The weekend college football betting action gets started early Friday afternoon from Nashville as Purdue faces Auburn in the Music City Bowl. Hugely disappointing season for the Tigers, who were a preseason Top 10 team but finished 7-5 with three losses by at least 14 points.

Odds courtesy of OddsShark.com

However, they are 3.5-point favorites over the 6-6 Boilermakers, who got bowl eligible with a 28-21 win at rival Indiana to close the regular season. It’s already been a successful postseason for Purdue, though, because it kept head coach Jeff Brohm from bolting for alma mater Louisville. The Boilers are just 6-16 SU in their past 22 games after a win.

In the Camping World Bowl from Orlando, No. 16 West Virginia faces No. 20 Syracuse. The big story there is star Mountaineers QB Will Grier deciding to skip the bowl and focus on the NFL Draft. He should be a first-round pick. WVU’s best offensive lineman, Yodny Cajuste, also will sit. The Orange are 1.5-point favorites and have covered their past three against WVU.

Casino operator Wynn Resorts has filed a lawsuit against rival Genting over the appearance of the latter’s in-development Las Vegas venue.

On the Friday before Christmas, Wynn’s legal grinches filed a lawsuit against Genting’s Nevada subsidiary Resorts World Las Vegas LLC, arguing that the unfinished Resorts World Las Vegas (RWLV) casino employs “a substantially similar architectural design” to Wynn’s existing Las Vegas casino properties.

Wynn’s filing argues that the shell of the $4b RWLV, which is going up just across the street from the Wynn Las Vegas and Encore buildings, already bears a striking resemblance to those properties, as well as to the Wynn Macau resort and the in-development Encore Boston Harbor casino in Massachusetts.

Those Wynn properties all feature a similar concave façade featuring distinctive curved bronze glass and cream-colored horizontal banding between the panes. The lawsuit alleges that RWLV’s design violates Wynn’s “copyrighted architectural work.”

STEVE WYNN FALLS FROM GRACE

Wynn Resorts started 2018 on the right foot, reporting its 2017 revenue rising 41% and the company’s chairman and CEO Steve Wynn predicted great things were in store for the casino empire he founded way back in 2002.

Two days later, Steve was vehemently denying a blockbuster Wall Street Journal report in which multiple female Wynn staffers accused him of sexual harassment dating back decades. The company’s shares promptly shed one-fifth of their value and gaming regulators in Nevada and Massachusetts launched probes that could imperil the company’s future operations.

Less than two weeks after the allegations were published, Steve had resigned from the company he founded, and he sold off his considerable holdings in the company the following month. To do so, he had to end a pair of six-year legal fights: the first with his ex-wife Elaine and the second with former Universal Entertainment chairman Kazuo Okada, the importance of both having drastically diminished in light of his new predicament.

This is The Mouthpiece, a guest contribution by Martin Owens. If you would like to submit a contribution please contact Bill Beatty for submission details. Thank you.

“The manner of giving is worth more than the gift.”

― Pierre Corneille

It’s a holiday thing. Most parents have been here: you get the kids the latest, shiniest,whiz-bang gotta-have gadget in the store, maybe a new design of bicycle. And you get it home Christmas Eve, and all of a sudden it dawns on you that you’re gonna have to assemble this thing. It’s way more complicated than anything you had as a child. And you don’t have the necessary tools, like 52-millimeter offset hex wrenches, and anyway the assembly instructions read like they were translated from Chinese (they probably were).

The first full month of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau (HKZM) bridge being opened saw a 15.3% year-on-year increase in visitor arrivals to Macau.

The Macau Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) reported November visits reaching 3.27 million, a 3.6% increase from the previous month. Of the 2.31 million who traveled by land to visit the Special Administrative Region, about 437,000 passed through the HKZM bridge, which opened to the public last October 24.

The census agency also reported same-day visitors increasing 26.9% from the same period last year, to 1.68 million. Overnight visitors rose 5.1% year on year to 1.59 million. The average length of stay of visitors remained the same, at 1.2 days, but overnight visitors increased their length of stay by 0.1 day, to 2.2 days.

About 70% of the visitors, or 2.28 million, were from Mainland China. Of these, 1.06 million traveled through the Individual Visit Scheme, 19.1% more than in November 2017.

With the festive season upon us and poker writers scraping the bottom of the barrel in search of something to write about, Lee Davy, releases his first poker prediction of 2019, that the Triton Poker Series will replace the Super High Roller Bowl as the Super Bowl of poker. 

2018 was an incredible year for the High Roller stratum of the poker industry. I don’t have the time or the patience to crunch the numbers, but I will sit in a car filled with exhaust fumes if it wasn’t a record year for High Roller prize pools.

The highlight of the year for me was the emergence of the Triton Poker Series as a real force in the High Roller niche. It’s different from the European Poker Tour (EPT), partypoker MILLIONS, World Poker Tour (WPT) and World Series of Poker (WSOP) as it only caters for High Rollers allowing the organisers to take care of their customers every need.

Before Triton held successful tours in Montenegro and Jeju, Poker Central dominated the High Roller niche with the ARIA High Rollers and the Triple Crown of US Poker Open, Poker Masters and the Super High Roller Bowl, with most players agreeing that the latter was THE premier poker tournament for high stakes players, globally.

At the very beginning of the year, I began this column for 2018 saying that this would be the year for conservative investors. It began this way. In 2017, “everything went up and fundamentals were only a bonus. Almost all gaming markets went way up, along with almost everything else in the world. 2018 is not likely to repeat this by a long shot.”

Gaming markets topped in late May, giving added corroboration to the famous Wall Street phrase “Sell in May and Go Away”. On Christmas Eve, the S&P 500 finally confirmed what gaming stocks had been warning about for months. A bear market is coming. And now it is here, officially, according to the arbitrary numbers dictated by the media that constitutes a bear market.

Now that it’s here as 2018 closes out, what follows is what I believe is going to happen in broad strokes in 2019 for China, Europe, and the United States.

China