Struggling Saipan casino operator Imperial Pacific International (IPI) has lost one of its directors while its chief lawyer has detailed what the FBI took when they raided the company’s offices last year.

On Monday, IPI informed the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that executive director Teng Sio I had resigned his seat, effective immediately. Teng, who briefly served as IPI’s chairman in 2018, was quoted saying he had no disagreement with IPI’s board and simply wished to devote more time to his family and his other business interests.

CONTRACTORS SCORING POINTS OFF IPI

Earlier this month, IPI learned that a lawsuit filed by one of its former contractors on the Imperial Palace Resort would be allowed to proceed. US District Court Chief Judge Ramona Manglona rejected an IPI motion to dismiss the suit by Pacific Rim Land Development, which claims to be owed $5.65m for work completed in 2018.

Spanish gambling operator Codere is seeking emergency refinancing of its debt as the COVID-19 pandemic puts a serious crimp in its cashflow.

On Monday, Spanish media outlet El Confidencial reported that Codere had enlisted Bank of America to ensure the company had enough liquidity to ride out the impact of COVID-19. Codere has suffered the closure of its land-based gaming venues while its online gambling division is struggling due to the mass cancellation of sports and racing events.

Codere has seen the value of its €900m bond issue tumble from €0.90 to €0.35 in a little more than one month, leading Moody’s to downgrade the bonds to junk status and raising concerns that the struggling firm is once again teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

Codere was forced to furlough nearly 70% of its Spanish workforce in late-March following the government’s order to close all non-essential retail operations to minimize further COVID-19 transmission.

Belgium’s gambling regulator has imposed new online weekly deposit limits to ensure gamblers don’t get carried away during their COVID-19 self-isolation.

On Monday, the Belgian Gaming Commission (BGC) announced that customers of locally licensed gambling sites would be limited to €500 in weekly deposits per player across all licensed sites. The new limit came shortly after the BGC issued advice to players on how to manage the temptation to gamble as a means of alleviating the boredom of social isolation.

There is no mechanism to increase the €500 limit but customers can apply to have a lower limit. This reduction, which will be applied immediately, can be requested through individual gambling sites. The limit can later be restored to the €500 maximum but the change won’t take effect for three days to ensure gamblers aren’t ‘chasing’ losses.

The BGC is currently focused on its online licensees’ activity following the mass shutdown of land-based gambling options – casinos, slots halls, cafés with betting kiosks, retail betting offices, even sales in newsagents – to prevent further transmission of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Last week, the BGC extended this retail shutdown to April 19 following guidance from the government.

With just a month and a half to go, the 2020 World Series of Poker has yet to be cancelled, despite the country it would take place in being under stack in the worst week so far for American deaths from COVID-19.

With Las Vegas no longer Sin City, but a city under lockdown, the decision to delay making a call on whether the WSOP takes place this year or not has been widely criticised. Players can’t make plans, no-one knows whether an online version will happen, and if the whole thing is to be suspended by a year, what advantage do the powers that be have in hesitating to make that judgement?

Even as early as a month ago, the brightest minds in the poker world saw no way that the Series could possibly take place, as Daniel Negreanu alluded to on Twitter.

The notion that we will have a WSOP in 2020 seems very unlikely. Also unlikely that you will see NBA/NHL playoff games with fans in the stands.

At one point in his first Galfond Challenge, Phil Galfond was €900,000 in the hole. He took a few days off, he weighed up his play against his luck. He answered many calls from fans and rivals on Twitter for him to hang up his mouse, admit defeat and take the L with the good humour and grace that he had been credited for so much in the past.

Many of those messages either declared outright or hinted at the same kindly yet cutting opinion on the Run It Once supremo.

‘You used to be great, but this guy is too good for you’, they spoke as a crowd-voice.

Reluctant to let the voice drown out his own thoughts, Galfond took time out in the tank. He processed his play, looked at how many hands he had left to recover the deficit and came to a decision. He was going to play on, to battle for the win when almost a seven-figure sum down.

When it comes to what we miss most about football, there are any numbers of things on an ever-growing list. From the anxiety that can only come from looking forward to a big game before it kicks off, to the player interviews, the highlights, the aftershock of a managerial sacking or news headline, the memes, we miss it all.

Footballer-to-footballer banter is very high up on that list too, though. So it’s good news for football and Esports fans that the Combat Corona challenge has taken place, with some high profile footballers facing off in a couple of games of FIFA20 for the fans, with viewers on Twitch donating over £18,000 to combat the spread of Coronavirus in the process.

The action was really well presented, with some same-club clashes as well as deadly rivals swapping bragging rights too.

Dominic Calvert-Lewin took on Jordan Pickford in an all-Everton clash that saw the superstar striker get the better of his club and International teammate Pickford.

In the latest of our series on the times poker has been on screen, we’re featuring a series dedicated to the might and majesty of the world’s greatest card game, Poker After Dark. Having run since 2007, Poker After Dark is one of the most popular series to ever cover the game and has returned to our screens in recent years on the PokerGO platform. What makes Poker After Dark so popular? Let’s take a look.

Poker has long been a game that was viewed as an underground pursuit, a card game played through cigar smoke. Though that all changed in one moment when Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event, the dark set design and intimate player surroundings made for a show that, when originally broadcast on NBC in 2007, felt like a retrospective, a callback to a bygone age.

If you want to look back at the most recent series in 2019 and have an active subscription to PokerGO, then you can check out the recaps from that series right here.

The format could well have been swamped by the popularity of High Stakes Poker, a show that shares a resurrective existence with Poker After Dark on PokerGO in recent times. After all, High Stakes Poker had big cash games, big names and big pots. All three were also on Poker After Dark, but the cash game competition was added to by having a tournament edge to its ending, which lent other elements to the show’s style.

The dead cat is bouncing. This dead cat is coated in flubber. But make no mistake. The cat is dead. It will most likely be a very convincing bounce. So convincing that the world will breathe a sigh of COVID-19 relief and sing the praises of the resiliency of the global economy in the face of adversity. But it will be a bull trap, because massive consumer price inflation, price controls, and shortages are coming.

Here’s why the dead cat bounce in stocks is likely to continue, for now. It looks like the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is only days away now, if we haven’t already hit it. Infection rates are slowing in Europe, and hot spots in the United States look to be finding a plateau. But here’s the thing. Since the S&P 500 topped in February, $920 billion have been added to the U.S. money supply, and that number will keep rising faster and faster and faster as the Federal Reserve keeps buying and buying and buying bad debt. We are still 22% below highs in the S&P. It is conceivable that we could see those highs return as COVID-19 fades away. Of course there is always the risk that a second wave of the virus strikes and everyone scurries back into their holes, in which case the next crash will be even worse. That is a significant risk that I cannot predict, which is why trading now is dangerous.

Still, if you didn’t buy calls in key gaming stocks by now, it’s not too late. Most of my March 27 trading recommendations for gaming stocks are down, and with the bounce now underway and virus news improving, they will soon be way up. Still, don’t go over 10% of a total portfolio. Don’t blame me if you get too greedy. And I must also warn, if you get car sick, don’t get in this car. If you have ever vomited from a rough roller coaster ride, don’t go to Busch Gardens. If you can’t stay conscious during a sky dive, don’t get on the plane. However, if you have ever pulled a slingshot maneuver around the moon at 9Gs to outrun an asteroid, land on it, drill into it and blow it up with thermonuclear weapons to save the planet, this should be a piece of cake.

For the rest of us, keep a good level of fiat paper cash on hand, digital fiat cash in your brokerage account, tuck away a nice portion of gold and silver held in Australia, a little Bitcoin SV (BSV) in a digital wallet, and then go and spend the next year with the nearest South American aboriginal tribe. You’ll learn really great skills with them that could come in very useful.