Actor Robert de Niro and his partners, chef Nobu Matsuhisa and Hollywood producer Meir Teper, opened Asia’s first Nobu Hotel in Manila on Monday.

De Niro, his partners and Melco Crown Entertainment principals James Packer and Lawrence Ho led the ribbon cutting during the grand opening of the 321-room hotel within the City of Dreams Manila in Entertainment City.

The Nobu brand is known for 36 restaurants in 31 cities across five continents. Today, Nobu has eight hotels, including Nobu Hotel at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which opened in 2013.

“Our partner Chef Nobu Matsuhita has established Nobu as a global luxury hospitality brand and guests will experience the very best of Japanese culture here at this beautiful hotel,” said Packer.

The U.S.-based gambling website DerbyJackpot.com partnered with merchant payment processor GoCoin to allow its customers to bet on horse races using Bitcoins, becoming the first U.S.-regulated gambling site to accept the digital currency.

“Having spent the last 18 months circling the globe educating gaming and financial regulators in Europe and Southeast Asia, I’m thrilled to see the U.S. be the first to market with a legal-regulated real-money gaming site with DerbyJackpot,” said GoCoin CEO Steve Beauregard. “And being from Maryland, I’m especially proud to see the launch on the eve of the Preakness Stakes.”

“As a Bitcoin company, compliance needs to be top of mind. Our compliance team was uber impressed with the thoughtfulness and thoroughness of the DerbyJackpot compliance program, that they were a natural fit for GoCoin,” Beauregard added.

DerbyJackpot.com told Bitcoin Magazine they chose to accept bitcoin due to numerous requests from customers.

With Bwin.party now at the center of a bidding war between 888 on one side, and Amaya / GVC on the other, the answer as to what is safer for shareholders long term is easy – 888 all the way. The Amaya / GVC route does have its advantages though and could see more success more quickly, but the way that Amaya and GVC seem to be setting up the offer puts a lot of unregulated eggs in one basket (GVC), and a lot of debt in the other (Amaya). The 888 route is the cleaner deal and has more geographical overlap and cross marketing synergies, though the question remains as to what 888 will do with Bwin.party’s unregulated grey market business.

The final price tag looks like it will be somewhere just below €2B. Some sources have €1.7B as the figure, CalvinAyre has €1.5, though in the end, since this is a bidding war after all, the final sum will probably be a bit higher if anything does go through in the end.

Let’s first take the Amaya / GVC offer. What makes sense about this route is how the two companies would divide the operations. Amaya would take the regulated, kosher markets which include Bwin.party’s regulated sportsbook. This is its best asset at €237.1m in revenues in 2014, or 38% of sales. GVC for its part would take the unregulated portion of Bwin.party’s assets, since operating in grey markets is its specialty.

GVC does not mention this outright in its public filings, but up to 92% of its business comes from unregulated markets in Brazil, Germany, and Turkey. There are hints here and there in official filings that GVC is active in these places, for example it does say that Turkey is its main B2B market, and that the World Cup was a resounding success especially for the host country Brazil, and that it enjoyed customer retention due to the World Cup “in the places that [GVC] operates”.

Macau expects to attract more Indians to come and visit Macau’s popular places of attractions which include museums, shopping malls and adventure sports in addition to casinos.

“Macau has been witnessing a 4.8% growth year-on-year. We expect it to do much better this year. This is because Macau is a perfect destination for leisure as well as meetings, incentives, conference and exhibitions (MICE) activities,” said Macau Government Tourist Office (MGTO) Head of India Representative Arzan Khambatta.

India has a population of close to 1.3 billion people and a vast majority of Indians in the 20’s-40’s are looking to travel to nearby holiday destinations and de-stress themselves from the fast-paced work life that is existent in India. In 2014, the visitor arrivals from India to Macau were 1,67,000.

Indians will find it easy to gain access to Macau as it provides them with an “on-arrival-visa” They will also find it easy to fly to Hong Kong and then catch a ferry from within the Airport complex and head down to Macau. The ferry ride is about 45 minutes and from the ferry terminal they can take a taxi and head straight into Macau.

Ladbrokes has begun the roll out of “Cash-out” providing its mobile customers the chance to close their position on a bet ahead of the final result.

The roll-out follows the successful introduction of the functionality on the Ladbrokes’ “My Accas” product in April.  Customer reaction has been good with over 25,000 using the facility since its introduction, leaving Ladbrokes sports betting and product teams with no qualms as to the functions popularity.

Ladbrokes joins rival operators bet35, Betfair, Coral, Skybet and William Hill in offering this service to UK sports betting customers.

“During Q1 we prioritized the introduction of the ‘Cash Out’ functionality. While it isn’t a new concept for customers, we recognize it’s an important part of what we need to deliver to be competitive and it’s one of the key parts of our plans for 2015,” said Ladbrokes Managing Director of Digital Andrew Bagguley