Pennsylvania wants to dig deep into Sheldon Adelson’s pockets to fill the state’s gaping budget hole.

Starting next week, the state will levy a higher tax on table games of 12 casinos operating in Pennsylvania – and the biggest part of that will come from Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem.

News website The Morning Call has projected that Sands will shell out some $4.6 million a year after legislators approved the tax increase from 14 percent to 16 percent in order to sustain the state’s $31.6 billion budget for 2016-17.

Casino operators – led by Sands – have spent months objecting to the propose tax hike, saying that higher taxes usually lead to fewer free meals, rooms and gambling for the millions of people who wager in casinos statewide each year.

A 2+2 poster by the name of themadbotter admits to operating a successful poker bot for a six-month period and candidly talks about the dark arts before turning the other cheek and pretending it was all a ruse.

When Jon ‘Pearljammer’ Turner won the Card Player Poker Tour (CPPT) Venetian Main Event a few days ago, I was pissed. He has won over $7.7m playing online poker. And yet he took part in a tournament that profited a man hellbent on destroying that very game.

Sheldon Adelson is not alone.

There is an army of men and women fighting to prevent people from playing online poker. Equally, there is an army of people sticking pikes up their asses and shooting flaming arrows in their eyes.

When it rain, it pours.

Philippines-based gaming technology provider PhilWeb Corporation chairman Roberto Ongpin is finding himself scratching his head again after the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ordered his disqualification from the board due to his alleged involvement in the 2009 insider trading scandal.

The SEC order comes four weeks after President Rodrigo Duterte directed the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) to rescind the online gambling licenses it has issued “sometime soon,” to the detriment of PhilWeb.

As consolation, the state corporate regulator granted Philweb’s request for a temporary license to operate in the Philippines pending the result of their meeting with Duterte.

Japanese billionaire Kazuo Okada is setting his sights beyond building a $2.4 billion integrated resort in the Philippines.

The casino mogul, according to his Filipino business partner Antonio Cojuangco, is planning to cement his business footprint in the Asian country through other infrastructure projects—such as a new international airport—that will put the Philippines on the global tourism map.

Cojuangco, whose All seasons Hotels & Resorts owns the land on which Okada Manila—previously known as Manila Bay Resorts—is being built, told the Philippine Star the Okada “specifically expressed his desire to bid for the international airport” when he paid a courtesy call on Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.

“He believes the airport is your first contact and so your airport, if well designed an efficient, people will talk about that and more tourists will come together,” Cojuangco said, according to the news outlet.

This is a guest contribution by Riaan de Jager, If you would like to submit a contribution please contact Bill Beatty for submission details. Thank you.

As a performance marketer, there is a lot to think about when choosing your affiliate program partners.  The strength of their brands, possible brand saturation, bonus offers, software platforms, conversion rates and reputation are the obvious ones. For many affiliates, the relationship with their affiliate manager is the most important factor and rightly so.

But there is an often-overlooked aspect of an affiliate program that may affect your business even more than any of those rather obvious criteria. In fact, you could add a substantial amount to your bottom line without really doing much. Curious? Then read on.

The Missing Question – What Do You Really Earn?

This is a guest contribution by Riaan de Jager, If you would like to submit a contribution please contact Bill Beatty for submission details. Thank you.

As a performance marketer, there is a lot to think about when choosing your affiliate program partners.  The strength of their brands, possible brand saturation, bonus offers, software platforms, conversion rates and reputation are the obvious ones. For many affiliates, the relationship with their affiliate manager is the most important factor and rightly so.

But there is an often-overlooked aspect of an affiliate program that may affect your business even more than any of those rather obvious criteria. In fact, you could add a substantial amount to your bottom line without really doing much. Curious? Then read on.

The Missing Question – What Do You Really Earn?

Beijing’s tightened grip on the rampant abuse of UnionPay International’s card system has yet to see any effect in Macau. In fact, authorities are reporting that the number of unauthorized transactions using cards from the mainland China’s bank has almost doubled in the first half of 2016.

Between January and June, the Judiciary Police (PJ) calculated a total of MOP2.1 billion (USD262.5 million) worth of illegal transactions in the territory, Portuguese news agency Lusa reported. The amount is almost double the MOP1.22 billion (USD153 million) calculated for the full year of 2015.

For the first half of 2016, PJ opened a total of 12 probes into cases involving money transactions using unregistered UnionPay point of sale (POS) terminals. All of the cases were sent to the Public Prosecutions Office for further action, according to the news outlet.

Police have identified 31 people in connection with the investigation—22 of whom were from mainland China. Authorities also seized 22 POS units that they believed have been tampered so that the UnionPay network will identify them as being registered an operated in mainland China, where transactions fees are much lower compared to Macau.

One group has a plan that could sweeten the deal for Australian television networks that will be affected should the gambling reform plan pushes through.

The Alliance for Gambling Reform has tabled a proposal that will give commercial TV broadcasters a discount on their license fee for every betting advertisement that they reject, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Under the plan, a network’s Commonwealth TV license would be reduced by a dollar for every dollar that they did not take from a sports betting company—potentially giving the broadcaster up to AUD150 million (USD112.13 million) in discounts annually.

The alliance’s director for strategy Rohan Wenn told the news outlet that the goal is to “get rid of the ads that are killing the codes we love.”

3-Barrels of pure value including Jon Turner winning the Card Player Poker Tour Main Event at The Venetian, Kuljinder Sidhu winning the Bellagio Cup, and Fedor Holz confirmed as a Celebrity Cash King.

Jon ‘PearlJammer’ Turner has topped off an excellent summer by winning the $5,000 buy-in Card Player Poker Tour (CPPT) Venetian Main Event for $536,858.

Sheldon Adelson, the man who wants to kill online poker, opened the doors to his Las Vegas home, and 537 players walked through and took a pew. Ironically, $7.7m of the $10m Turner has won playing poker was earned playing online – something he can’t do in the States thanks to people like the octogenarian billionaire.

The event was the piece de resistance of the Venetian Deepstack Extravaganza III, a series that guaranteed over $16m in prize money. The CPPT event raised $2,497,050 in prize money. The winning purse of $536,858 is Turner’s largest.

The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation raises over $40m for climate change projects, including one person who paid $120,000 to play poker with Jonah Hill and Edward Norton.

While Donald Trump may believe that climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese, the rest of us with half a brain are compos mentis enough to see with our own eyes the damage our decision making is having on the world. But with the hopes of our planet tied to the dollar and politics more concerned about building walls to keep folk out than changing the world we desperately need new heroes who view existential threats as their Lex Luthor.

Leonardo DiCaprio is one of them.

When he was a child, his parents hung the Triptych of the Garden of Delights above his crib. The transformation and eventual erosion of the Garden of Eden bothered him even at that age.

Sports Betting Community or “SBC” have expanded their events portfolio and will be launching the Betting on Sports Conference on September 15 & 16, 2016.  The conference will take place in London at the Grange Tower Hotel and promises to provide something new to this sector of the industry.  CalvinAyre.com spoke with SBC’s Andy McCarron to find out what his team has in store for delegates.

Becky Liggero: Thank you for joining me today, Andy.  Why did SBC decide to organize this two day, networking-rich event? How did the feedback you received after Betting on Football influence your agenda?

Andy McCarron: It’s been almost a decade since the betting industry had a dedicated multi-day event and, to be honest, we don’t really know why the sector has kind of been left to fend for itself during that time. Compared to most of the other gambling sectors, betting is more complex, more important to get right, and, as far as we are concerned, more entertaining. The two day format lets us visit more of the vital aspects of the business.

We’re trying something a little different with Betting on Sports, based on the feedback we’ve received from our successful Betting on Football conferences. What we’ve been hearing back is that people really value networking opportunities, so we’re trying to put the chance to meet and interact with industry peers at the heart of this new event. We still have high level sessions covering lots of important topics, but there is almost equal weight on the networking opportunities, further boosted by the introduction of our new conference app.