3: Barrels carrying multiple streams of income vibe including Jason Somerville launching a new hand replayer; Main Event Travel becoming the travel partner of choice for 888Live Barcelona, and William Hill ready to splash out for social media adverts.

Being a professional poker player is tough.

The game is more difficult than ever before, and the ups and downs are not only emotionally bankrupting, but piggy banks are being smashed at a rate only previously seen at a Greek wedding.

The answer?

Sheldon Adelson, the irascible chairman/CEO of casino operator Las Vegas Sands, has topped all gambling executives on Forbes’ latest list of the world’s fattest fat cats.

According to the official top-2,043 billionaires list published this week, Adelson’s net worth is around $30.4b, good enough for 20th position on the 2017 chart but well back of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who topped all comers with an $86b fortune.

Interestingly, Forbes introduced a new wrinkle this year that attempts to track real-time changes in their billionaires’ valuation, and Adelson’s ranking had risen to #18 as of late Tuesday afternoon, despite the fact that he reportedly lost around $622m on the day. (Just a suggestion, but has he checked under the sofa cushions? That’s where we usually find stuff.)

Despite Adelson’s wealth, it’s amazing how little influence he appears to wield through his highly publicized political lobbying. His pricey efforts to convince federal politicians in Washington to ban online gambling have yet to bear any fruit, while politicians in Israel – where Adelson funds a money-losing newspaper whose sole purpose is promoting the prime minister – recently decriminalized recreational marijuana use, which must have seriously harshed the buzz of the stridently anti-pot Adelson.

The PokerStars Championship in Panama has come to a close with Kenneth Smaron winning the Main Event and Steve O’Dwyer winning the $10,500 High Roller.

The first PokerStars Championship to hit Latin America has ended with three North Americans and a Brit taking home the biggest events on tap, and a record number of 6,100+ entries, and $9.3m+ in prize money spread over 46 unique events.

The PokerStars Championship Panama $5,300 buy-in Main Event attracted 366 entrants and a $1,775,100 prize pool. There were plenty of top dogs chasing down the title at the deepest end of the dive, but it was American, Kenneth Smaron, who took the $293,860 first prize after beating the Canadian Harpreet Gill in heads-up action. It’s the largest prize pool ever won in a Panamanian tournament.

The Sortis Hotel, Spa & Casino played host to a final table that took 170 hands to reach its conclusion, but only nine of those took place in the final duel, which Smaron won when his KJcc beat the T8o of Gill in the race to the river after Gill had moved all-in.

If it’s Tuesday, it must mean Pennsylvania has yet another sweeping gambling expansion bill to consider.

Monday saw the release of state Sen. Jay Costa’s 207-page SB 524, which the senator previewed in January. The bill follows the HB 392 bill introduced in the state House of Representatives last month (and its identikit Senate version SB 477).

Costa’s bill adopts many of the same positions staked out by HB 392, including allowing for online gambling, daily fantasy sports (DFS), mobile tablet gaming at select airports, fixing the unconstitutional slots tax for casino host communities, allowing skill-based gaming machines in casinos and allowing Category 3 casinos to ditch their loathed non-gaming amenity requirements in return for annual payments of $1m for five years.

However, as previously advertised, Costa’s SB 524 would impose a 25% tax on online gambling and DFS revenue versus HB 392’s far more palatable 14% (although still preferable to earlier Senate bills that imagined a 54% rate). Costa also wants online licensees to pay upfront fees of $10m rather than $8m, while online technology partners would pay $5m fees versus $2m in HB 392. (Oh, and if you have any first-born children, kindly drop them off at the statehouse soylent green processing center.)

The Australian government has gone all America in the online poker community by prohibiting the game in a bid to cut down on legislative loopholes that they believe lead to match and spot fixing in other sports.

The US had Black Friday, and now Australia has Tits Up Tuesday.

What is going on in this crazy world of ours?

I read the other day that the recent ‘strange events’ like Americans making Donald Trump the most powerful man in the world, proves that we are part of a computer simulation, and some stupid teenager has gotten hold of the joystick.

Live dealer online casino specialists Evolution Gaming has entered the Mexican online gambling market via a deal with Spanish gambling operator Codere.

On Tuesday, Evolution announced that it had reached an agreement to be the exclusive live casino supplier to Codere’s new Mexican online gambling site Codere.mx. Codere is already Mexico’s largest land-based gaming hall operator by a large margin via its partnerships with Grupo Caliente and Compañía Interamericana de Entretenimiento.

The deal will see Codere enjoy the full pantheon of Evolution live casino products, including standard and VIP tables for live roulette, blackjack, baccarat and baccarat squeeze games, as well as numerous poker variants and Evolution’s new proprietary Dream Catcher Lucky Wheel product.

Codere CIO Felipe Ludena Munoz said Evolution’s live casino pedigree gave his company confidence that the new product would “maximize immediate and future online live casino opportunities in this market.”

A high-rolling gambler has pled guilty to stealing $125k worth of casino chips from a Crown Resorts VIP room.

Last December, Australian police filed charges against Gunawan Akay, a 38-year-old gold-class member at Crown Melbourne’s Maple Room for high-rollers. The casino operator’s high-quality CCTV footage had fingered Akay as the not-so-nimble-fingered thief who made off with 25 $5k chips two days before Christmas.

On Tuesday, Akay pled guilty to the theft. While Akay’s lawyer is attempting to keep most of the details secret, Crown said Akay was on a prolonged losing streak immediately prior to the theft, having lost thousands of dollars playing high-stakes baccarat.

Akay’s sleight of hand left something to be desired but while the VIP room dealer immediately alerted casino security of the theft, Akay managed to make it to the street without being detained. Being a regular at the casino, Crown officials quickly recognized their longtime customer’s face on the CCTV footage, and Akay was arrested four days after the incident.

UK-listed online gambling operator 888 Holdings posted double-digit gains in 2016 thanks to its surging casino and sports betting verticals.

Figures released Tuesday show 888’s overall 2016 revenue hitting an all-time high of $520.8m, a 13% improvement over 2015’s total, while earnings improved 12% to $90.2m. The figures were even more impressive in constant currency terms, with revenue up 18% and earnings jumping 24%.

888’s mainstay casino product continued to bring home the bacon, improving 21% to $279.3m, while its Kambi Sports Solutions-powered sportsbook jumped 49% to $51.9m. Both verticals benefited from a 22% rise in marketing spend, which as a share of revenue was up three points to nearly 33%. 888’s new casino brand, 777.com, which launched at the end of 2015, was said to be “performing well.”

Things weren’t so bright at 888’s poker operations, which saw revenue fall 3% to $84.4m. 888 said the sagging poker division nevertheless “outperformed” the global poker market and noted that first-time depositors rose 6%, although this latter figure was dwarfed by first-time casino (23%) and sports (52%) depositors.