The annual Global Gaming Expo Asia (G2E Asia) 2017 is shaping up to be the biggest event yet for the Asian gaming market.

In 2016, G2E Asia recorded the highest visitor attendance in the 10-year history of the event, welcoming a total of 10,984 visitors from 83 countries and regions. Last year’s attendance broke the record set in 2015, when the event attracted 10,095 visitors.

This year, G2E Asia is poised to cement its status as a must-attend event for the gaming industry. And if you’re still unsure on whether to attend the three-day event, here are some reasons that will make you change your mind.

G2E Asia 2017 will be third bigger

PokerStars has launched Pot-Limit Omaha Spin & Go games at the $1, $3, $7 and $15 buy-in levels, and Daniel Negreanu gives you a six-minute breakdown of his thoughts on improving the mental side of poker.

PokerStars has launched Pot Limit Omaha (PLO) games on the fashionable Spin & Go format. Severin Rasset, Director of Poker Operations & Innovation, stated in a press release that the addition of the four-card whizz, bang, wallop of a game was a decision made after receiving feedback from players.

It was the French online poker room Winamax who squeezed the Three-Max Hyper Turbo Lottery Style Sit & Go down the birth canal. Expresso Poker was born in August 2013, but it wasn’t until PokerStars launched their version called Spin & Go in Oct 2014 that the game became en vogue.

PokerStars launched the format much to the chagrin of the Grinders who thought the fast-paced game would take punters away from their tables, and they were right when players managed to cram in 7.3 million games in the first ten-days. But the Grinders adapted, and plenty of them are making money in this fast and fun alternative to the Sit & Go format.

A news article appears in The Southeast Asia Globe talking about the thriving underground poker scene in Cambodia, and Pete Yanhan Chen wins the first-ever World Poker Tour event held in mainland China.

With the online poker games getting harder to beat and the up and down life of tournaments enough to make a hardened pro puke, a lot of professional poker players are turning to the live cash games as a way to pay the bills.

So where are all these juicy live cash games?

One place that seems to be thriving, according to a piece in The Southeast Asia Globe is Cambodia. I know what you are thinking: Khmer Rouge, Killing Fields, and Genocide, but that was in the 70s, and these days more and more people are flocking to this part of the world as a way to reduce their expenses and find profitable games.

Iceland’s tax authorities have rejected a financial company’s attempts to write off betting losses as a business expense.

On Wednesday, Icelandic media outlet Visir reported that the nation’s Ríkisskattstjóri (RSK) tax authority had denied an unspecified company’s attempts to write off ISK 250m (US $2.27m) in betting losses incurred at online betting exchange Betfair (now part of the Paddy Power Betfair behemoth).

According to the report, the unnamed company’s primary reason for being was making speculative investments in foreign currencies prior to the 2008 global economic meltdown, which hit Iceland particularly hard. The country endured three years of severe economic strife that saw the failure of three major commercial banks while the country’s stock market lost 90% of its value.

In response to the crisis, the Icelandic government was forced to impose strict capital controls that the unnamed company claimed ruined its business model. It was at this point that the light bulb apparently went off in the mind of the company’s owner, who decided to pursue alternative ‘investments’ such as online sports betting with Betfair.com.

UK retail bookmakers’ fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBT) have received a stay of execution following the Prime Minister’s surprise call for a snap election.

Earlier this year, the UK Department for Culture, Media & Sport promised a “late spring” reveal of the contents of its triennial review of the nation’s gambling industry, which focused on whether or not to reduce FOBT maximum stakes from £100 to just £2, as well as mulling further restrictions on gambling advertising on television.

But Monday’s surprise call by PM Theresa May (pictured) for a fresh general election on June 8 means the gambling review will likely be delayed, possibly as far off as late autumn. UK election rules prevent sitting governments from making announcements regarding significant policy changes so as not to unduly influence voters, and the so-called ‘purdah’ period will start this weekend.

Even when the review is released, the actual implementation of its findings could take a year or more, offering bookmakers an even larger window of time in which to enjoy their current revenue mix.

Anti-online gambling advocate Sheldon Adelson cut a $5m check to US President Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, so can a quid pro quo on banning online gambling be far behind?

On Tuesday, a Federal Election Commission filing revealed that the Las Vegas Sands casino owner and anti-online gambling curmudgeon had contributed $5m to Trump’s coming out party in Washington this January. Adelson’s contribution accounted for nearly 5% of the record $107m the inauguration fund collected from wealthy donors.

(For the record, it’s unclear how much of that $107m was actually spent on the inauguration. The New York Times quoted the inaugural committee saying any leftover funds would be donated to charity, although these charities have yet to be identified, which likely means that the much-maligned Donald J. Trump Foundation will soon have more money to pay the lawyers defending the president’s many lawsuits.)

Adelson’s largesse followed the $11.2m that he and his wife Miriam reportedly gave Trump and Trump-affiliated political action committees during the 2016 election cycle, not to mention Adelson’s $20m gift to the Republican Senate Leadership Fund last September.