It didn’t take long for a sudden surge in online gambling operators in Cambodia to be seen as more of an unwelcome plague than a new economic instrument. Partly due to an inability to follow rules and partly due to outside interference, the entire industry was shut down by the Cambodian government at the end of 2019.

Of course, there will be those who defy the country’s order and still continue to operate, but they’ll be looking at severe punishment if caught. According to one senior police official, these individuals will be branded “gangsters” and will incur the full wrath of the police force.

To these individuals, the national police force makes its position clear. According to a spokesperson for the force, Chhay Kim Khoeun, “The National Police chief had made it clear that any individual or group who defies the order is to be considered as gangsters.”

It’s been a tumultuous ride for Cambodia and online gambling operators. 2019 was especially full of ups and downs as the town of Sihanoukville quickly became the epicenter of gambling operators looking to capture a piece of the action, both online and in brick-and-mortar venues. All the movement wasn’t without controversy, however, since many of those being employed were brought in from outside the country and concerns over raw sewage disposal and shoddy construction began to surface.

There will be some amazing poker events in 2020, but which ones will really grab the audience’s attention and refuse to let go? What events are the ones we’ll look back on in 12 months’ time and talk about with our mates? Let’s take a look at the most plausible yet pulsating possibilities we can conjure.

A British Player Wins the World Series Main Event

It’s not outside the realms of possibility, but it does require a healthy use of your imagination to picture the image of a British Player winning the World Series of Poker’s flagship poker tournament. That’s mainly because no British-born poker player has ever won the WSOP Main Event, and although Iranian-born Mansour Matloubi resided in London, no-one has event done that since 1990.

Why is that the case? Britain has some of the best poker players on the planet including, perhaps, the current best player in the world in Stephen Chidwick. They have other superstars such as Sam Grafton, Jake Cody, Sam Trickett and Barny Boatman, bracelet winners and EPT and High Roller crushes all. Why has the Main Event been such a sticking point over recent years? Numbers.

It’s been quite the year of poker stories, and our faithful readers very much seemed to enjoy our poker content. Exclusive interviews ranked very highly in the stories our readers flocked to most, maybe edged out slightly by content about perhaps the most interesting man in the poker world today, Kid Poker.

Daniel Negreanu leaves PokerStars

Negreanu dominated many of our headlines this year, but none were bigger than this one. After 12 years of marriage, Kid Poker was finally leaving PokerStars. Neither side has apparently suffered much from the split, as Negreanu has continued to be one of the best and most vocal players alive .

This story didn’t end there though, as Negreanu had a bit of a snafu selling shares of his WSOP action. After a glitch in the server, Negreanu had to pay back many of his backers, but the good guy did so quickly, keeping everyone happy.

Use whatever analogy or superlative you want in describing the state of human civilization as we enter the new decade, there is a sense of massive change at our doorstep. 2019 wasn’t all bad, but most people on all sides of all the trendy arguments these days will agree there is more social unrest, people are angrier, politics is getting even more inane if that were even possible, and something’s gotta give. We all disagree on what the thing is that has to give, but it’s something. What exactly? Many things probably, but here I’ll try to explain what I think it is, and how the gaming industry is involved in it.

I was reading Dave Barry’s year in review humor column yesterday, which I look forward to every year. I grew up reading him, and I model my own year-in-review columns after his style. While it was funny and biting as usual, I was telling my wife last night that something about it changed this year. In past years, he would take a few weird events that happened throughout the year and exaggerate them funhouse-mirror-style, so you’d come out of reading it with a sense that crazy things did indeed happen here and there, but generally, everything is more or less normal so just laugh it off. This time though, Dave didn’t have to pick out obscure events and blow them up out of proportion. This time all he had to do was review the actual news, almost as if he were a real journalist. I finished the column laughing, but also with a definite sense of unease.

I can boil down what I’m seeing in just one number. 5,245,520,000,000. That’s 5.245 trillion. That’s the amount of dollars that the Federal Reserve has conjured up into existence since September 17, 2019 just three and a half months ago when the overnight loan market suddenly exploded and rates jumped to 10% overnight. $5.245 trillion is the amount of money needed to keep real interest rates (rates minus price inflation) suppressed below zero, a situation the world has been in now for 11 years running. Don’t believe me? Check here. Download the Excel file, use the sum function in the final column. It’s all right there.

What can you really say about that number except that something is totally whacked out? It’s like trying to conceptualize the size of the universe. After trying to think about it for 5 seconds, you just give up. There’s no point.

As a well-seasoned iGaming conference circuit queen, I wanted to enter the New Year by sharing the most surprising changes to the 2020 calendar. This year the big conference organizers in our space (and beyond) have truly shaken up their offerings and in chronological order, I’ll highlight six big changes you may not be aware of.

Lets not forget, CalvinAyre.com will be attending each of these six events as well, so we hope to see you there!

1) CoinGeek Conference returns to London in February with iGaming component

While CoinGeek Conference London is not a dedicated iGaming event, there will be an iGaming component added to the conference this year. Delegates can expect at least a panel dedicated to iGaming, in addition to networking opportunities with like-minded professionals and an unrivaled platform to learn about technology that is changing world as we know it.