American history was made on Tuesday when the states of Delaware and Nevada officially began sharing online poker liquidity.

The interstate online poker – and only online poker – deal between the two states has been a long time coming but WSOP.com head of online poker Bill Rini confirmed the soft launch of the network on Tuesday night. Reports are emerging of players from the two states exchanging greetings like astronauts meeting cosmonauts through the hatch of the Mir space station.

Sadly, while the date itself is historic, the immediate impact of this launch will be muted. Nevada’s intrastate online poker market was on a sustained negative trajectory until it stopped reporting revenue in December (after falling to just two operators the month before). Meanwhile, Delaware’s already wafer thin online poker revenue fell 70% in January.

So in the short term, at least, this is more about huddling together for warmth than setting anything on fire. A low profile might not be such a bad thing, as any potentially embarrassing technical kinks can be tweaked by network operator 888 Holdings before America’s anti-online zealots get wise.

MGM Resorts CEO Jim Murren says he’s “bemused” by Connecticut’s plan to build small-scale casinos to head off the threat of MGM’s new Massachusetts resort.

Murren made the comments during Tuesday’s groundbreaking ceremony in Springfield, MA, where MGM’s $800m casino expects to open in 2017. This has the operators of Connecticut’s two tribal casinos – Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods – putting aside their differences to fend off a common enemy. The tribes have proposed building three new casinos, particularly a new small-scale facility along Interstate 91 on the state’s northern border, close to Springfield.

Murren told the Hartford Courant that he’d “love to go toe-to-toe with Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun.” Murren said MGM’s “brand-new, luxury resort” on three city blocks in downtown Springfield was more than enough to compete with some “box of slots” on the highway.

Mohegan Tribal Council chairman Kevin ‘Red Eagle’ Brown has since hotly disputed this characterization, saying the tribes’ new casino would be a “first-rate gaming facility” and most definitely not a slot parlor. “That’s one of the myths we’re trying to take out.”

The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa will get their time in court with Phil Ivey after his legal team failed in their bid to persuade a District Judge that the case should not even make civil court.

Phil Ivey is not going to be eating meat paste sandwiches anytime soon, but he is facing some stiff financial challenges.

The most profitable online cash game player of all time, is currently the 2015 biggest loser with over $1.5m in losses; that’s nearly a million more than anyone else playing in the virtual world. And he has just received some bad news from his legal team in Atlantic City.

You may recall that The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa are suing Mr. Ivey, his female companion Cheng Yin Sun, and the card manufacturer Gemaco for their part in $9.5m in losses that were sustained during four sessions of baccarat sometime in 2012. I know. The mind boggles.

Gevork Kasabyan defeated Adam Weinraub, in heads-up action, to take the first prize of $205,720 in the World Series of Poker Circuit Main Event at the Bicycle Casino, California.

When you wake up on the final day of a World Series of Poker Circuit (WSOPC) Main Event, knowing you have 25% of the chips in play, with 14-players remaining, you expect nothing more than the number one spot.

That’s how things were for Adam Weinraub. He knows a thing or two about poker. He has over $600,000 in live tournament earnings, won a World Poker Tour (WPT) Celebrity Invitational Event in Season 5 for $125,000, and also beat

[Image Credit: PokerNews]

Three impressive feats of poker proliferance to bring you up to speed on, including victories for Georgios Zisimopoulos and Keith Johnson in the Italian Poker Tour, whilst Dzmitry Urbanovich runs riot in the European Poker Tour.

The decision to move the European Poker Tour (EPT) to Malta has proven to be a smart one. The poker playing community has flocked to the tiny island in their droves.

The Global Poker Index took advantage of the deluge (GPI) by hosting the inaugural Global Poker Masters (GPM). Italy winning poker’s version of the World Cup, every single second of which was streamed live on Twitch.

That was for glory.

Cambodia‘s government earned over $25m in tax revenue from casino operations in 2014, a 12% gain over 2013.

Ros Phirun, director general of the finance ministry’s financial industry department, told the Cambodian Television Network that the country’s 59 casinos had not only contributed to the state’s budget “but also contributed to developing areas along the border.” Phirun said the state expects 2015’s casino tax take to rise a more modest 4% to $26m.

With the exception of NagaCorp’s NagaWorld casino in Phnom Penh, all Cambodia’s casinos are located in border areas with Thailand and Vietnam. Lately, the casinos bordering Vietnam have been subject to any number of lurid headlines, from the apparent suicide of a Hanoi man found hanging from a belt in a casino washroom in Svay Rieng Province to the kidnap and murder of an eight-year-old Vietnamese schoolgirl whose body was found near another casino in Svay Rieng.

Recently, Cambodian police are focusing their attention on an alleged protection racket that has been extorting money from Russian ex-pats in the Sihanoukville area in the country’s southwest. Vladimir Palancica, a local tour operator, said he was attacked at the Queenco Casino and Hotel last month by 10 men with guns and knives after Palancica refused to give his attackers money. Three tourists were reportedly injured in the melee.

Antigua’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne has hit back at US claims that he believes “unfairly and unjustly” harm his nation’s reputation.

On Tuesday, Browne made a statement to the Antiguan House of Representatives regarding the US State Department’s 2015 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR), which labeled Antigua and six other Caribbean countries “jurisdictions of primary concern for money laundering.”

Browne said a diplomatic note had been transmitted to the US government stating that “the comments and assertions on Antigua and Barbuda in the INCSR 2015 lack any basis in fact and are not based on objective criteria.”

Browne said he was “especially amazed” by the report’s characterization of Antigua’s online gambling industry as “growing.” Browne said it was hardly a secret that Antigua’s online gambling industry “has been in decline directly as a result of the action by the United States government which has been found by the World Trade Organization to have damaged” Antigua’s economy.