The lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, and regulator reactions to it, still weigh heavy on European sportsbooks. Our very own Rebecca Liggero Fontana moderated a roundtable on the topic at SiGMA Europe, and found the positives and negatives that came from each.

On the plus side, sports books found products that worked when there was very little other option. “Virtual sports and esports, and those type of verticals, are now significantly bigger than what they used to be,” said Jesper Svensson, CEO of Betsson. “So you can see that the expansion of the offering has had an important role.”

“I would say that innovation is perhaps not the bigger driver, it’s just the traditional products that are getting more and more interest, if I see the trends I’m looking at,” he added.

More than just products though, the cooperation of the industry helped get iGaming through it. “What I found was, there was a lot of moral support from everybody around,” said Rob Dowling, CCO of Singular. “Everybody was willing to have really nice, long conversations and giving advice. Not just the usual competitors, and we look at each other and talk at conferences, and ‘Oh, I’m bigger than him,’ whatever. It was more a level of, let’s sit down, let’s have a conversation over a cup of tea or a beer on Friday via Skype, and let’s see how we can fix this problem, let’s see how we can move forward.”

Figuring out what slots to host on your platform can be a daunting task, with thousands of options and hundreds of suppliers. It gets even harder when you figure in localization, emerging trends and customer demands. To understand how Hero Gaming does it, our Becky Liggero Fontana spoke with CCO Sam Brown.

Hero Gaming has a portfolio of 3,000 slots titles, provided by 111 different game studios, with 100 new games added every month. They have 17 different languages, 9 websites, and a lot of work to do in deciding what should be featured where. Liggero Fontana asked how Brown decides what new slots games to take on. He answered:

“The obvious ones are obviously the region, what type of audience or theme the slot can attract itself to. So these are sort of some of the more obvious variables, and you’ll quite often see themes and clusters especially really obvious ones, like Easter games Christmas games, Mega Waves games, bonus feature games. We also look for games that are trending well on our existing websites. If we see one or two of them performing, we will try and jump on those trends quite quickly and go through our sort of extensive portfolio of suppliers and try and find more.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRgfl5dbMDoVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Sam Brown talks about emerging trends in slots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRgfl5dbMDo)

The latest winner in the list of Caribbean Poker Party success stories has been confirmed as German pro, Jan-Eric Schwippert. Schwippert, who has over $6 million in live winnings, last night won the 7th event of the CPP 2020 Online Series by taking down the Warm-Up for a whopping $100,273 in total prizes.  

Day 1c was a turbo feeder straight into Day 2, which helped the field swell way past the $500,000 guarantee. The final number of total entries was boosted by 326 players from that flight, meaning that there was $631,000 up for grabs in total. With online regular Pedro Padilha leading the 69 remaining Day 1c players into the Day 2 action, the final day of the event was fast and furious stuff, featuring Day 1a and Day 1b chip leaders Klaus Mortensen and Tom Delaine. 

The final table played out in dramatic fashion as Schwippert got the win against some fine opposition, with the bounty element of the competition really coming into its own to provide some thrilling final table action.  

First to depart the nine-player table was Yevgeny Fidchuk from Russia, who won $9,095 in total when he crashed out before anyone else. He was followed to the virtual rail by Day 1b chip leader Tom Delaine, whose $8,109 in bounty prizes meant he actually cashed for more than Austrian poker pro Hannes Speiser in 7th place. With Patrice Brandt exiting in 6th place and Daniél Nagy from Hungary busting in 5th, the aggression really ramped up in the final four, with American Ken Smaron and Argentinian Ramiro Petrone both departing for $29,654 and $45,490 respectively, the stage was set for a heads-up battle to saviour.  

Colombia’s gambling market is losing the man who helped guide the country to becoming the first South American market to formally legalize and regulate online play.

This week, Juan B. Pérez Hidalgo, president of Colombia’s gambling regulatory body Coljuegos, relinquished the role he’s held for nearly five years. Taking his place is César Augusto Valencia, administrator at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla and a business graduate of Pennsylvania’s Drexel University, although a man with no obvious gambling experience.

Some Colombian media outlets had reported that Perez’s time was running short over a month ago. Those outlets also said Perez has been asked to vacate the role by Minister of Finance Alberto Carrasquilla Barrera for unspecified ‘political’ reasons.

During Perez’s tenure, Colombia approved online gambling legislation in 2016 and issued its first online license to Aquila Global’s Wplay.co site the following year. A flood of other operators soon followed, with Grupo Vinnare becoming the 18th licensee late last year (although only 16 platforms are currently active).

Cambodia keeps busting unauthorized online gambling operators, while the government is adamant that the legal option is never, ever, EVER coming back. 

On Tuesday, the Phnom Penh Post reported that police in Cambodia’s capital had arrested 10 foreign nationals following raids on two locations in a gated community suspected of hosting an illegal online gambling operation.

While the raids resulted in the seizure of the usual complement of computers, phones and other tricks of the trade, police are still interrogating the arrested suspects, apparently convinced that there are additional members of the operation that remain at large.

After developing a reputation as a thriving hub for Asian-facing online gambling operators, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen announced plans in August 2019 to ban online gambling by the start of 2020. While initial reports were that the ban was a success, later reports suggested that not all Cambodian casinos were observing the ban.