If ever there was a casino operator that needed to have its license pulled, Imperial Pacific International (IPI) meets all the criteria. From the start, the company that has tried to develop Saipan’s Imperial Palace into a worldwide, internationally-recognized resort has failed. It’s been recognized, but for all the wrong reasons. Allegations of embezzlement, bribery, unsafe work conditions, slave labor – the list goes on. IPI is already close to slipping off the edge, having shuttered Imperial Palace temporarily due to the coronavirus pandemic. Now, it’s hoping it can score some quick cash, but the amount it’s looking for should raise flags.

Apparently, IPI has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Zhongfeng International Investment Holdings Group Co. Limited to be issued convertible bonds. Zhongfeng is reportedly aa “strategic partner” of the embattled casino operator, and the two are expected to finalize the deal with the signing of a subscription agreement within three months. If they can’t reach common ground on the terms, the MOU will be nullified, and the deal will be off the table.

Oddly enough, the company is only seeking $6.5 million. That wouldn’t even make a dent in the amount IPI owes to everyone. The Commonwealth Casino Commission is looking for $37 million that still hasn’t been paid into a community benefit fund, construction companies want their $7.6 million that is still owed, the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. wants the money it’s owed for outstanding power bills (the lights at Imperial Palace and IPI’s headquarters have already been shut off for non-payment) and the list continues from there.

From a non-expert point of view, $6.5 million is to a large casino operator what $2 would be to a beggar on the street – just enough to squeak by one more day. It seems more like a way to develop a better exit strategy than an attempt at economic recovery, and anyone willing to participate in such an arrangement better be prepared for the worst. With the track record IPI has already shown of not being willing to live up to its financial responsibilities, it’s a good time to recall one of the oldest sayings in the investment world – never lend more than you’re willing to lose.

The 2005 WSOP Main Event was an epic production, but at its heart, the ridiculous numbers, massive money and deep rail were nothing compared to the drama provided by the final hand of the tournament, where the Australian player Joe Hachem became World Champion.

The hand in question starts tamely enough. Steve Dannenmann raises it to 700,000 with ace-three, and Hachem calls with seven-three, at that stage a 27% dog in the hand. But the flop is pure Aussie magic, as it lands 4-5-6 and Hachem becomes an 89% favourite as he flops a magical straight.

Not only does Hachem flop absolute gold, the second nuts to holding 7-8 as a starting hand, it’s even better because Dannenmann has an ace for a high card on a low flop and the three to connect for other straights on turn or river. Hachem’s check is neat, putting Dannenmann in the mood to take a swing at the pot. He does so, to the tune of a million chips.

Hachem makes a raise here, doubling it to two million. It’s a very ‘I see you and I raise it’ kind of move, not out of place in an episode of Eastenders. Dannenmann makes the call, hoping that he still has the straight draw and the chance at pairing his ace to overtake, what, an overpair to the six-high flop? There are so many pairs that beat that and yet lose to an ace. He’s in a great position in most hands. Like ones where his opponent hasn’t flopped a straight heads-up.

In the fast moving world of gambling, sometimes you might miss news that could be important to you. To make sure you’re all caught up on gaming industry news, be it online or brick and mortar, we’re rounding up the some of the announcements and partnerships from the last week that you might have missed.

Don’t miss out on all of the latest announcements. Our Press Release section is updated constantly.

A bright new partnership between Omega Systems and Endorphina

In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s a nice change to be able to share some great and uplifting news about some of the newest iGaming partnerships.

France’s Autorité de régulation des jeux en ligne (ARJEL, the online gaming regulation authority) was formed ten years ago, initially created to oversee online gaming in the country. The seven members that comprise the ARJEL board have worked diligently to shape France’s online gaming market over the years, implementing a number of initiatives designed to help the activity flourish and to protect consumers. The gaming ecosystem, as a whole, is changing, though, and oversight has to evolve with it. This is why ARJEL is no longer running the show, replaced by a more robust L’Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ, the National Authority of Gaming). The torch was officially passed yesterday.

ANJ held its first formal meeting yesterday, marking a new era for gaming control in France. The entity will oversee all aspects of gambling in the country, including casinos, horseracing, lotteries, iGaming and more. This includes policing France’s 228 racetracks, over 200 casinos and all online operators that conduct business within the country’s borders. ANJ can instruct online operators to remove certain advertising that is deemed inconsistent with guidance and can also implement on-site controls. However, its authority stops with money laundering or integrity issues, which will still be overseen by France’s Ministry of the Interior (MoI).

The transition from ARJEL to ANJ was proposed last year and approved this past March when it was announced that Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin would be spearheading the new initiative. The political leader is in charge of Franc’s National Commission for Data Protections and is now officially the president of the new gaming body after yesterday’s inaugural meeting was held. As such, Falque-Pierrotin and the other members of ANJ have their work cut out for them, needing to bring together “splintered” laws and regulations that have prevented France’s gambling ecosystem from advancing as gaming operators would have liked.

According to Falque-Pierrotin, when the ANJ was first announced, “The ANJ is not an enlarged ARJEL; it is a new project that requires rethinking regulation. It has to adapt its intervention to monopolies (FDJ and PMU) and to players gambling mostly anonymously in points of sale. I would like to set up a regulation that combines support and control in order to better serve and protect players.”

Sports gambling operators are implementing initiatives to show trends in the gambling segment as the sports world begins to show signs of recovery following the nightmare suspension caused by the coronavirus. These trends help bettors understand where the action is, which ultimately helps influence their activity and puts their attention where it might receive the best returns. There’s no such thing as too much information, and sports gambling and iGaming operator Bodog is now preparing a weekly report that provides an in-depth look at the previous weekend’s action. With only a limited amount of sports being offered, the results shown on the first report, released yesterday, aren’t too surprising.

The goal of the report is to highlight the top ten favorite leagues in terms of bets, as well as the top ten gambling events and the percentage of the handle each of these took. Not surprisingly, the report for June 19-21 didn’t find tiddlywink gambling among the top ten, but ping pong is still one of the more active sports for wagers. It actually did better than half of the other sports on the list.

The top sport was the English Premier League (EPL), which is just now getting back on the field. With 25.94% of the handle, it was much stronger than basketball’s Chinese Basketball Association (CBA). The CBA, in second place, had 15.89% of the action. Taking third was UFC/MMA (Ultimate Fighting Championship/Mixed Martial Arts), which grabbed 11.51% of the market.

At the bottom of the list, lower than the 7.03% scored by ping pong, the RBC Heritage PGA event garnered 6.36% of the wagers. Horse racing, thanks to the Belmont Stakes, saw some action with 6.28% of the field and Spain’s La Liga captured 6.25% of the fun. The NFL hopes to get its season going this September and, despite no live action to attract gamblers, the NFL 2020 Sims did well, beating out eSports and the lowest three sports to take 6.87% of the handle.

Any company that dedicates massive amounts of resources and money into creating a viable web presence has to know that the work doesn’t stop when the coding is complete. Once a site is operational, just like any business, it’s important to develop initiatives that will attract customers and make them want to keep coming back. Marketing and advertising are not luxury expenses for a business – they’re just as important as paying employees or paying bills on time. When it comes to maintaining a website to draw in visitors, many iGaming operators may be falling behind. A recent study conducted by OptimizeXL shows that, out of 2,200 operators examined, the majority seriously lack when it comes to things like conversion rate optimization (CRO) and AB testing.

CRO and AB testing are uniquely intertwined in that, when used together, they can help companies and web developers see what is happening with traffic flows on sites. AB testing, in an oversimplified description, uses two versions (A and B) of a webpage that are presented to users to see how each performs. According to OptimizeXL’s Artur Pluta, who prepared the findings with analysis assistance from Australia’s BuiltWith business intelligence firm, only 13.2% of iGaming operators use AB tools on their sites. This means that only a small handful of the 2,283 sites tested understand the power of testing for conversion rate growth. 

Breaking down the operators, using Alexa rankings as a benchmark, those that are in the top 10,000 in the ranking are more inclined to conduct AB testing, while operators ranked lower than one million don’t bother with it. In addition, only 43% of those operators in the first group practice CRO, which indicates that the companies have made the effort to reach the top of the ladder, but haven’t allocated resources to make the final push. 

Explains Pluta, “The truth is – if you’re in the top and you’re not investing in CRO you’re lagging behind most of your biggest competitors. If you’re a contender from lower parts of the ranking trying to get into the top spot, investing in CRO is clearly a lesson you should learn from [businesses] that are ahead of you. One way or another, if you want to get to the top or stay there, based on our data, casino & sports betting [CRO] seems to be a highly contributing factor.”

There’s a heavy spot light on regulations right now, as the gambling industry deals with sudden new changes they must comply with, and wait with baited breath on what will come next. To understand what’s happening in the European market, our Becky Liggero Fontana caught up with Tom Galanis, Director of TAG Media and Co-Founder of First Look Games.

They first spoke about the U.K., and Galanis noted that new expectations haven’t been coming so much from the U.K. Gambling Commission. “In the U.K., slightly oddly in the last couple of months, it hasn’t been so much the regulator there to say, driving new restrictions, new rules, for which operators need to abide by, it’s actually been the Betting and Gaming Council (BGC), the new trade association…to take certain steps to protect vulnerable people spending too much time, too much money gambling,” he said. “So what has happened is that the Betting and Gaming Council, operators, which accounts for I think some 90% in terms of revenues in the U.K. gambling market, all those operators have agreed to halt above the line advertising, which includes television and radio, I think from the fifth of May, and that’s obviously welcome news to some that was see gambling advertisement be restricted in this country going forward.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6Pi1sleIUM?feature=oembed]

That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. “So for the short term obviously, that the hope is that it removes the spotlight from us as an industry and shows us in the best light, doing the right thing,” he said. “However my concern is actually that this is built on emotive subjectivity, rather than data led, objective research which is sorely lacking in this matter…So what I want to see more of, frankly, is more objectively let research to underpin any future decision-making when it comes to further restrictions of restrictions of advertising.”

Germany-facing online casino operators may enjoy some temporary tranquility after local officials decided to press pause on pursuing sanctions against an unspecified international online operator.

On Monday, Renatus Zilles, CEO of the German Association for Telecommunications and Media (DVTM), announced that a Darmstadt Administrative Court proceeding involving the Darmstadt Regional Council and a ‘private gaming provider’ had been suspended at the mutual request of both parties.

The unidentified operator and the Council reportedly sought this truce in order to arrive at “a mutually acceptable and constructive solution for designing a transitional regulation” before Germany’s new regulated online market takes effect on July 1, 2021. As a result, “no enforcement measures” will be taken by the Council “during the rest of the proceedings against the gambling provider involved.”

The Council has been tasked with issuing online gambling permits under Germany’s latest State Treaty on Gambling, which will not only authorize online sports betting but also casino and poker products for the first time. One year ago, the Council issued instructions to prospective online applicants to shut their German-facing online casinos ahead of the regulated market’s launch.

Odds courtesy of OddsShark.com

There’s a mega-stacked card at UFC 251 from Fight Island in Abu Dhabi on July 11, and this Saturday night’s Fight Night event from the UFC’s Apex facility in Las Vegas is the last UFC card before that. The main event Saturday is a terrific lightweight matchup between American Dustin Poirier and Kiwi Dan Hooker. They were originally to fight May 16 in San Diego, but the coronavirus postponed that.

The 31-year-old Poirier (25-6) is ranked third in the division behind champion Khabib Nurmagomedov, interim champion Justin Gaethje and No. 2 Tony Ferguson. Nurmagomedov was supposed to fight Ferguson at UFC 249 but couldn’t because of travel issues from his native Russia. Poirier told UFC president Dana White that he was ready to take Khabib’s spot, but it went to Gaethje, who upset Ferguson.

“The Diamond” already owns a win over Gaethje in April 2018 via fourth-round knockout and claimed the interim lightweight belt with a victory over Max Holloway at UFC 236 in April 2019 but comes off a loss to Nurmagomedov in a unification bout at UFC 242 in September 2019 by third-round submission. Poirier is a -210 favorite Saturday.

Norway’s gambling regulator has convinced Facebook to pull three dozen online gambling pages from the social media platform for promoting their wares to local punters without local permission.

On Monday, the Lotteritilsynet regulatory agency announced that Facebook had yanked 36 online gambling sites’ pages after being notified by the regulator that the pages were in violation of Norway’s gambling laws.

Among the operators cited in the announcement were the Gamesys Group’s Vera&John online casino brand, Coolbet’s Kommunepoker and Vennepoker brands, Gaming Innovation Group’s Rizk brand (now part of the Betsson Group) and Cherry AB’s ComeOn brand (which earlier this year lost a Norwegian eSports sponsorship opportunity due to local protests).

The Norwegian-language pages encouraged customers to patronize the internationally licensed gambling sites that compete with Norway’s state-run operators Norsk Tipping and Norsk Rikstoto. In addition to cracking down on unauthorized marketing, Norway’s government has been targeting payment processing and imposing domain-blocking to ensure the financial health of its online monopoly.

Atlantic City casinos have been cleared to reopen their doors on July 2, but they face strict limits on how many guests will be allowed inside.

On Monday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy tweeted that AC’s casinos would be allowed to reopen to the public on Thursday, July 2, ending a three-and-a-half month closure due to COVID-19. The reopening will allow the casinos to take advantage of the crucial July 4th holiday weekend, although this year’s celebration promises far more muted than in previous years.

For one thing, the casinos will only be allowed to accept 25% of their normal capacity. That’s half the level that Nevada casinos enjoyed when they reopened earlier this month. On the other hand, it’s greater than the 15% capacity that Detroit’s three commercial casinos will be permitted when their reopening is announced.

Gov. Murphy promised that further details of the rules casinos must follow to reopen will be released “within the next several days” but did say that both casino staff and customers will be subject to “health screenings” and will also be required to wear masks. Murphy added that any “knuckleheads” who refuse to wear a mask will be “escorted out of the casino.”