The Manchester United board has quietened the English Premier League grapevine by appointing Ole Gunnar Solskjaer permanently; handing the Norwegian a three-year contract. 

Ole Gunnar Solksjaer has transformed from a baby-faced substitute savant to a leader of one of the most famous of footballing architectures after Ed Woodward took some time out from his role as The Equalizer to hand the Norwegian a three-year contract as the manager of Manchester United.

You can do all the addition and subtraction that you like; an invisible archetype exists in our minds, a lock and key mechanism of fear that means few of us ever reach our real potential. Thank goodness, for the sake of all Red Devils, that fear didn’t prevent everyone involved in the club from making the right deal.

Flip-flops.

The Triton Poker Series returns to the Maestral Resort & Casino in Montenegro May 5 – 17 with ten events spread over thirteen days, including brand new formats, and all the old faces. 

Last spring, the founders of the Triton Poker Series emerged from a slumber to host a magnificent high stakes tournament series in the Maestral Resort & Casino in Montenegro, and ever since they have sprayed their world-class poker philosophy across the world like bullets from an Uzi in the hands of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And after successful back-to-back visits to Jeju in South Korea, The Triton Poker Series in Montenegro is back, and anyone who’s expecting symmetry will be happily disappointed.

Those of you who were paying attention to the Triton Poker Series Jeju livestream will have seen the trailer for the Montenegro event and pasted the 5-17 May dates into your calendar. If you did, the first thing that may have come to mind was, “man, that’s a long time.”

There’s a good reason for that.

Greek gambling operator OPAP closed out 2018 on a strong note, reporting revenue and earnings numbers the company hasn’t enjoyed in years.

Figures released this week show OPAP’s revenue hitting €440.7m in the three months ending December 31, 2018, a 7.6% rise from the same period last year. Earnings shot up 31.5% to €109m and net profit rose 15.8% to €38.1m, in part due to a 9.6% cut in operating expenses.

For the year as a whole, revenue was up 6.3% to €1.55b, earnings rose 15.4% to €353.6m and net profit improved 13.7% to €143.3m. The FY18 gains came despite a €17.5m goodwill impairment for its Neurosoft software subsidiary.

OPAP’s good fortune was almost entirely due to its burgeoning video lottery terminal (VLT) division, which reported revenue of €68.4m in Q4, up 114.5% year-on-year as the number of installed VLTs hit nearly 19k across 351 Play Gaming halls and 1,915 agencies. OPAP says it remains on target to have the full complement of 25k VLTs installed by the end of 2019.

Nevada’s casino gaming revenue suffered a slight year-on-year decline in February but still managed to top the $1b mark.

Figures released Thursday by the Nevada Gaming Control Board show the state’s casino licensees generated gaming revenue of $1.012b in February. The sum is a 0.62% decline from the same month last year, but an improvement over January 2019’s $984.5m.

Casinos on the Las Vegas Strip fared worse than some of the state’s other regions, as Strip gaming revenue was down nearly 2% to just under $592m. By contrast, Downtown casinos reported revenue up 9% to $58m. Casinos in the Lake Tahoe areas reported revenue falling around one-quarter following a bout of particularly inclement weather.

February’s slots revenue was up 0.5% to $608.3m while the ‘table, counter and card games’ segment was down 2.2% to $403.2m. The table numbers were dragged down by baccarat, which got the usual seasonal jolt from the Chinese New Year celebrations but the VIPs also played luckier, resulting in baccarat revenue falling more than one-quarter to $132.1m.