Who knew?  Ellen DeGeneres is a poker freak. She regularly hosts high-stakes games at the home she shares with wife Portia De Rossi, and only invites the top of Hollywood’s top names. The games are legal in California, and can sometimes rack up pots worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. What makes the games even more interesting, however, is the side of DeGeneres that isn’t shown on TV.

DeGeneres, according to reports, has a tendency to not hold anything back during the games. She has been described as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, her choice of medicine being poker chips. One recent invitee, who wasn’t able to keep up with the game, received the wrath and rage of the comedienne, who accused her of ruining the game, Radar Online reported.

The unidentified participant told the news site: “The energy around the table was very tense. Ellen threw a tantrum, and her screams echoed through the halls as frightened guests looked on in sheer disbelief!” It caused the guest so much grief that she felt compelled to fold her cards and abandon the $18.6-million oceanfront property.

This is all extremely contrary to the way DeGeneres appears on TV, who began her stand-up comedy routines in 1978 and made an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1986. She has appeared in several films and also voiced Dory in the animated films Finding Nemo and Finding Dory. She was also the star of Ellen from 1994 to 1998 and has hosted her talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, since 2003.

Prague – 27 February 2018 – With just 30 days to go until the second edition of Prague Gaming Summit kicks off, the organizers are announcing a fully packed speaker lineup with many leading experts of the industry.

In 2017, the new amendments in the Polish gambling law have entered into force. Operators have found themselves either blacklisted or dealing with heavy paperwork and more announced amendments.

Poland is one of the most restrictive markets in Europe, but apparently the changes to the Polish gambling regulations introduced last year were quite beneficial to the licensed betting operators and helped them almost double their turnover in comparison to the previous years.

The latest announced moderator is going to make sure that delegates will gain insights into how running an operation in Poland can have its perks by driving the conversation between Piotr Dynowski (Bird&Bird), Anna Wietrzynska-Ciolkowska (DLA Piper), Tony Las (Superbet Poland) and Adam Warlewski (Superbet Poland)

When CBS and Turner, a subsidiary of Time Warner, signed a lucrative deal with the NCAA two years ago, they certainly didn’t expect to be caught up in one of the biggest college sports scandals to rock the country.

The deal was worth $8.8 billion over eight years, and gave broadcast rights to the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) Division I Men’s Basketball Championship games, commonly called March Madness. March Madness receives an extremely high percentage of viewers, which drives up the price for advertising and brought in $1.24 billion nationwide for TV spots in 2016. That lucrative deal might now crumble due to an ongoing FBI investigation into college basketball corruption.

The FBI started taking a closer look at the NCAA in September of last year, investigating possible corruption. Questionable recruiting practices and business activities have so far resulted in charges against several coaches. The charges include solicitation of bribes and fraud. Since many of the coaches travelled out of their home states into other states to recruit players, the case is being handled at a federal level.

Bank records and documents seized during raids conducted in conjunction with the investigation revealed expense reports, questionable payouts and cash advances given to potential recruits, according to a Yahoo report. It has been a huge black eye one of the most well received sports leagues in the country, and has even caught sports apparel conglomerate Adidas in its snare. Adidas has been accused of facilitating payments to colleges and universities that signed deals with the company.

The Baha Mar casino in the Bahamas has reportedly sacked two of its executives following the arrest of two suspected Colombian prostitutes at the integrated resort.

On Monday, the Bahamas Tribune reported that the two unnamed execs were dismissed last week on “suspicion of impropriety” following an internal investigation. The report quoted Baha Mar’s senior VP of administration and external relations Robert Sands saying the pair were fired after management became aware of “potential misconduct.”

Without directly drawing a line from one to the other, Sands also noted that the Royal Bahamas Police Force “concurrently arrested two women, who were charged with overstaying their visas.” The Colombian nationals entered the Bahamas legally on January 9 but were authorized to stay in the country for only nine days.

According to court prosecutors, Cable Beach police set up an undercover operation at Baha Mar on February 17, leading to the women being charged with visa violations three days later. Despite police suspicions, they apparently failed to gather sufficient evidence to charge the pair with solicitation.

China’s state-run media says the nation is losing its war against illegal gambling in rural areas.

On Monday, the state-owned People’s Daily newspaper published an op-ed detailing the Lunar New Year crackdown on illegal gambling by authorities in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

According to the official numbers, some 25,426 police officers were assigned the task of stamping out illegal gambling in the northern territory, and the final figures showed police filing 2,367 administrative cases and 76 criminal cases of illegal gambling activity, along with the seizure of some RMB 3.5m (US$554k) in cash.

The dedication of some of the officers – or the lack of care shown by their superiors – shouldn’t be understated. The report claimed that one group of 40 plain-clothes officers walked 10 kilometers in -30° temperatures to get the drop on walkie-talkie-wielding sentries guarding the roads leading to a warehouse where illegal gambling was going down.

The point of consumption tax is fomenting some discord in the Outback. Crown Resorts is fighting a planned 15% POCT for South Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland, which may go Australia-wide. The POCT would affect Crown’s fully owned subsidiary Betfair Australasia, among the smallest of Crown’s operations. It is fighting the tax by warning state governments that it will be forced to raise prices on consumers, which would cause leakage of customers to illegal betting sites, and there goes the state’s new delicious tax revenue.

There’s nothing wrong with fighting a new tax. In fact fighting any tax is a good thing. The way Crown is doing it though isn’t based on sound economics. Taxes cannot be simply pushed off onto consumers. Any company can always try to raise prices in order to increase revenues and margins, but it doesn’t always work. Just consider the extreme example and say the government raises taxes to a million dollars per online bet. In response, Crown will now charge a million dollars more in commission per bet. Obviously that wouldn’t work and Crown’s revenue from such a business would move to zero.

Even if tax costs could be shifted to consumers, that would mean consumers now have less money to spend on other things, maybe video games or some newfangled brand of transparent underwear. The shift would then be onto the video game sector or the see-through underwear company, who would then purchase less magical transparency salve from its own suppliers, and so on and so forth. The economy does not stop at any level. It keeps moving in a circle and a new tax affects everyone, in every industry, at every level, everywhere in the world.

Raising prices in an effort to cover a tax is not any different from simply raising prices in order to try to make more money just because. Consumers do not do the math in their heads as to how much of a given price is due to some tax or other. They just see the final price. They don’t consciously allow for a company to raise prices when a new tax is introduced and therefore pay more willingly because…you know…taxes and we consumers need to help. Indeed, if Crown tries to raise prices on its Betfair customers by 15%, those who cannot afford the price hike will move to cheaper venues as Crown says, hence leakage. That part is true.

Two major UK live tours to catch up on including victories for Chris Bryce in the partypoker LIVE UK Poker Championship, and Andreas Wiborg in the Unibet Open London.

If partypoker LIVE were a lawnmower, it would be one of those fancy things that people drive, while the rest of the competition stand riddled with sweat after pushing all day.

Another successful competition is in the books. Remember when partypoker missed guarantees with higher frequency than Frank Bruno missed punches? They are loooooong gone.

The partypoker LIVE UK Poker Championship Main Event promised a million pounds in prize money, and 1,076 entrants ensured that happened.

Macau welcomed a higher number of tourists in 2017 but a smaller slice of this tourist horde came away with a good impression of the world’s top gambling hub.

On Friday, Macau’s Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) released the results of its Q4 and FY17 visitation satisfaction surveys, and the figures make for sober reading for the special administrative region’s hospitality industry.

First the good news: total visitation improved 5.4% to 32.6m in 2017, and total visitor spending (excluding gaming) hit MOP61.32b (US$7.6b), up 16.4% from 2016. By way of comparison, Macau’s 2017 gaming revenue was up 19.5% year-on-year to MOP 265.7b.

Now the bad news: overall visitor satisfaction with Macau’s hotel services and facilities slipped 4.2 points to 85.9% while satisfaction with travel agencies fell 14.6 points to 70.7%. Gaming facilities weren’t spared the satisfaction erosion, falling 10.3 points to 73.9%.