Australian lottery and betting operator Tabcorp Holdings has been fined (again) for breaking New South Wales rules on inducing state residents to gamble.

Late last week, Sydney’s Downing Center Local Court issued an AU$30k (US$22k) penalty against Tabcorp for breaching NSW regulations that make it an offence to publish gambling ads that include “any inducement to participate, or participate frequently, in any gambling activity (including an inducement to open a betting account).”

Liquor & Gaming NSW opened an investigation last December after learning that a Tabcorp customer had received an ad from the company via his Instagram account. The ad was part of an Instagram Stories campaign Tabcorp ran over two days in December 2019.

Liquor & Gaming NSW subsequently discovered that 900 NSW residents who’d closed their Tabcorp accounts were also targeted by this campaign. Tabcorp blamed the mistake on human error, but Magistrate Erin Kennedy concluded that it was likely that at least some of these 900 customers had closed their accounts due to problems controlling their gambling, making their targeting extremely inappropriate regardless of the excuse.

With 246 entries all paying $10,300 to take part, the 2020 World Series of Poker $10,000 Hybrid Main Event began in earnest on GGPoker and saw 62 players make the Day 2 seat draw.

It was a busy Day 1a field, with some top pros such as Fedor Holz taking part, as PokerNews reported in the immediate hours after the tournament locked for the day.

Holz didn’t make the Day 2 cut, as it turned out, so who did? Well, after 16 levels of elite poker each lasting 30 minutes, the cream of the crop was Julian Menhardt from Austria, who totalled 534,490 after knocking out Ami Barer late on. Menhardt is closely followed in the chipcounts by Paul Esau (475,075) and Dirk Gerritse (457,197), with Norwegian player Preben Stokkan ending on 446,677. With over $2.2 million in live winnings, Stokkan will definitely be one to watch.

Elsewhere on the day, Lauryinas Levinskas (389,628), Brunno Botteon (247,359), partypoker Team Pro Anatoly Filatov (232,102), Daniel Dvoress (200,905), Aliaksei Boika (197,556) and Yuri Dzivielevski (184,326) all made the cut.

In many ways, it’s the most natural poker partnership to come along in some time – GGPoker, the site who brought us 54 of the 85 WSOP bracelet events in the summer, have teamed up with Poker Shares to bring betting and poker together in perfect harmony.

Sportsbetting and poker go together like strawberries and cream, like Daniel Negreanu and Doug Polk, like the rubber and the road. Betting on the final nine players of events such as the Super MILLION$ is an exciting development, as announced by the poker site over the weekend.

NOW PLACE BETS ON THE FINAL TABLE@GGPoker & @pokershares, have launched a new feature which allows you to bet on final table line-ups.

We’ll offer a 10% PRICE BOOST if you place a bet & back the winner of the weeks SuperMILLION$!

Malta-licensed online gambling operators broke a record for suspicious transaction reports (STR) in 2019 and are well on pace to break that record this year.

Malta’s Financial Intelligence Action Unit (FIAU) recently released its report on STRs issued last year by remote gaming licensees of the Malta Gaming Authority (MGA). The reports were submitted to the FIAU’s Compliance and Supervision Platform for Assessing Risk (CASPAR), with which all MGA remote licensees are required to register.

The FIAU received 1,445 STRs from online operators in 2019, more than twice the 700 received in 2018, which was itself more than triple the 218 received in 2017. As of May 2020, the FIAU had received 741 STRs, putting the current year on pace to break 2019’s record.

Nearly one-third (32%) of 2019’s STRs were submitted by just three companies, while another 35% were submitted by five different companies. The remaining 33% of STRs were submitted by 72 entities, with 29 online licensees filing one STR apiece. Just over one-quarter (26%) of licensees submitted zero STRs last year.

Quebec’s gambling monopoly says it will fully cooperate with the provincial government’s plans to audit its casino operations for signs of improper dealings with local mafia figures.

On Monday, Quebec Finance Minister Eric Girard (pictured) announced plans to conduct an independent audit into allegations of money laundering and other dodgy dealings at the four land-based casinos operated by the province’s Loto-Quebec gambling monopoly.

The allegations were made last week in a series of print and broadcast media reports focusing on perks doled out to the likes of Stefano Sollecito, a reputed organized crime figure who somehow gambled millions at Casino de Montreal despite declaring an annual income of only around C$50k to tax authorities.

Loto-Quebec responded to those media reports by insisting that it “complies with all regulatory requirements” but the provincial government evidently felt enough heat that only a public display of curiosity would temper. In addition to money laundering, the audit will also examine the casino loyalty programs that offered luxury perks to controversial figures who were willing to gamble large sums.

Some weeks, you might want to hear from the elite players in poker to inspire your working week, other times it’s all about the champions. This week, however, it’s the turn of some of poker’s little guys to send you into the week with cheer in your heart. No, we’re not specifically talking about players of reduced height, but more the underdogs of the poker world.

From the World Champion who coined an era to the superfan who became the man, underdogs are the poker narrators of history. Let’s read them in their own words, their inspiring, moving words.

“Just fold and I can go to the bathroom.” – Sebastian Malec

Online casino operators LeoVegas and Spillehallen have been (very lightly) spanked by Denmark’s gambling regulator for failing to observe anti-money laundering (AML) obligations.

On Monday, Denmark’s Spillemyndigheden regulatory agency reported that it had issued a ‘reprimand for non-compliance’ against LeoVegas for flaws in its customer verification process. The matter was brought to the regulator’s attention by the company, which detected the problem during an internal investigation.

The flaw, which involved new customers who registered with the company’s Danish-licensed site between June 2019 and May 2020, involved converting temporary accounts to final accounts without the required customer verification. Specifically, the accounts in question were all approved using NemID, a popular online banking log-in solution for Danish residents.

However, Spillemyndigheden prohibits online licensees from using NemID as a standalone registration unless a risk assessment has been made. Otherwise, “NemID cannot stand alone and must thus be supplemented by another control source or other mitigating measures.”