Prominent esports live streamer, James “Phantoml0rd” Varga, chooses Valentine’s day to sue Twitch two years after the live streaming platform shut him down over his affiliation with skin gambling.

Do you remember that game we used to play when we were kids? The one where we would jump on the end of a slug, and watch the guts, heart and soul fly out the other end (I know, I’m not proud of it). Well, Twitch tried doing that to James “Phantoml0rd” Varga, and he’s fighting back.

For the uneducated, Varga is a bit of a whizz when it comes to the world of esports. From League of Legends (LOL) to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO), Varga became a bit of a darling showcasing his considerable talents over the Internet.

In 2012, the talent committee at Twitch saw the genius in him and invited him on board. Over the next four years, Varga created one of the most crowd-pleasing homes on the platform attracting 16,000 paid subscribers as well as becoming the first person to amass a million followers. The Varga tribe has viewed his videos over 88m times, and in one sitting saw 144,000 people join him for a live stream. The days of worrying about your child wandering off only to end up chopped to pieces by a serial killer are long gone. Nobody is leaving the house.

A round-up of three events from the World Series of Poker Circuit, Heartland Poker Tour and the Venetian Cardroom in Las Vegas with most of the money heading into the bank accounts of Kammar Andries, Mike Englert and Timothy Reilly.

Sleep on it.

And that’s what Kammar Andries did after poker delved into a draw full of knives and gave him a few nicks.

The 40-year-old physical therapist took the week off work to make a ‘legit shot’ at winning a World Series of Poker Circuit (WSOPC) gold ring at the Seminole Casino Coconut Creek.

Casino operator MGM Resorts is singing Donald Trump’s praises after a $1.4b tax break allowed the company to mask a year-on-year profit decline.

On Tuesday, MGM released its Q4 earnings report, which showed overall revenue rising 5.7% to $2.6b in the three months ending December 31. Operating income declined over one-fifth to $223m while net income hit $1.4b versus just $24.7m in the same period one year earlier.

However, that profit gain came courtesy of the Washington tax reforms approved last year, which gave MGM a $1.43b non-cash income tax benefit, boosting earnings per share to $2.42. Without that windfall, the earnings gain would have less than a penny per share.

Domestic resorts revenue improved 5% year-on-year to $1.9m in Q4. However, excluding contributions from the new MGM National Harbor venue in Maryland, domestic revenue was down 3% as overall slots handle, table drop and revenue-per-available-room all declined.

PokerStars’ inaugural France Espania Hold’em Series (FRESH) smashes the €5m Guarantee, and Mike Takayama loses a Platinum Pass and then finds one again.

It’s not like PokerStars left the Spanish and French markets out in the cold like odds socks hung out to dry and forgotten. They were always coming back.

As Santa’s elves were whipping up a dervish of energy in his parcel room, the French gambling regulator Autorité de régulation des jeux en ligne (ARJEL) handed PokerStars an early Christmas present with delivery of the first online poker license that would allow the largest online poker room in the world to merge player pools in France and Spain.

Since then the PokerStars Europe Network has done rather well for itself, becoming one of the busiest cash game environments in the online realm, and it recently debuted the fruitful FRESH (France Espania Hold’em) Series.

Even P.T. Barnum would be surprised at the soaring birthrate of suckers falling for online gambling-related initial coin offerings (ICO).

Recent weeks have seen a seemingly endless number of gambling-themed ICO announcements, including Ethereum-based projects like Gamblica, a new Cardano-based project called SP8DE and the still largely undefined aspirations of legacy gaming brand Atari, whose primary interest appears to be boosting the company’s stock price by hitching it to technology that doesn’t date from the 1970s.

A quick glance through this site’s archives will reveal dozens of similar announcements over the past year, all aimed at convincing individuals to part with their hard-earned fiat currency in exchange for vaporware linked to threadbare and unproven gambling platforms.

These would-be gaming operators all promise some kind of new customer-friendly approach to wagering, be it commission-free exchange betting or the comparative lack of a house edge versus traditional online gambling sites.

Saipan casino operator Imperial Pacific International Holdings (IPI) is making good on its vow to aggressively respond to allegations of corruption made by the Bloomberg news agency.

This past weekend, IPI said it planned to “explore all legal remedies available” to respond to last week’s Bloomberg News article, which accused IPI of jeopardizing the safety of construction workers, engaging in sketchy financial transactions and making millions in questionable payments to relatives of the officials overseeing IPI’s operations.

On Tuesday, IPI’s board of directors alerted the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that it “repudiate[s] all allegations of wrongdoing published by Bloomberg in its 15 February 2018 article.” The statement went on to say that IPI had “instructed its lawyers to commence legal action against Bloomberg for defamation in the article. Shareholders will be kept informed of development of the legal action.”

The statement is a bolder response than IPI presented toward a 2017 Bloomberg article that referenced similar allegations of financial chicanery at IPI’s temporary Saipan gaming venue, Best Sunshine Live. IPI said at the time it planned to “take formal legal actions” against Bloomberg but doesn’t appear to have followed through on these threats.

Japan’s would-be casino operators got a major shock this week on reports that the government will impose a gaming revenue tax that tops out at a whopping 50%.

On Tuesday, Japan’s Jiji news agency reported that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its junior coalition partner Komeito plan to include specific tax rates when the Integrated Resorts (IR) Implementation Bill is submitted to the Diet for consideration in the current session.

According to the government sources, the plan is to impose a 30% tax rate on annual revenue up to ¥300b (US$2.8b). The rate is significantly higher than the effective 7.75% Nevada casinos are required to remit, although lower (at least, initially) than the effective 39% rate paid by Macau casinos.

However, should an operator’s annual revenue exceed ¥300b, a 40% tax rate would apply on revenue over ¥300b but less than ¥400b ($3.7b), while revenue exceeding ¥400b but less than ¥500b ($4.7b) could face a hefty 50% rate.