Russia’s digital censors are without a doubt the hardest working people in the online gambling sector.

Russia’s telecom watchdog Roskomnadzor blocked nearly 14,500 unauthorized online gambling domains in the month of August, bringing the year-to-date total of blocked domains to over 76k, a 269% rise over the number of blocked domains in all of 2017.

Russia prohibits all online gambling except sports betting, and has to date issued 15 online sports betting licenses to Russian firms. According to July website traffic reports, Fonbet continues to lead the pack, reporting 10.1m visits, well ahead of runner-up 1xBet at 8.3m visits, while third-place finisher Liga Stavok was well back at 4.9m.

Russian-licensed sites are believed to capture about 60% of domestic online betting action but they face hurdles that their internationally licensed competitors – the ones Roskomnadzor strives so faithfully to sandbag – do not.

It’s the morning after the first night of legal single-game wagering on the National Football League outside Nevada, and there’s no shortage of sports betting news that needs to be updated. Read on…

On Thursday, the Mississippi Gaming Commission (MGC) announced that the first month of legal wagering at the state’s land-based casinos produced betting turnover of $9.8m. The state launched its legal betting market on August 1 and there are now no less than 19 land-based wagering options available to local bettors.

MGC exec director Allen Godfrey told the Daily Journal that the results “seem like positive numbers,” although it pales in comparison to the $40.7m that New Jersey’s licensed betting operators took in July, and there were far fewer operators authorized to take those bets at the time. However, Mississippi’s population is only one-third of New Jersey’s, so we’ll cut them some slack.

The Delaware Lottery reported this week that the state’s legal betting market handled wagers totaling $7.7m in August, representing a 6% decline from July’s result, suggesting that a lot of Delaware bettors really miss July’s 2018 FIFA World Cup action. Of the state’s three licensed betting operators, Delaware Park accounted for over two-thirds of August’s handle.

UK gambling and advertising regulators have been forced to repeat warnings to gambling operators regarding their obligations not to promote their business to children.

On Friday, the UK Gambling Commission issued a “rules reminder” for its licensees, with the top two items being “gambling adverts on football club websites” and “gambling logos on under-18s football shirts.”

This reminder followed hot on the heels of a BBC report that found gambling company logos on the websites of 15 football clubs from the Premier League, Championship, League One and the Scottish Premiership. These betting logos appeared on pages aimed at the clubs’ junior supporters and contained links that led directly to the betting sites.

Many of the sites removed the linked logos after being contacted by the BBC, but Shabnum Mustapha, media and public affairs manager at the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), told the Beeb that the ASA’s compliance team would be writing to the leagues “to set out clearly our concerns in this area.”