Three years ago, quarterback J.T. Barrett was unable to participate in the Big Ten Championship Game for the Ohio State Buckeyes due to an ankle injury. The Buckeyes still routed the Wisconsin Badgers without him 59-0 as 4-point underdogs and went on to win the national championship as dogs in each of their last two games as well.

Odds courtesy of OddsShark.com

Last Saturday, Barrett again suffered an injury against the Michigan Wolverines in the regular-season finale, but it is not serious enough to keep him from playing the Badgers for the conference title this time around.

Ohio State (10-2) is listed as a 6-point favorite at the sportsbooks on Saturday against unbeaten Wisconsin (12-0) and hopes one more victory will put the team in position to make another run at the national title in the College Football Playoff.

The first World Poker Tour Main Event on Japanese soil is a success, and Faded Spade becomes the tour’s new deck.

Have you ever heard of cultivation theory?

It’s a theory that people who watch too much TV develop a belief that TV land is real and that the world is more violent than it is.

Lou Reed said we should take a walk on the wild side and that’s what I thought my brother-in-law was doing by staying in South Korea with a nutter sitting on the throne in the North.

This is a guest contribution by Tom Mitchell. If you would like to submit a contribution please contact Bill Beatty for submission details. Thank you.

The promise of a better tomorrow is a powerful sentiment. Of course, as we all know, better tomorrows don’t necessarily arrive on schedule, or quite as planned. Yet the very hope that one moment can immeasurably change things for the better connects with our eternal pursuit of happiness. It’s the same with jackpots, whose regular payouts offer that truly transformative sum of money. Potentially, at least, that life-changing moment is just around the corner. And you don’t even need to wait till tomorrow!

As such, based on the traditional product-range of even the most multi-channel provider, jackpots remain a central instrument in any operator’s orchestra. On balance, whatever the competing distractions, players will always be inexorably drawn to game where there is a big-money prize on show. It’s a call to action from the fabric of our innate wishful thinking.

Small wonder, then, that lottery jackpots consistently rank among the more popular products with players. Simply take the Gambling Commission’s 2015 report, Gambling Behaviour in Great Britain, which found that 46% of the UK Population played the National Lottery, 23% bought scratch cards, while 15% pursued other jackpot lotteries. Compare those numbers to, say, slots whose figures garner a relatively lowly 7% for reported player engagement.

Three stories from the cafeteria at PokerStars Towers including the results from the PokerStars Festival in Hamburg, Lex ‘RaSZi’ Veldhuis proving he still has it with a mighty fine win on Twitch, and Daniel Negreanu explains why he isn’t a fan of Thanksgiving.

Given the impact that German poker players are having on the global scene, it would be daft if a native didn’t win the PokerStars Festival Main Event in Hamburg this weekend.

Ulrich Pauls ensured we avoided a drift into daft by taking down the first prize of €105,850 in the €1,100 buy-in event. The 36-year-old from Hamburg nearly didn’t play. Before the Main Event, Pauls was one of the unhappiest faces of the 2,609 entrants from 54 different countries who created €1,170,138 in prize money.

But he went for it, like walking into a barbershop, saying, “Take it all off.”

After an online poker player known only as Cumicon posts an almost perfect graph of online Pot Limit Omaha winnings hitting the $7.4m mark, Lee Davy, takes a few punts on why the player suddenly retired.

I had my first Thanksgiving Dinner on U.S soil last week (don’t tell Daniel Negreanu) and the conversational icebreaker, “what do you do for a living?’ was on the menu.

When I told people how much money is floating around the game of poker, jaws dropped lower than my mother and her best mate when they accidentally pressed play on the VHS recorder after my Dad had left Electric Blue 2 inside after a drunken orgy of one back in 1983.

I talked about Patrik, Phil and, of course, the brain-shaking hit and run from Fedor Holz.

The airline industry could be one of the ways poker players become more comfortable with the use of cryptocurrency after Air New Zealand partners with the decentralised travel partner Winding Tree.

The guy next to me is doing my head in. Beads of sweat glisten like stray bubble bath bubbles. Overweight; his breath stinks. He’s not even that close to me. I feel trapped in a tiny elevator with the man.

“I’m going to be late goddamit!”

My 13-month-old daughter says “Goddamit,” like the good little parrot.

A Philippines-based anti-corruption watchdog has filed a graft complaint against the head of the local gaming regulator, accusing her of seeking to establish a monopoly over the country’s online gambling market.

On Monday, Philippine media reported that the Anti-Trapo Movement (ATM), a local NGO, had filed a graft and breach of conduct complaint with the national Ombudsman regarding the Philippine Offshore Gambling Operator (POGO) program established by the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR).

PAGCOR launched its POGO program late last year in a bid to exert greater control over the online industry, which to that point had been overseen by the country’s special economic zones, including the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (CEZA) and the Aurora Pacific Economic Zone and Freeport Authority (APECO).

The ATM’s complaint accuses PAGCOR CEO Andrea Domingo (pictured) of a “gross violation” of anti-graft laws, by so-called ‘forum shopping’ for a government department that would find fault with the legality of the online operations in certain economic zones.