Casino operator Silver Heritage Group has parted ways with its co-founder for as yet unexplained reasons.

On Wednesday, Silver Heritage informed the Australian Stock Exchange that Tim Shepherd, the company’s co-founder and president of business development and marketing, would be leaving the company as of September 30. Shepherd will reportedly hang on as an independent external consultant as of October 1.

While the company thanked Shepherd for his 14 years of service, it offered no explanation for the reasons behind Shepherd’s exit. The company also declined to specify who would fill the biz-dev and marketing role in Shepherd’s absence.

Silver Heritage is preparing to open its new Nepal casino, Tiger Palace Resort Bhairahawa, close to the teeming masses just across the border in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Last week, Silver Heritage announced that its June entitlement offer had raised A$19m, which it says is sufficient to complete the Tiger Palace ahead of the resort’s scheduled partial opening of the property in September.

The Chinese gambling game Mahjong becomes a mind sport, is put forward as a contender for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and is responsible for a series of epileptic seizures.

“What’s that game?”

It’s the same question each time I walk into the casino with a newbie. It’s the corner for the Chinese. The sound of rattling tiles overpowering the sound of riffling poker chips. It is, of course, Mahjong, and earlier this week, fans of the Chinese tile game got the thumbs up from the International Mind Sports Association (IMSA).

The gambling game is the sixth game to be officially recognised as a mind sport by the IMSA behind Chess, Bridge, Go, Draughts, and Ziangqi. The addition of Mahjong is interesting because it is such a popular gambling game, which one assumes is the primary reason the IMSA doesn’t recognise poker as a mind sport.

The World Poker Tour has announced plans to host their first-ever event in Japan. WPT Japan will take place in Tokyo, with Adam Pliska calling the event a ‘momentous occasion’ for the industry. 

Here are the things that I know about Japan.

They have the second coolest national flag behind Wales.

The country sits on the Ring of Fire, and that sounds both painful, and worrisome.

A double barrel of live tournament results, including a second Poker EM Main Event title for Simon Boss, and a record breaking Mid-States Poker Tour victory for Carter Myers in Iowa.

My drinking career began in the Ogmore Vale Conservative Club. I remember how nervous I was the first time I entered what would be my second home. I had to sign the big book because I wasn’t a member.

Mickey Mouse

‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage

Two different gaming divisions of Malaysian conglomerate Genting have reported sharply different fortunes so far in 2017.

On Monday, Genting Hong Kong issued a profit warning, alerting shareholders that it expects to post a net loss of between $200m and $220m in the six months ending June 30.

The forecast doesn’t include contributions from joint venture partner Travellers International Hotel Group, which operates the Resorts World Manila casino in the Philippines. Travellers has yet to report its own figures and Genting HK says it could issue a supplemental report once Travellers discloses its performance to the Philippine exchange.

The projected loss is a significant downgrade from the $73.7m Genting HK lost in H1 2016 but on par with the $502m loss in FY16. The company blamed the losses on increased competition for its Crystal Cruises shipboard casino business, rising costs at the German building shipyards it acquired in April 2016, and general depreciation of its new Genting Dream vessel.

Saipan casino operator Imperial Pacific International Holdings (IPI) has agreed to pay additional fees in exchange for more time to finish building its new resort.

On Wednesday, gaming regulators in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) announced that IPI had been granted extensions on completing both phases of the Imperial Pacific Resort Hotel Saipan, which launched its gaming operations last month after lengthy delays.

In April, IPI was granted an extension to complete Phase One by August 2018, but the construction delays and labor issues that have plagued this project since its inception don’t appear to have abated.

It was only last month that IPI announced that it planned to complete the resort’s 15 luxury villas by January 2018 and finish work on the 329-room hotel by August 2018. However, the company declined to specify when guests might actually begin booking their accommodations at the resort.

The Czech Republic has offered financial figures to support the claim that its ‘get tough’ approach to overhauling its gambling regime is paying off handsomely.

Last Friday, the Czech Ministry of Finance published statistics showing that its gambling market generated revenue of CZK 39.3b (US $1.78b) in 2016, a 29% improvement from 2015’s result, which had fallen 3% from 2014’s total. The state’s share of 2016’s bounty fared even better, rising 38% year-on-year to CZK 10.5b.

Deputy Finance Minister Ondřej Závodský credited the rise to the government’s ongoing efforts to stamp out illegal gambling and channel the nation’s gamblers to legal (and taxable) operators. The government claims to have reduced the total number of slot machines by 20k over the past three years and has shut around 300 illegal gambling shops since the start of 2017.

Závodský further claimed that the increase in gambling revenue was proof that the government’s decision to dramatically hike gambling taxes hasn’t been the death of the industry, as had been widely predicted by the tax plan’s critics (although the tax didn’t officially kick in until January 1).