[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]

Deepika Padukone is one of the best-known actresses in India, as well as many other countries around the world.  She is one of the highest-paid actresses in India and has been seen in several high-profile movies, including Happy New Year, Piku and XXX:  Return of Xander Cage.  She has won a number of awards, including two Producers Guild Film Awards, three Filmfare Awards, three Stardust Awards and the 2020 Crystal Award at the World Economic Forum – the latter for her charitable efforts.  She was also listed by Time Magazine among the top 100 influential people in the world in 2018.   Her celebrity status and global popularity have now been captured by Instagram, where she has joined an ongoing campaign by the social media platform to recognize Mental Health Awareness month. 

Padukone curated a Wellness Guide for the platform as a way to inspire people to remain optimistic and positive during the coronavirus pandemic.  Instagram is using the guides to highlight mental health and wellness and has teamed up with a number of public figures and organizations to help assist the effort.  Ankhi Das is the director of public policy for Facebook, which owns Instagram, in India, South and Central Asia, and explains, “We want to support [users’] mental well-being by amplifying mental health resources and empowering creators to create inspiring, wellness related content. The Wellness Guide is a step in that direction.”

Padukone teamed up with The Live Laugh Love Foundation, which she founded, to help curate the global project.  She explains of her involvement, “I am sure we all agree that the past several weeks have not only been exceptionally unusual but also very difficult; uncertainty about the future, loss of livelihoods, and the inability to be around family and loved ones, are just a few of the challenges facing us.  And situations such as these often lead to or aggravate mental illness. I look forward to sharing with all of you some of the things I’ve been doing over the past several weeks to nurture my mental health, and I hope you find them useful too.”

Imagine a boxer that takes an uppercut and gets knocked down. He gets back up, looking dazed but OK, but now he has an internal bleed that will soon bring down him to the canvas permanently. He doesn’t feel it yet so he’ll keep fighting for a while longer, but he’s already done. Sooner or later he’s just going to collapse and that’ll be it. That’s International Game Technology. The company just had its earnings call this week. It wasn’t great. For IGT, 2008 was the uppercut. The stock topped at $48 just prior to the financial crisis getting into full gear and bottomed at $7. With this crisis, $7 is looking more like resistance.

The sad part is that 2007, 2008, and 2009 were all profitable years (page 29) for IGT! What that tells me is that the stock was way overvalued prior to the last financial crisis and collapsed to a more grounded valuation. What that also tells me now, as IGT hasn’t been profitable since 2016, is that its intrinsic value is probably closer to that of a penny stock. 

The end of an iconic company is certainly a sensitive issue, so I would like to clarify before elaborating. I am not saying that the gaming machine manufacturing industry is over, or even that the IGT name won’t live on. It will. It’s a respected brand name that carries weight. Bankruptcy almost never means that a good or service ceases to exist. All it means is that the financiers of a company that provides that good or service, lose their investment. That really shouldn’t bother anybody but the investors, and all told it really is not that big of a deal. What is a big deal is constantly bailing out these companies with everyone else’s money, which makes every taxpayer an investor by force. As my mother said to me when I was a kid (and even sometimes now), this is unacceptable behavior.  

The capital that produces all of the machines still exists and will still exist. Nobody is going to burn it down. Bankruptcy doesn’t magically make physical infrastructure disappear. All it does is deflate the value of that capital for someone else to buy and use at a new market price, free of old debt burdens. Bondholders lose out, equity holders lose out, but the infrastructure remains and keeps producing what it did before.

Germany’s Bundesliga became the first major sports league to return to action following the global coronavirus pandemic, and the soccer games are in full swing. While sports fans wait for a possible return of the NBA and others, Bundesliga is filling a much-needed gap in the athletic void. DraftKings is ready to capitalize on the millions of viewers tuning into the games, and will now offer live-streamed coverage of many of the matches through a new partnership with the league.

DraftKings began streaming the games, which were played in empty stadiums, this past Saturday. The season is expected to last just another five weeks, more or less, which means users of the platforms have a lot of action to look forward to. Any DraftKings user with any amount of money in their account will be able to take advantage of the streaming action, provided they live in Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania or West Virginia.

The addition of the livestreams will certainly be a bonus for the sports gambling giant, which recently went live on NASDAQ. Although the sports world has been brought to its knees, the company’s initial public offering (IPO) has enjoyed tremendous success. Like all other companies linked to the sports world, DraftKings has seen its revenue plummet, but this hasn’t curbed investor interest. By continuing to cover topics like the NFL Draft, Ultimate Fighting Championship, table tennis and more, the company has shown that it’s able to remain strong in the face of adversity. This led the company’s CEO, Jason Robins, to say last week during an earnings call, “It’s been a huge growth area over the last couple months for us. I think what it shows you is there’s a lot of pent-up demand for sports. People are hungry for sports to come back.”

Even analysts have been extremely bullish about the company’s prospects, and several have published glowing reviews of what’s in store. There is always one that has to stand out from the rest to garner more attention, and this time, it comes from Goldman Sachs. An analyst for the financial company, Stephen Grambling, started providing coverage of DraftKings this week, late to the party in some respects, and isn’t as convinced as other analysts that the company is on track for overwhelming greatness.

After 502 entries swelled the prizepool to over a million dollars, the PokerStars SCOOP Event #73 ended on Monday evening with Pavel Plesuv the last man standing, making himself $177,964 richer in the process.

The $2,100-entry event saw just 37 players return to the virtual felt on Day 2, and it was Plesuv who went on the attack right away, racing up the leaderboard to threaten the overnight advantage held by ‘zivziv’. Day 1’s dominant player would eventually finish in 3rd place, but before that, play had to get to the final table.

In the early levels, zivziv’s lead only grew, as their stack of 3.6m chips more than doubled as they ran up a monster stack, but while players were falling regularly, just 16 players being left in seats by the end of the second break of the day, plenty of big names were still involved.

A pivotal hand for Plesuv that PokerNews reported on was a three-way all-in where he knocked out both Simon Ravnsbaek and Alex Difelice, but he then repeated the trick with a pre-flop all-in with pocket queens which held across a nine-high board to bust both Maksim Viktorovich (ace-ten) and ‘6omen6’ (ace-king), a hand that took Plesuv into the lead in a big way.

After 502 entries swelled the prizepool to over a million dollars, the PokerStars SCOOP Event #73 ended on Monday evening with Pavel Plesuv the last man standing, making himself $177,964 richer in the process.

The $2,100-entry event saw just 37 players return to the virtual felt on Day 2, and it was Plesuv who went on the attack right away, racing up the leaderboard to threaten the overnight advantage held by ‘zivziv’. Day 1’s dominant player would eventually finish in 3rd place, but before that, play had to get to the final table.

In the early levels, zivziv’s lead only grew, as their stack of 3.6m chips more than doubled as they ran up a monster stack, but while players were falling regularly, just 16 players being left in seats by the end of the second break of the day, plenty of big names were still involved.

A pivotal hand for Plesuv that PokerNews reported on was a three-way all-in where he knocked out both Simon Ravnsbaek and Alex Difelice, but he then repeated the trick with a pre-flop all-in with pocket queens which held across a nine-high board to bust both Maksim Viktorovich (ace-ten) and ‘6omen6’ (ace-king), a hand that took Plesuv into the lead in a big way.

Global digital currency payments processor CoinPayments has announced Jason Butcher as its new CEO. Butcher previously held the role of COO at the Cayman Islands-based firm, a position he had for over four years. In an exclusive interview with CoinGeek, the new CEO revealed his plans for the firm, and why he believes that it’s only a matter of time before digital currency payments become a mainstay.

Butcher takes the helm at a time when digital currency payments are becoming increasingly popular. CoinPayments, for instance, processes over $100 million worth of payments on a monthly basis, a clear indication of the rising use of digital currencies in payments. The company, which operates in 221 countries globally, has processed over $5 billion since inception. It supports Bitcoin SV and over 1,900 other digital currencies.

“It’s an exciting time to take the helm of one of the most innovative companies in the crypto payments space and when digital payments are increasingly in demand,” Butcher tells CoinGeek.

The new CEO has already hit the ground running as he seeks to cement CoinPayments’ position as a global leader in the sector. He outlined the three pillars which the company will commit to during his reign, stating:

Global digital currency payments processor CoinPayments has announced Jason Butcher as its new CEO. Butcher previously held the role of COO at the Cayman Islands-based firm, a position he had for over four years. In an exclusive interview with CoinGeek, the new CEO revealed his plans for the firm, and why he believes that it’s only a matter of time before digital currency payments become a mainstay.

Butcher takes the helm at a time when digital currency payments are becoming increasingly popular. CoinPayments, for instance, processes over $100 million worth of payments on a monthly basis, a clear indication of the rising use of digital currencies in payments. The company, which operates in 221 countries globally, has processed over $5 billion since inception. It supports Bitcoin SV and over 1,900 other digital currencies.

“It’s an exciting time to take the helm of one of the most innovative companies in the crypto payments space and when digital payments are increasingly in demand,” Butcher tells CoinGeek.

The new CEO has already hit the ground running as he seeks to cement CoinPayments’ position as a global leader in the sector. He outlined the three pillars which the company will commit to during his reign, stating:

After a vote on Monday afternoon, all 20 English Premier League clubs agreed for quads to return to training in a bid to kick-off the practical measures of Project Restart.

With Premier League clubs re-starting training in small groups as of today, Tuesday May 19th, the proposed restart date of June 12th looks likelier to go ahead than at any other point in the last three weeks, especially after the U.K. Government moved towards a tentative reopening of a working society.

With the first batch of Coronavirus test results due back to clubs at 2.00pm on Tuesday, the 20 Premier League clubs all voting to restart training shows a real commitment to resuming the English Premier League season, which had either nine or ten games to go depending on who you support.

Training in small groups is obviously just a first step towards the resumption of the world’s most popular professional football league, but it is an important one. It took a lot of work too, with medical teams from all 20 teams meeting with EPL officials across a convivial video conference.

Given a testimonial by Phil Hellmuth himself, this is the story of how a player known as ‘The Duckman’ went for broke at the World Series of Poker.

You might ask ‘What makes this story any different to anyone else’s shot at glory as they bid for the World Series of Poker bracelet so many players desire more than any other poker tournament victory.

The answer, however, might not be what you expect. The reason A Chip and a Prayer world so well as a book about shooting for the moon exactly how everyone else wants to is the familiarly that ambition then shares with the reader.

Marvin Karlins wants to be a poker champion, and not just any champion, but a bracelet winner. His idea isn’t to run up a ticket to the big one, but moreover, commit a huge amount of money to shortcutting the dream to the exciting section of actually taking part. In that sense, it cuts to the quick and you’re never bored reading this tale. It does, however, make you root for the man known as ‘The Duckman’ a little less than if his story had more of a rags to riches feel. Instead, it’s more a riches-to-rags tale and you don’t watch Rocky to see a conceited champion beating up the plucky try-hard, do you?

The Latin American (LatAm) gaming market is receiving a considerable amount of attention.  It ranks only behind Europe in terms of the quickness with which all forms of gambling are being implemented, beating out the US, where many states continue to shuffle their feet toward legalized gaming operations.  With the amount of interest being directed toward LatAm, there’s no shortage of deals taking place, and the latest comes through a new agreement between iGaming content supplier Pragmatic Play and LatamWin, a software solutions company with a focus on Central and South America. 

Going forward, Pragmatic Play will see its complete line of online slots integrated into LatamWin’s ANDES SYSTEM gaming platform.  It’s a huge coup for Pragmatic Play, which will be able to substantially increase its footprint across the region.  LatamWin is already in Argentina and Chile, and is now working on expansion into Mexico and Brazil.  Pragmatic Play CCO Melissa Summerfield explains in a press release, “We are very pleased to see our videoslots go live with LatamWin’s casino platform, ANDES SYSTEM.  We are always looking at ways to expand our footprint in markets across the globe and LatamWin seem to be a perfect match for us and we look forward to a long and exciting partnership together.”

Pragmatic Play is constantly innovating in the online gaming space.  It reportedly develops as many as four new online slot games each month and all of its solutions are available through a single API.  It also has a hand in Live Casino and bingo operations, and introduced Auto-Roulette, a Live Casino offering, last week.  The game is live-streamed from the company’s studio in Bucharest and includes new features it says will enhance the user experience.  Auto-Roulette is available for desktop and portable devices, and includes a 3D interface so players can “truly immerse” themselves in the action. 

In addition, Pragmatic Play’s Live Casino John Hunter series of slot machines has now added its fourth installment, John Hunter and the Book of Tut.  In a separate press release, Summerfield explained, “We are delighted to launch our latest John Hunter title, this time as he searches for King Tut’s treasure.  The John Hunter series has been incredibly well received by fans across the globe and we are very excited to continue his adventures as he guides players to unimaginable riches.”