Monthly Archives: March 2015

Taj Mahal can keep Trump’s name; faces anti-money laundering charges

Taj Mahal Casino can keep the Trump on its name as Carl Icahn reached an agreement with Donald Trump on Monday to allow his name to remain on the casino.

Under the agreement, which needs approval from U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, Trump Entertainment will pay Trump $172,000 to please a ground lease claim, among other things.

“The Trump Taj Mahal, under the right leadership and with the proposed significant reinvestment in the property, can be, once again, a wonderful place for travel and entertainment,” Trump said in a statement.

The agreement also requires Trump Entertainment Resorts to remove “any and all vestiges” of the name from Plaza casino, where the sign was removed but the name is still outlined in dirt or rust in many areas.

Judge insists Sands China hand over documents to former CEO

A judge says Las Vegas Sands subsidiary Sands China has undermined the search for truth in refusing to hand over documents without redactions in a long-running wrongful termination lawsuit against it. District Court Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez again ordered the company to hand over information to former Sands China CEO Steven Jacobs in a ruling last week.

Which households are in a postcode lottery for broadband speed?

A survey of the UK’s very quickest average connections also shows the north of England enjoying twice as many speedy streets as the south A survey of the UK’s very quickest average connections also shows the north of England enjoying twice as many speedy streets as the south. According to uSwitch.com, which collected the data over six months, the fastest average connection can be found in Sandy Lane in Cannock, Staffordshire.

Skrill integrates 1-Tap for RaceBets customers ahead of the Cheltenham Festival

Photo Credit: sbcnews.co.uk

Skrill 1-Tap introduces instant mobile payment solution

Leading digital payments company Skrill, today announces that online bookmaker RaceBets.com has added Skrill 1-Tap to its mobile and desktop offerings.

With the 2015 Cheltenham Festival around the corner, RaceBets customers can now benefit from a convenient and secure payment process when placing bets at the jewel in jump racing’s crown and at race meets across the world.

Macau VIPs aren’t being paranoid: Beijing really is watching

Macau’s VIP gamblers aren’t being paranoid, Beijing really is watching them like a hawk.

Li Gang (pictured), director of Beijing’s liaison office in Macau, told the Beijing News that China’s crackdown on corruption had left public officials with no doubt that if they travel to Macau to gamble, “they will be discovered.” Li boasted that any public officials with even a hint of naughty conduct on their records “now dare not go to Macau to gamble.”

Without getting into specifics, Li said Beijing had put measures in place to ensure that no public official gets in or out of a Macau casino without being identified. Among these measures are identify checks that are now conducted for anyone wishing to gain access to a casino VIP table.

Such measures may be responsible for the reported revival by some Macau casino operators of proxy betting, in which a junket operator representative sits at the gaming table and relays play-by-play card information to a VIP on the mainland, who then advises the proxy how much to wager on any given hand.

iSoftBet provides content for 666BET and Metro Play

Alderney-licensed casino games distributor iSoftBet announced an agreement to provide branded slots and premium content for Isle of Man licensee 666BET and its Metro Play brand.

iSoftBet will boost the Metro Play & 666Bet casino offering with its range of branded and original content – including new slots titles Neon Reels and Ambiance – along with its portfolio of mobile content and table games.

666Bet said that they were impressed by the increasingly varied array of bonus rounds available across the iSoftBet catalog and their team is excited to see iSoftBet games live on their site at the earliest opportunity.

“I’ve been looking forward to working with Metro Play and 666BET from our initial discussions, and I know that our games are going to really complement the look and feel of their casino offering,” iSoftBet group sales and Business Development Manager Luci Apostolou said. “The team has been great to work with.”

Content Marketing Tip of the Week: Creative Ideation

theMediaFlow Managing Director Nichola Stott gives an overview on Creative Ideation in this edition of CalvinAyre.com’s Content Marketing Tip of the Week.

Okay so you know you have to write about Wimbledon, you’ve done a metric tonne of research, you know what everybody did last year and you have a clear brief as to what your objective is but nothing is coming. Total creative block!

Here are some of the ideation techniques and tactics we use at theMediaFlow to help us come up with original ideas that grab the attention and the visits:

1. Word/free association

Russian online bookmaker traffic falls 11.5% in 2014

Russian gaming company First Gaming, which operates under the brand name Rub90, has released a study of the country’s bookmaking industry in 2014.

There were 5,518 land-based bookmaking outlets in Russia in 2014, 354 more than in 2013. However, the 7% growth rate pales in comparison to 2013’s 53% and 2012’s 69%. Seventy of 2014’s new shops opened in the Krasnodar region, while 60 opened in the Moscow region (44 within the city itself). Of the 10 regions studied, only Sverdlovsk and Samara recorded year-on-year declines. (Read full results of the study – in Russian – on Bookmakersrating.ru.)

In terms of market share, Fonbet remains the land-based betting titan with 21.4% of issued bookmaking licenses. Baitbet was a distant second with 14.3%, followed by Bookie Pub (1XBet) at 11.6% and lottery operator Bingo Boom at 10.1% (although Bingo Boom doesn’t offer sports betting). The rest of the chart ran as follows: Euromir (8.9%), Liga Stavok (8.8%) and all others (24.9%).

Fonbet also ruled the online betting market, as its site recorded 2.5m visits per month. Marathonbet.com was next at 2.2m monthly visits with BetCityru.com in third at 1.6m. The rest of the pack finished thusly: 1xbet.com (1.5m), Parimatch.com (1.1m), Zenitbet.com (1m), Baltbet.com (550k), Ligastavok.com (500k), Olimp.kz (350k), WinLineBet.com (250k), with Favbet.com and Tennisi.com each notching around 100k.

Mukul Pahuja Calls Phil Hellmuth a Cheeseburger Salesman

The Season XII World Poker Tour Player of the Year, Mukul Pahuja, takes the World Series of Poker, The World Poker Tour and Phil Hellmuth to task during a Twitter rant of epic proportions.

Mukul Pahuja has had enough.

“The blatant disregard for our collective intelligence is straight up nauseating.”

Those were the words of the Season XII World Poker Tour (WPT) Player of Year (POY) after the World Series of Poker Circuit (WSOPC) decided to guarantee a $1m prize pool, in their Main Event in Baltimore, when according to a Pahuja tweet, the prize pool had already hit $960,000.

Senate passes bill to beef up lottery tuition fund

SANTA FE >> After voting last week to limit the amount of money for college scholarships financed by lottery proceeds, state senators now want to add a smaller pool of cash to the tuition fund. The Senate voted 40-0 Monday for a bill that would require forfeited lottery prizes to be transferred to the lottery tuition fund.

False teeth and a new car: Lottery winner from Nova Scotia unveils his wish list

James Hanlon had a specific purchase in mind when he accepted his $675,000 cheque March 10 as a grand prize winner of Atlantic Lottery’s Set For Life. “I’m gonna get myself a nice set of false teeth,” Hanlon, flashing a gummy smile, said to raucous laughter at Atlantic Lottery Corporation’s office in Dartmouth.

Zal Irani Wins the Chicago Poker Classic Opener for $100k

Local boy Zal Irani takes down the Chicago Poker Classic opener, after defeating Anthony Parille, in heads-up action, to win the $100,000 first prize and a seat into the $2,000 Main Event.

Zal Irani has just won $100,000, and not even his Mum is taking a piece of it.

The 42-year old former financial planner, took down Event #1 $360 No-Limit Hold’em, at the Chicago Poker Classic, in the Horseshoe Hammond, and it looks like he will keep every single penny.

“In this place, I can’t ever swap or sell. I cut [my mom] off this time which was so hard to do,” Irani told the WSOP after his win.

PokerStars to Guarantee $5 Million During MicroMillions Series

PokerStars have slapped a $5m guarantee on the side of their 10th installment of the low stakes grinding wet dream: The MicroMillions.

The MicroMillions is one of the only times of the year you can drag your partner in front of the computer screen to show them that you are buying in for peanuts, and are coming home with the monkey.

It’s a low stakes grinders wet dream.

It’s the 10th time PokerStars have paid attention to the little person. It gets bigger each year. The series starts Thursday 19 March with Event #1: $0.11+R NL Hold’em {Hyper-Active}, and ends on Sunday 29 March with 10 events including Event #98: $22 No-Limit Hold’em Main Event.