888Poker Ambassador, Chris Moorman, has won a 26th Online Triple Crown, and now sets his sights on achieving the same feat in the live realm.

Chris Moorman isn’t after the money.

“My motivation is always to get the accolades rather than the money,” the most prolific online multi-table tournament (MTT) player in the universe told PokerStrategy during a recent interview. 

888Poker must be paying him too much. 

Representatives of the Italian gambling industries primary stakeholders, LOGiCO, have penned a response to the Italian Democratic Party Senator, Franco Mirabelli’s claims that a shared liquidity scheme opens a Pandora’s Box of pain and misery.

When the Italian Democratic Party Senator, Franco Mirabelli, looks at the scheme to share online poker liquidity with France, Portugal, and Spain he sees nothing but a car wreck. Representatives of LOGiCO, the gambling industry association created in 2016 to muzzle the barking from dogs like Mirabelli, vehemently disagree.

The pace of the shared liquidity between those prime European nations has spun as slowly as the wheels turning on the overturned cars in that wreck that Mirabelli observes. But in July, the French gaming regulator ARJEL announced that the quartet of countries had signed a shared online poker liquidity agreement, and poker players began blowing on their kazoos.

Here is a snippet of a joint statement made by the gambling regulators in the four countries at the time of signatory.

If you notice a lot less Russian players on your favorite online poker site in the coming days, you have Vladimir Putin to thank.

On Wednesday, amendments to Russia’s federal law “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection” take effect, with new restrictions on the use of virtual private network (VPN) services and other ‘anonymizing’ tools that many Russians use to access online information their government doesn’t want them to see.

Russian legislators approved the anti-VPN legislation this summer and Putin eagerly signed it into law at the end of July. Companies that provide VPN and anonymizing tools and services can now find themselves out of business if they fail to ensure their products aren’t being used to access forbidden online fruit.

The Roskomnadzor telecommunications watchdog has been meeting with local internet service providers to ensure they toe the line, and announced on Tuesday that its experts were working with companies including Russian cybersecurity firm Kapersky Lab, search engines Mail.ru and Yandex, as well as the makers of the Opera browser (which features built-in VPN technology), to test “the new interaction system.”

Berlin Affiliate Conference (BAC)

Directly following EiG, the BAC (co-located with the Financial Partners Expo) will return to the Messe Berlin and serves as one of the prime locations to learn how to profit in the iGaming and financial markets.  Over 1,500 affiliates and 100 affiliate programs are expected to attend the two-day expo, with sessions dedicated to topics such as SEO, content marketing and some of the best networking parties of the year.

What: BAC

When: November 2-3

The Israeli Tax Authority is poking and prodding their best poker players over a disagreement on taxation that could cost the professional player base millions of shekels.

You prick.

That’s what I used to think if I asked a poker player for his name while recording a hand at a live tournament. I get it now.

If there’s anything worse than having to hand over significant portions of your hard earned cash to the taxman, it’s having to hand it over after many years of not having to.

Macau’s original casino operator SJM Holdings continues to lag its newer competitors, reporting a double-digit decline in third-quarter profits.

Tuesday saw SJM release its unaudited earnings report for the three months ending September 30, during which gaming revenue was essentially flat at HKD 10b (US $1.28b), while adjusted earnings fell 10.4% to HKD 726m ($93.1m) and profit slipped 16.5% to HKD 428m.

Things look equally limp on the year-to-date front, with gaming revenue falling 1.2%, earnings off 8.6% and profits down 14%. Fortunately, the company remains flush, with HKD 13.5b in cash, bank balances and pledged bank deposits versus only HKD 4.4b of debt.

The Q3 shortcomings can’t be pinned on the company’s flagship property, the Casino Grand Lisboa, which reported gaming revenue up nearly one-fifth to HKD 3.7b, although the property’s earnings were up a more modest 2% to HKD 418m.

Brazil appears to be backing away from its plan/threat to restrict online sports betting to a government-controlled monopoly.

Last Thursday, Brazilian Senator Benedito de Lira (pictured) filed an amended version of PLS 186/2014, the Senate’s version of plans to radically overhaul the country’s gambling market by authorizing everything from brick-and-mortar casinos to unspecified forms of online gambling.

Previous versions of the Senate bill contained only vague references to ‘electronic betting’ while President Michel Temer raised eyebrows a year ago by suggesting he favored restricting online activity to a sports betting monopoly that would be run by national lottery operator Caixa Econômica Federal.

The amended Senate bill still leaves it up to the federal government to oversee online gambling activity, the scope of which has been fleshed out to include “sports and non-sports betting games” as well as “online casino games.” The bill calls for a reasonable 15% tax on online gambling revenue, while land-based operators would pay 10%.

A Brazilian brick-and-mortar casino operator’s impetuousness has brought down the long arm of the law.

Last week, Grupo Pefaco opened its Winfil casino in Porto Alegre, but its 460 slot machines were restricted to ‘demonstration’ mode, i.e. free-play gambling only, due to Brazil having yet to explicitly authorize real-money casino gambling.

But Saturday saw the casino commence real-money gambling based on a court injunction barring local law enforcement from seizing any of Winfil’s gaming machines. However, the judge who issued that injunction told local media on Monday that her injunction applied only if the machines were still in demonstration mode and had offered no comment regarding the illegality of casino gambling.

As one might expect, the authorities didn’t tolerate Winfil’s boldness for long. Brazilian affiliate Games Magazine Brasil reported that officers from the Civil Police and the state Prosecutor’s Office rolled up in “dozens” of vehicles to disrupt the goings-on, much to the dismay of the casino’s patrons, who chanted ‘we just want to play.’ (See video at bottom of page, which includes said chanting as well as the furious but ultimately futile arguments of Winfil’s lawyers.)

Spain’s regulated online gambling market saw revenue shoot up by more than one-third in Q3, and even poker reported year-on-year improvement.

Figures released this week by Spanish gaming regulator Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego (DGOJ) show locally licensed online gambling operators generated combined revenue of €140.5m in the three months ending September 30. The sum is 16.6% greater than the market reported in Q2 and 37.3% more than it earned in Q3 2016.

The revenue gains are all the more impressive given that operators’ advertising expenses in Q3 fell 3% year-on-year, while the total value of operators’ bonus offers fell even harder (-18.2%). However, sponsorship costs nearly tripled year-on-year, albeit still representing a mere €1.9m.

Sports betting revenue rose 37% to just under €77m, with in-play betting accounting for nearly 60% of wagering revenue and 71.3% of betting volume. Spanish sportsbooks played lucky in Q3, as betting handle actually decreased 6.5% from Q2 while revenue rose 27.8%.