exemption for mobile bettors to register new accounts in person through January 9. 

Illinois betting has a new king, appropriately enough named DraftKings and its local Casino Queen partner, which together handled wagers worth $141.4m in October. That was more than enough to dethrone reigning monarch Rivers Casino Des Plaines/BetRivers ($115.5m), while the tandem of FanDuel and Boyd Gaming’s Par-A-Dice casino ranked third with $105.5m. 

It’s the most welcome return to poker since Phil Ivey ended his self-imposed exile to rejoin the World Series circus a couple of years ago.  

High Stakes Poker is back for a brand-new series.  

With original hosts Gabe Kaplan and AJ Benza, HSP is back, back, back in a big way and we watched the first episode of the returning series with a mile-wide grin on our faces here at Calvin Ayre.  

The cash game, with players sitting down with a minimum of $200,000 and a maximum of “a biscuit short of half a million dollars”, features some terrific action, great banter between a perfectly cast pick of players.  

UK gambling giant Flutter Entertainment is reeling after Kentucky’s highest court ruled the company owed the state over $1.2b in damages stemming from its PokerStars brand’s legacy operations.

On Thursday, the Kentucky Supreme Court voted 4-3 to reinstate an $870m judgment issued in 2015 against PokerStars’ then-owner Amaya Gaming by Franklin Circuit Court Judge Thomas Wingate. The sum represented a trebling of the $290m judgment Wingate originally imposed against Stars.

The judgment followed a civil suit brought by the state against a host of online gambling operators deemed to be serving Kentucky bettors without its permission. Some operators cut deals with the state but Stars, then controlled by Isai Scheinberg and his son Mark, decided not to knuckle under.   

PokerStars was later acquired by The Stars Group (TSG), which in 2018 celebrated a Kentucky Court of Appeals ruling that overturned the lower court’s judgment. However, the state vowed to appeal, leading to Thursday’s bombshell announcement. 

What do you get the poker player in your life who has everything? The answer – more of everything!  

Every poker player relies on what they do at the felt to get by, but at Christmas, poker players can be notoriously difficult to buy for. You don’t want to be stuck buying that awful plastic poker set for $9.99 at your local thrift store which features four different coloured poker chips and a dealer button that you could start a game of tiddlywinks with.  

With a week to go until the biggest multi-table tournament in the world, Santa may be getting ready to deal out the cards and gifts, but you’ll want to nudge St. Nick along with one of these tips for a winning present. What will you end up with in your stocking? Simply leave this webpage open close to your nearest and dearest and they’ll do the rest.  

Tip: Why not favourite Calvin Ayre’s Poker Page for extra Father Christmas-related fortune over the festive period? You can find that page right here.  

UK gamblers boosted their activity across all verticals in October, but football’s return relegated online slots to second place among customer losses. 

Figures released Thursday by the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) show its online licensees’ gross gambling revenue (GGY) hit £542m in October, a 29% rise from September’s result. The UKGC credited the gain in part to the recent return of Premier League football boosting active accounts by 7%, as well as a number of bookie-friendly results.  

Football’s resumption pushed real event online betting GGY up 52% from September to £290m, with the number of individual bets rising 12%. For the first time since the UKGC began its pandemic market watch in March, online betting customer losses exceeded those for online slots. 

Football was the tide that lifted all betting boats in October, as retail wagering totaled £115.6m, up 15.6% from September. Bets placed by self-service betting terminals (SSBT) drove the retail gains, with SSBT GGY up 49% to £41.2m while OTC betting rose a mere 3% to £74.5m (likely due to bettors’ pandemic preference for dealing with machines, not humans). 

Pennsylvania’s online gambling and sports betting revenue helped paper over the double-digit losses suffered by state casinos’ land-based slots and tables in November.

Figures released by the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) show the state’s gambling licensees reported combined revenue of nearly $284.3m in November, down a modest 2.7% from the same month last year but a significant step back from October 2020’s $320.2m. 

Land-based slots revenue slumped 31.6% year-on-year to $129.5m while table games fell 30% to $52.3m as the state’s casinos continued to struggle under pandemic restrictions. The retail revenue slide will accelerate when December’s numbers are released, following their second state-ordered medical shutdown last Saturday that will extend into early January.

The outlook is significantly brighter at the state’s online casinos, which reported revenue of just under $59.8m in November, a new monthly record, although just barely, rising a mere $15k from October. Online slots brought in $39.4m, digital table games added $18m and the state’s lone online poker operator (PokerStars) contributed $2.4m. 

Now that Robert Downey Jr. is officially out of the Marvel universe, the comic book franchise is set to revive the Fantastic Four. While now may be the time to drop in an Arrested Development reference, we have the odds on who may be pulling on the spandex for the dream team in 2022.

Giancarlo Esposito is the early frontrunner at +350 to fill the role of the villain Doctor Doom. Esposito is better known for his role as Gus Frigg in Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. The Danish-born actor is making waves as the villain of the new Star Wars series The Mandalorian. Cillian Murphy of the Chris Nolan Batman series and BBC’s Peaky Blinders is the second favourite behind Esposito at +500 for the role.

Anthony Ramos is a slight favourite to claim the role of the human torch. Zac Efron also has a claim to the role first filled by Chris Evans in the film version (If you don’t count the 94 Roger Corman take). The husband-and-wife team of Emily Blunt and John Krasinski are the favourites for the roles of the Invisible Woman and Mr Fantastic. The two were last together in A Quiet Place. 

The Thing looms as an interesting choice for the quartet, with the Rock, John Cena and Terry Crews outsiders to fulfil the role. According to Bodog, Stephen Graham at +400 is the favourite to land the role. Graham is better known for his role as Scrum in the Pirates of the Caribbean series.

A new alliance between Entain (formerly GVC Holdings) and Verizon Media hopes to keep pace with new technologies, and deliver a whole new level of realistic digital gambling experiences to customers. The two companies announced their new global innovation alliance in a December 17 press release.

Entain will work with Verizon to develop a new Virtual Reality (VR) experience, allowing users to watch live sports, interact with sports data, gamble, and socialize with friends. The two companies will also develop concepts for new formats using 5G and augmented reality to offer similar content. The end goal is to offer the customer experiences similar to being in the stadium, while having all the benefits of sitting on the couch.

“To win in the future we need to understand where consumers will be in five, ten years’ time and work with other global businesses also investing in that,” said Shay Segev, CEO of Entain. “We envisage consumers meeting at a game with friends, who could in fact be elsewhere, using virtual reality headsets to watch, interact and share the experience together and, potentially, compete between themselves at half time or feel like they’re on the pitch with the players.”

“Together, we are building the next-generation of content experiences for sports and gaming fans,” said said Guru Gowrappan, CEO, Verizon Media. “Our world-first 5G-enabled production studios in LA and London, creative technology teams and Verizon Media’s Immersive platform, that enables extended reality (XR) content to be created and distributed across digital channels at scale, allow partners like Entain to bring next-level immersive and interactive experiences to their customers.”

When Virginia decided to launch legal sports gambling in the state, the response was overwhelming. 25 applications were received for a field of only 12 licenses, but some of those applicants may have jumped the gun. As the Virginia Lottery, the entity tasked with laying out the rules and regulations for the new market, unveils its guidance, some of its expectations are causing sportsbooks to cry foul. The reaction probably won’t be enough to stop the clock, but it could cause Virginia’s sports gambling market to lose a few yards. 

Virginia wants sports gambling operators to pay 15% in taxes – a high amount, but not a show-stopper. However, what is apparently making things difficult for sportsbooks to figure out how to operate is a requirement that they offer game spreads in real-time. The Virginia Lottery decided that this was a requirement so that gamblers could make the best decisions, and it comes with a caveat that the sportsbooks show – with each line – an explanation of how they reached that conclusion. They also have to be able to show the current handle and the exact payout. Anyone who has been around sports gambling for even five minutes knows that these are not just impractical requests – they’re impossible.

Still, in order to appease regulators, sportsbooks have tried to make it work. They tried, and failed. FanDuel, with all of its financial and technical backing, couldn’t figure out a viable solution when it ran a test program in October that used only 24 bets on a single NBA Playoff game. Extend that to hundreds, if not thousands, of events being played simultaneously around the world, and the only thing that emerges is a nightmare. 

FanDuel gave it a shot and then reported its findings back to the Virginia Lottery. The operator laid it all out, explaining, “Sports betting apps are simply not built to provide and display this type of information. This requirement would force a re-engineering of the products, to create a demonstrably worse user experience. The actual odds [of a game] and by how many points [is always an] unknown.”