Atlantic City’s Ocean Resort Casino (ORC) has been sold to an as-yet unidentified buyer just six months after the property (re)opened.

On Wednesday, rumors swirled that ORC owner AC Ocean Walk LLC, which is majority-owned by Colorado developer Bruce Deifik, was on the market, despite Deifik having only acquired the property 12 months ago and the property having just opened its doors six months ago.

On Thursday, news broke that the rumors were true, although we may have to wait a while longer to discover the identity of ORC’s mystery shopper and how much they paid. Deifik paid $200m when he acquired the then-shuttered Revel in January 2018.

The new owner(s) reportedly plan to inject an additional $70m into ORC, which appears to have struggled to attract a sufficient volume of guests and gamblers to make its operations sustainable in the long run. The Associated Press reported that the $70m will fund a new buffet, additional hotel suites, gaming floor improvements and more entertainment options.

Poland’s licensed online sports betting operators now control nearly half the country’s market, a significantly higher slice from just one year ago.

On Thursday, Sport.pl quoted data from Poland’s Ministry of Finance indicating that Polish-licensed bookmakers’ land-based and online turnover hit PLN5.1b (US$1.37b) in 2018, a 55% rise over 2017’s PLN3.3b and triple 2016’s PLN1.7b.

The Ministry has yet to publish these figures on its own site, and the report didn’t break out separate online turnover figures. The report did claim that Polish-licensed bookmakers snared a 48% share of 2018’s online betting market, eight points higher than at the end of 2017. Prior to the implementation of Poland’s new online gambling regulations in April 2017, estimates of Polish-licensed operators’ share ranged as low as 10%.

The locally-licensed market share improvement is at least partly attributable to the Ministry issuing seven new online betting licenses in 2018, bringing the total number of Polish-licensed online options to 14, although some of these new licensees have yet to launch their Polish-facing sites.

Online gambling technology provider GAN has expanded its existing relationship with Paddy Power Betfair’s FanDuel brand to target online opportunities in two US states.

On Thursday, the UK- and Ireland-listed GAN announced that it had signed “a material long-term deal” with the FanDuel Group that will see GAN provide FanDuel with a platform for “rapid deployment of Internet casino and account services for Internet sports betting in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.”

GAN already supplies technology to the New Jersey-licensed operations of PPB’s Betfair brand, which came under the FanDuel Group umbrella following PPB’s acquisition of FanDuel’s US-facing operations last year. Last April, GAN and PPB extended their New Jersey deal for another “multi-year” period.

GAN’s new five-year FanDuel pact includes the latter company agreeing to license GAN’s US Patent, which involves linking companies’ land-based loyalty programs with online gambling accounts. Last year, GAN engaged an outside law firm to pursue US companies GAN believes are infringing on its intellectual property rights.

The whales may be swimming away from Macau casinos during the first half of 2019, but they will return during the latter half of the year. This is according to Instinet, the stockbroking division of Japan-based Nomura.

Instinet analysts Harry Curtis, Daniel Adam and Brian Dobson predict that Macau’s gross gaming revenue (GGR) is going to take a hit in the current half, but things will even out later in the year. The analysts write, “Consensus expectations are for (7.5 percent) VIP compression in the first half of 2019 and up low single digits in the second half, so there would be upside to estimates (and probably sentiment) if it stays flat or declines only low single digits while mass expands mid- to high-single digits.”

They further state, “Based on November and month-to-date December results, there should be upside to our kitchen sink 2019 (10 percent) VIP estimate.”

The analysts published their forecast this past Monday, providing guidance on the mass- and VIP-gaming segments of Macau’s casino industry. They added that year-on-year growth for GGR for the VIP segment has remained flat, or dipped into the red, during each of the past six months.

Last September, Caesars Entertainment got caught up in the sports gambling craze in New Jersey and became a little too excited. It allowed a few bets on college football games, an activity that is still prohibited in the state. Once the wagers were made known, the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (NJDGE) swooped in to slap the company on the wrist (although it more than likely just felt like a feather) and new information has now surfaced related to the illegal wagers.

According to NJGamblingSites.com, information received through a public records request helps to build a timeline of events surrounding the bets. On November 20, the Deputy Attorney General of New Jersey, Jennifer K. Russo-Belles, sent a letter to Caesars, addressed to the company’s VP and Chief Counsel N. Lynne Hughes, that points to “numerous instances of noncompliance.”

Russo-Belles details how Caesars allowed gambling on a game between universities Rutgers and Kansas, stating, “While CIE’s [Caesars Interactive Entertainment] Las Vegas Trading Team noticed the game had been incorrectly loaded and removed it from availability within an hour of its posting; CIE’s New Jersey Trading Team did not. It was not until the division notified CIE’s New Jersey Trading Team on Sept. 14, 2018, four days later, that CIE voided the bet.”

However, the trading team for CIE Las Vegas “had failed to send out notifications when it discovered the illegal listing because it was unaware of New Jersey’s compliance standards.” That led to the manager of CIE’s hub operations, Jeff Davis, to send an internal memo to CIE staff in which he emphasized that it was “illegal to offer New Jersey collegiate games for sports betting.”