Vietnam plans to expand the product range of its proposed legal football betting market in a bid to convince local bettors that the state-approved operation won’t be a complete waste of time.

In 2017, Vietnam approved a plan for a five-year trial of legal wagering on horseracing, dog racing and football, with the latter limited to international matches overseen by global body FIFA. Since FIFA competitions only happen every couple years, this left serious gaps in Vietnam’s legal betting calendar, leading the government to propose adding other major football events in 2018.

This week, local media reported that the Ministry of Finance was once again considering adding more reliable football fixtures to its list of approved wagering options, including the English Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A and UEFA Champions League action.

The government is also considering allowing punters to place bets over the phone and fund their wagering via e-wallets and prepaid phone cards. At present, the plan would allow bettors to wager only at betting terminals in retail outlets via direct bank transfers.

Italy’s land-based gamblers didn’t report any significant increase in online activity during the country’s lengthy pandemic lockdown period, according to a new study.

The study by the Pisan Clinical Physiology Institute of the National Research Council queried nearly 4k individuals in a six-week period spanning April-May regarding their gambling activity during the country’s prolonged COVID-19 lockdown, during which most land-based venues were forced to temporarily shut their doors.

Overall, just 3.6% of respondents said they’d gambled at a land-based venue during the period in question, mainly via lottery products at tobacconists, while 3.7% reported engaging in some form of online gambling. Of those who’d engaged in land-based gambling over the past 12 months, 12% continued to gamble via land while 10.3% gambled online.

Over one-third (35.4%) of respondents decreased their physical play during the lockdown and 22.8% halted land-based gambling altogether, while an enterprising 13.9% somehow increased their activity. Scratch cards were the overwhelming favorite activity, enjoyed by 72.5% of land-based gamblers.

China’s lottery sales continued their slow climb out of the cellar in May while the courts delivered their latest blow to online gambling payment processors.

Figures released Tuesday by China’s Ministry of Finance show lottery sales totaling RMB29.2b (US$4.13b) in the month of May, a 17.7% decline from the same month last year but a nearly RMB6b rise from April’s result. For the year to date, sales are off 49.2% to RMB90.3b.

May’s sports lottery sales were down by one-fifth year-on-year to RMB15.2b, but that was RMB3.7b higher than April thanks to more international sports leagues resuming activity. Welfare lottery sales, which briefly reclaimed the sales crown in April thanks to the sports halt, fell 15% year-on-year to RMB14b, up from RMB11.9b in April.

China suspended all lottery sales in January as the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown took effect. Sales began resuming in some provinces in March, with Beijing being the last region to resume operations until May.

There are ways to command online attention and there are popular poker shows. Then, there is Joey Ingram. After two months away from broadcasting on YouTube, ‘Chicago Joey’ was back with a bang as he returned not only to the popular video-sharing website but also live poker.

Stepping outside in Las Vegas in the midst of a Coronavirus outbreak is one thing but returning to a poker cardroom is quite another. In other states, a number of measures have been taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the killer global pandemic which has so far taken around 500,000 lives depending on which figures are correct.

It’s probably a conservative estimate.

So that makes it all the more incredible to see people prepared to travel to casinos which generally have air conditioning that spreads the same air around a room where people gather and mingle like almost no other enclosed space. If church is said to be only slightly more dangerous, that might be because, to some people, a casino is church.

Special interest groups are everywhere, they are powerful, and they don’t let go of power easily. They grab on to some sector or industry, seize a few politicians who love making laws, and tell those politicians they’ll give them a cut of their profits if they make it difficult or impossible for anyone else to compete with them. One of the oldest ongoing examples of this sort of thing is the Jones Act of 1920, which requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on ships built in the United States, owned and operated by U.S. citizens. The propaganda point was that it would protect the shipping industry in case of war. The actual point was that shipbuilders, protected from foreign competition, would be able to charge higher prices so that they could make more money.  

The result, 100 years later, is that the U.S. shipbuilding industry is almost nonexistent. In 1950, there were 434 Jones Act compliant ships. Now there are less than 100 (see figure 1). It’s so expensive to ship domestically by water because of the Jones Act that few actually do it, and so there is virtually no industry at all.

Now, let’s kick it up a notch, to use a dated cooking phrase. Imagine that the lobbyists for the Jones Act back in 1920 were also minorities at a time when racism was a hot-button issue. Could you possibly say no to them, even if their influence by numbers and money would have a negligible effect on your reelection chances? Not a chance. You don’t want to be accused of racism and be the next target. In that event, the special interest group would be even more powerful than before. And so it goes that a historically protected special interest group, Native American tribes who were given a monopoly on the gaming industry outside of Nevada as a kickback for centuries of injustice, has now become even more powerful. They have successfully blocked California from legalizing sports betting, obviously wanting to preserve their monopoly.

This is something I warned about back in May 2018 when the U.S. Supreme Court finally scrapped the federal ban against sports betting. Here’s what I wrote back then, when gaming stocks, led by 888, skyrocketed on the ruling:

Well, color me shocked – not. The Arkansas Racing Commission (ARC) met last Thursday to consider casino business proposals from two potential candidates, Gulfside Casino Partnership and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. When the members of the commission were done voting, there were immediate concerns that one of them had shown an egregious amount of bias, and a superfluous lack of integrity, in choosing one over the other. Initially, there didn’t appear to be any backlash; however, the ARC has now decided to take action, confirming that Commissioner Butch Rice was too far gone to make a rational decision.

Rice’s score of the Cherokee’s proposal was so far south that it stood out like a rebel flag at a military parade. He had only given the Cherokee 29 points, out of a possible 100, which was substantially lower than the scores offered by his fellow commissioners. A former Arkansas attorney general and current Cherokee lawyer said Rice’s scores were “so wildly divergent that it shows a bias,” adding that his “scorecard is objectively impossible to defend.”

Rice’s scores showed a 71-point difference in the results he gave to each proposal. He was solely responsible for Gulfside winning the count and, when his score was removed from the final tally, the average score for the Cherokee project was 90.5, showing that the other commissioners rated the proposal well above Rice.

As a result, Rice was called to the carpet in front of the ARC yesterday, where his score was stricken due to a “reasonable suspicion of unfairness.” Now, the commission has to call in an outside entity to take a look at the two proposals and choose one to move forward. This is going to delay casino development in Arkansas at a time when more revenue is needed, and further serves as a blow to the gut for the recently-approved gambling expansion laws in the state. The push for new casinos in Arkansas has met severe resistance every step of the way, and a community leader tasked with being responsible to residents just set the initiative back about six months.

Codere SA had expected to take the global gaming industry by storm and began efforts to expand its footprint around the world. However, the Spain-based company has fallen on hard times, due in part to the coronavirus, and continues to get further behind in its financial obligations. Codere has already solicited help from banking giants like Bank of America and Credit Suisse to be able to keep its head above water, but its arms are getting tired of treading water. A new line of credit should help provide a boost of energy; however, without a major turnaround in operations, it may not be enough to keep the company from sinking.

Codere has reportedly been able to convince a U.S.-based hedge fund to guarantee a 12-month line of credit, according to SBC News. This will give the company between $135 and $169.5 million (€120 to €150 million) to keep swimming toward shore and pay off some of its debt. As a result, Codere will be able to restart operations in Spain and South America as soon as possible, allowing it to start earning income to cover the new debt. The financial agreement is expected to be approved sometime this week and will need existing debt-holders to give their support.

Once complete, the arrangement will see Codere accept new interest rates on existing U.S. debt worth a total of $800 million. Currently, the company is reportedly paying 6.75%, but this will increase to 7.25% as a result of the new plan. Seeing as how some gaming-related entities have been willing to pay up to 14% to secure financing, the increase is relatively tame.

Codere hasn’t identified the hedge fund willing to take a chance on the company, but Cinco Dias, a Spanish media outlet, believes it could by Dryden Capital. The financial investment firm out of Miami has become a savior for many companies in Spain lately, having financed entities like Grupo CIRSA, which is Codere’s primary rival in the local market, retailer Tendam and pizzeria chain Telepizza. Spain had been hit hard by COVID-19, but reported cases have dropped to almost nil in the past two weeks and virtually all commercial activity is now back in action.