Spanish-licensed gambling operators have come under fire for continuing to sign new sports sponsorship deals despite new rules that will soon prohibit such activity.

Earlier this month, online gambling operator Betway signed a shirt sponsorship deal with La Liga football club Real Betis Balompié. Betway CEO Anthony Werkman hailed the deal, saying the company hoped “to be able to show ourselves to [the team’s] fans and to the people of Seville.”

Around the same time, Asian online betting operator Dafabet signed a two-year sponsorship deal with La Liga’s Cádiz CF, a move that Dafabet CEO Dimitris Karatzas said would help “consolidate our brand in the Spanish market.” Dafabet has yet to formally launch operations in Spain, but did strike a deal in June to operate off R. Franco Digital’s platform.

More recently, Spanish media reported that UK bookmaker William Hill is negotiating a sleeve logo placement on the jerseys of Málaga CF, a team with which the company once held a main shirt sponsorship.

Saipan casino operator Imperial Pacific International (IPI) expects to lose less money than usual in the first half of 2020, mainly because it hasn’t had many gamblers to rack up unpaid markers.

On Tuesday, IPI informed investors that it expects to book a net loss for the six months ending June 30 but that this loss would be “not less than 50%” below the US$239.7m in red ink the company reported in H1 2019. So, er, hooray.

Like most casino operators around the world, IPI’s Imperial Palace venue was forced to close in mid-March due to COVID-19. That means IPI welcomed fewer VIP gamblers in H1 2020 than the previous year, and the expected decrease in net losses “is mainly attributable to the reduction in impairment losses” for bad loans made to said VIPs.   

Unlike most Asia-Pacific casinos, IPI infamously opted to avoid junket operators in favor of a direct-loan strategy to its VIPs. This was supposed to offer IPI a greater share of VIP gambling losses but ultimately resulted in IPI being unable to collect on those losses, which routinely amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

The preparations for the Men’s Singles at the 2020 U.S. Open are well and truly under way.

While many of the game’s big names, such as all-time Grand Slam leader Roger Federer, 12-time Roland Garros winner Rafa Nadal and Australian hard-hitter Nick Kyrgios, looking like they’ll miss the Flushing Meadows showpiece, sportsbettors are turning to other names as they look to pick a winner.

Many of those are taking the price of Evens for Novak Djokovic to take the title, but while there’s a good chance that happens, the Adria Cup organiser and current world number one might not have recovered fully from a bout of COVID-19.

If he hasn’t, then several of the players who played in the Cincinatti Masters and Western and Southern Open, the pre-U.S. Open tournament curtain-raisers yesterday will have high hopes of lifting the famous trophy designed by Tiffany & Co. come mid-September. 

Four more Day 1 flights are in the bag as the longest ‘day’ in the history of the World Series of Poker Main Event continued unabated in the race to book a seat for Day 2.

That, of course, can only be done by surviving 15 levels, each lasting 30 minutes, during a Day 1 flight, of which there are a ridiculous number. With almost two dozen Day 1 flights taking place on GGPoker and a total of three entries permitted for every player, there are plenty of chances for legends to be born in the next few weeks.

Day 2 may take place on August 30th, but there’s an awful lot of poker to take place before then. Day 1g saw a pretty balanced set of names make it through to the next stage, with a total of 32 names making it through from the flight. 

These included the chip leader from that flight, Anmol Srivats, who brought through 649,699 as well as his closest competitors Andres Korn (624,071), Dinesh Alt (620,747) and Werner Smit (592,161). Others to make it through from Day 1g included Joao Santos (486,672), Ben Jones (466,017), German high roller Fabian Quoss (247,368) and former WSOP bracelet winner Joseph Cheong (135,397).

Not too long ago, Google, like many other entities that control the tech world, decided that cryptocurrency was bad. It moved to suppress virtually anything that had to do with crypto advertising and operations, severely handicapping the industry. Google has been changing its tune more recently, however, and seems to have warmed up quite a bit to the idea that digital currencies are, in fact, a legitimate form of payment. Whether this stems from the realization that crypto is the future or as simply a smart business move is still debatable, but the underlying reasons aren’t as important as the result. Google’s digital payments platform, Google Pay, has spent the past several months onboarding several crypto-based payment solutions, and this is going to go a long way toward greater adoption. 

Paxful, a peer-to-peer crypto trading platform, was the first to be embraced by Google Pay, paving the way for crypto enthusiasts in dozens of countries to be able to make their purchases using the Google payments solution. Available even where there are no banks, the partnership opened a number of financial channels that many would have never been able to access before. Practically overnight, all that someone needed to be able to be a consumer was an Internet connection. 

Coinbase followed this past March, teaming up with Google Pay so the exchange’s Coinbase Card holders could link their crypto balances to the payment solution. Next up, NewsCrypto, a crypto trading analytics and education platform, was brought into the mix and became the first to allow crypto purchases directly through Google Pay. NewsCrypto offers its own digital token, the NewsCrypto Coin, which can be used to purchase the platform’s advanced trading tools and more. 

As far as a single action leading to global shifts in habits, the acceptance by Google Pay of crypto-based operations is a huge game-changer. The platform has over 67 million users around the world, and the exposure of digital currency as a viable fiat alternative on the payments solution is going to lead to phenomenal growth and adoption. Add to the growing list of previous anti-crypto pundits like Visa and PayPal, both of which are now embracing the digital currency realm, and a very real, very clear picture emerges of what lies ahead for crypto as a form of money. 

Some people are not too embarrassed to admit that they get their social media marketing tips from their kids. The constantly evolving digital landscape means that some companies will face the real prospect of having their social media strategy crushed by a teenage fitness influencer in their loungeroom, who dances to TikTok videos that you’ve never heard of.

Social media can potentially be a huge time drain on your office resources, with the thousands of platforms on the internet. One false keystroke can quickly become a PR nightmare for your company, so it’s important to lay down some ground rules for some effective social media strategy.

We’ll walk you through some of our top tips to help you up your social media game and compete with the millennial TikTok influencers of the world. 

Create realistic goals for your social media

Thanks to a wise Macanese court, a patently ridiculous $12 billion litigation against Las Vegas Sands has been postponed for another year. That may sound like a real relief, but given that the chances LVS would ever be forced to pay such a ludicrous sum are essentially zero anyway, the news is really nothing more than a yawn. This is especially so in the current environment where Macau’s economy has contracted by an unfathomable 61% last quarter, numbers akin to an Independence Day-style alien invasion.

It’s not even that these numbers are entirely COVID-19 related either. Macau’s economy, at least as measured by GDP, has been contracting for 6 straight quarters now. COVID-19 appeared to catch it in the middle of an already year-long downturn.

Even if LVS loses eventually, any sum actually rewarded will be insignificant, and that’s assuming that the current monetary system even survives another year. There are signs out of Macau itself that it may not. Why is Macau relevant to this question at all? Because Macau’s economy is a convenient microcosm of what happens when you are almost entirely dependent on a single industry or export. For Macau it’s gambling. For the United States, it’s dollars, the main and most important American export to the world. Yes, America is also a banana republic in that sense.

Yes, Macau may have a very sophisticated, luxurious, top-tier banana that the world’s super rich just love to snack on, but a banana republic is still what it is.