Casino Canberra is poised to break the video poker machine (pokies) monopoly held by Australian Capital Territory (ACT) clubs.

On Thursday, ACT Attorney-General Gordon Ramsay filed legislation that will allow Casino Canberra to add 200 pokies as well as 60 fully-automated table games. While the pokies number is less than the 500 machines the casino had originally requested, Ramsay’s move is highly controversial, given that pokies are considered the sole domain of local clubs.

Ramsay has attempted to mollify the clubs by imposing a mandatory pre-commitment scheme on the casino pokies while sparing the clubs the same restrictions. Casino pokies players will have to declare upfront how much money they’re prepared to lose over a 24-hour period. Casino pokies will also be subjected to a $5m-per-spin limit, half the rate allowed on the clubs’ pokies.

The casino will also face a more punitive pokies forfeiture rate. Clubs looking to add new pokies must buy them from other clubs, and must forfeit one of every four pokies purchased this way. The forfeiture is part of the ACT government’s plan to reduce the overall number of pokies from its current level of 5,000 to 4,000 by 2020.

The British Columbia Lottery Corporation’s online gambling site has posted double-digit revenue growth thanks to improved slots activity.

Figures released this week show BCLC’s net income in the 12 months ending March 31, 2017 hitting C$1.34b (US $1.07b), up 2% over the fiscal 2015-16 result. The 2016-17 net income set a new record and exceeded BCLC’s targeted profit by C$96m.

Revenue hit a record C$3.14b, a C$42m improvement over the previous year. The Crown Corporation credited the gains to “innovation and capitalizing on strategic investments in our slots offerings in casino and online.”

BCLC’s PlayNow.com gambling site contributed revenue of C$157.6m, 16% higher than the previous fiscal year and more than twice the sum the site generated in 2012-13. BCLC lumps in its online ops with its Lottery division, therefore preventing any analysis of how much of that revenue the site is taking to the bottom line.

A Catholic priest has staked out an early claim for Worst Person of 2017 by blaming his kiddie porn conviction on his crap poker skills.

On Friday, Rev. Kevin Gugliotta, who formerly worked at the Holy Spirit Roman Catholic Church in Union, New Jersey, was sentenced to just shy of two years in prison after pleading guilty in March to disseminating child pornography. Gugilotta was given credit for the 10 months he’s spent in custody awaiting sentencing.

The 55-year-old Gugliotta was arrested last October after he uploaded multiple images of boys as young as eight years old engaged in sexual activity from his vacation home in Pennsylvania.

Naturally, it was later revealed that Gugliotta was suspended from church activity in 2003 for molesting a teenage boy in the 1980s. However, Church officials in Newark quietly reinstated him the following year based on their reasoning that Gugliotta was a layman at the time of the offense. Well done, Catholics. Well done.

First we had a decentralized online poker room. Now comes another company that promises to move esports and prediction platforms to the blockchain, too.

Herosphere develops online esports prediction platform, which allows for two or more parties to interact with each other and fulfill contracts without a third party. Essentially, the platform lets gamers and fans predict the outcomes of their favorite online games against each other, without having to worry about a third party controlling the cash flows.

“There are many fundamental problems in betting and gambling industry today,” said Paul Polterauer, co-founder and CEO of herocoin.io.

To cut out middlemen—greedy or not—herosphere turns to a decentralized coin that puts control of the money flow in the hands of the community. Participants will compete only against themselves; and the platform generates smart contracts using a dedicated cryptocurrency called HEROcoin to enable secure and reliable processing. Herosphere said the payouts are based on the crowd size participating in a certain prediction contests as well as initial pledges.

A disposal of available-for-sale financial assets has boosted Genting BHD’s net profit for the second quarter of the year by as much as 57 percent, the company reported.

In a regulatory filing, Genting BHD announced that its April to June 2017 net profit expanded to RM456.33 million (US$106.81 million) compared to RM289.82 million (US$67.83 million) a year earlier. Revenue in the quarter rose 17.22 percent year-on-year to RM4.95 billion (US$1.16 billion).

The group attributed the second quarter growth to its gaming business in Malaysia, Singapore, the UK, and U.S. and the disposal of Genting Singapore PLC Group’s 50 percent interest in its associate, Landing Jeju Development Co Ltd.

Data showed that Genting gained RM302.2mil (US$70.73 million) after the sale.

The agreement that promised to resolve bitcoin’s scaling issue has started to fall apart.

This week, payment service provider Bitwala announced that it will not support the so-called New York Agreement (NYA), despite being a signatory of the said consensus.

Bitwala was one of the companies that agreed to a plan in May to deploy Bitcoin Core’s Segregated Witness (SegWit) proposal along with a 2MB hard fork within six months. At the time, Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group said the proposal was supported by 56 companies in 22 countries, representing 83.28 percent of bitcoin’s hashing power, 20.5 million wallets and $5.1 billion of monthly transaction volume on the bitcoin network.

Customer first

A new tropical storm is threatening to wreak havoc in the already battered Macau peninsula, the Chinese meteorologists have warned.

There is 70 percent chance that Macau, which is still reeling from the tropical storm Hato’s fury, will be in the path of the new tropical storm Pakhar, according to The South China Morning Post report.

Tropical storm Pakhar, which likely to pass the city state on Sunday morning, is said to be weaker than Typhoon Hato.

With this in mind, many analysts are already predicting that Macau’s previously exceptional August growth rate will take a significant hit of “at least a couple hundred” basis points.

The reliably alarmist UK media is raising a ruckus over new UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) statistics showing an increase in Great Britain’s ranks of problem gamblers.

On Thursday, the UKGC published Gambling Behavior in Great Britain 2015, the first such comprehensive survey of gambling prevalence in three years. The stats relied on data combined from health surveys in England, Scotland and Wales.

The media are focusing on the 0.8% of the UK population aged 16 years or over who the 2015 report deems to be suffering from problem gambling behavior, compared to 0.6% in the 2012 survey.

While the 2015 number remains a tiny fraction of the population – and comparable to rates in many other jurisdictions – UKGC exec director Tim Miller said the numbers reflected the “significant challenge” in making gambling “fairer and safer … The pace of change to date simply hasn’t been fast enough – more needs to be done to address problem gambling.”

In this week’s Calling The Clock, we bring you an update from the PokerStars Championship Barcelona, the launch of 888Poker’s Flopomania, and much more.

We’ll begin this week’s poker news round-up with the largest online poker room in the world, and updates on two mammoth events both online and live.

In recent times, live grinders have been as complimentary to PokerStars live events as People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is too tiny gestation crates, and yet this week, the wave of opinion began to turn after another outstanding turnout in Barcelona.

I guess location is everything.