Dusk till Dawn in Nottingham have introduced a live shot clock in their midweek competitions at the club, and so far the feedback has been positive from the punters.

Time wasters are not welcome in Dusk till Dawn (DTD).

The winner of the British Poker Award (BPA) Best Live Card Room has made the experience even better after introducing a live shot clock for their midweek competitions.

“We’re always listening to customer feedback and always act on it where possible, and it’s with great excitement I can confirm we will be using our Turbo ‘Shot Clock’ system in our weeknight comps at the club.” Said Club Director Simon Trumper.

World Series of Poker officials are urging poker players to pre-register for the $565 buy-in, $5 Million Guaranteed, Colossus event, as they anticipate a world record number of entrants.

World Series of Poker (WSOP) officials have urged members of the media to spread the news far and wide. If you don’t pre-register for the $565 buy-in No-Limit Hold’em (NLHE) event, known as The Colossus, you could end up in spending most of the day standing in a queue.

The event, which takes place on the opening weekend of the 2015 WSOP, will consist of two starting days, four starting flights, and eight different waves.

Confused?

The Massachusetts Gaming Commission (MGC) has set a 5 p.m. deadline today for initial applications from developers who are vying for the last casino license in the state.

As it stands, three companies, KG Urban, Crossroads Massachusetts/Somerset, and Mass Gaming and Entertainment, have submitted their application.

The New York-based KG Urban has made plans to build a Foxwoods casino on the New Bredford waterfront. Part of the plan for the company would be to secure a host community agreement with New Bredford Mayor Jon Mitchell. No resolution has been made on that front, although company spokesman Andrew Paven told the Boston Herald that the two sides have been engaged in “substantive conversations” about the proposal.

Mass Gaming and Entertainment has filed its application with the other two developers having requested extensions until today to get their proposals in order. The Rush Street Gaming, Mass Gaming’s parent firm, secured a host agreement to build a $650 million casino and hotel project on the Brockton Fairgrounds site.

Companies preparing to pitch at the popular LaunchPad competition at GiGse next month need to monitor the market closely in the build-up to their presentations, according to Rob Gallo, the CEO and founder of Neo Poker Lab, the winner of the 2014 GiGse LaunchPad.

Gallo, who this year is looking forward to enjoying a watching brief at the GiGse LaunchPad in San Francisco, California, hailed last year’s experience as “fantastic”, with the prestigious award having put the company’s “name on the map”.

Clarion Events – which is organising GiGse in partnership with GamCrowd, the industry’s crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing platform – has set a March 15 deadline for applications to participate in the LaunchPad, which will take place on April 22, the final day of the three-day GiGse event.

However, Gallo insisted that those companies that are serious about scooping the top prize should follow Neo Poker Lab’s example by initiating preparations for their presentations as soon as possible.

Gaming industry professionals have less than two weeks to enter the running for the popular LaunchPad competition at GiGse next month in San Francisco, California.

Clarion Events – which is organising GiGse in partnership with GamCrowd, the industry’s crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing platform – has reminded those interested in competing for the prestigious award that the cut-off point for applications via the www.gigse.com website is March 15.

Following the deadline, the list of real-money and social gaming start-ups will be whittled down to a final five who will pitch to an investors’ panel and an audience of potential partners on April 22 on the final day of GiGse, which will start on April 20.

The selected start-ups will receive advice on fine-tuning their pitches before being grilled by the panel of experts on the day. The winner will be selected through an audience vote.

World Snooker has announced separate title sponsorship deal with online gaming operator 888 Holdings and UK-based bookmaker Betfred.

888′s title sponsorship of Snooker’s new World Grand Prix, titled as the 888.com World Grand Prix, will take place on March 16-22 in North Wales.

The field is comprised of 32 players who qualified from a unique ranking list which ran from the 2014 World Championship to the 2015 Gdynia Open, competing for the £100,000 ($150,000) top prize

“We are thrilled to welcome 888.com on board for this fantastic new tournament. They have shown tremendous support for snooker in the past and we are pleased to continue to build that relationship,” said World Snooker Chairman Barry Hearn. “This tournament is a wonderful addition to the calendar as we will see the very best players in the world competing for the inaugural title, in Llandudno, where we know there is a great support for snooker. It’s going to be a superb week for fans in the arena and viewers at home.”

Last week’s Champions League game between Chelsea and Paris St. Germain was exciting for so many reasons but not for Sky Bet’s furious customers who cried foul when the online bookmaker failed to honor odds after PSG’s dramatic comeback to secure a place in the quarterfinals.

According to the Daily Mail, some customers were furious upon learning that Sky Bet dropped the odds of PSG winning in extra time to 9/2 after initially the bookmaker’s mobile phone app initially posted a line of 25/1. What that means is an initial bet of $1 would have paid out $25, not $4.50 on the revised odds.

Sky Bet Managing Director Richard Flint admitted that the 25/1 odds were posted incorrectly and that the company argued that its decision to drop the number when it came to paying out winning bettors was keeping in line with its terms and conditions, which explicitly says that the company reserves the right to “correct obvious errors and eaters settle bets at the correct odds or void bets.”

“Occasionally mistakes happen,” Flint added. “In this case a wrong price was displayed for around three minutes, and a small number of customers bet at the incorrect odds. These odds were clearly wrong – we showed odds of 25-1 when the true odds and the odds displayed by all other bookmakers was 9-2. We settled at the correct odds.”

If you ever had plans of winning Warren Buffet’s $1 billion March Madness bracket challenge this year, your odds of actually accomplishing just went down from highly improbable to, well, impossible.

It’s hard enough to win a challenge when you’re odds of doing so are already at 9,223,372,036,854,775,808/1 (that’s nine quintillion-to-one), but now that Buffet has cancelled the challenge altogether, the likelihood of you beating the odds has been slashed to zero.

According to CNN Money, the parties—Buffet’s Berkshire-Hathaway, Quicken Loans, and Yahoo!—involved in making the challenge last year are now embroiled in several legal disputes stemming from disagreements on who came up with the idea in the first place.

Apparently, all the trouble started when a small sweepstakes company called SCA Promotions took Yahoo to task, suing the Internet company for allegedly reneging on a deal to host a perfect bracket contest. Not one to be outdone, Yahoo filed a lawsuit of its own, alleging that SCA communicated to Berkshire about buying insurance to cover the $1 billion price in the unlikely event that somebody somehow defies the odds and wins the contest.

This is a guest contribution by SafeCharge (Israel) Ltd. General Manager Shemer Katz . If you would like to submit a contribution please contact Bill Beatty for submission details. Thank you.

How do you optimize your payments strategy, to maximize sales and minimise risk so that your business reaches its full potential?

If you’re running an online gaming business, having an effective, flexible payments strategy is key to your success. There are a number of tactics that you can use, some depend on your payment partner, others on your individual client base, and sometimes the nature of your product may dictate the tactics you need to use to optimize your payments. No matter how good your site is, having the best possible payment strategy is crucial to keep your business sustainable and allow expansion.

There are four main areas of payments that are particularly important for an online gaming merchant – conversion/retention, risk management, localisation/customisation, and flexibility.

Barcelona star Neymar is preparing for his team’s Champions League tie with Man City by playing poker, and Pamela Anderson has slapped a restraining order on the Big One for One Drop star Rick Salomon.

It’s an epic week for Barcelona FC.

They will be looking to hold on to their 2 v 1 lead when they face the Premier League champions, Man City, in the second leg of the Champions League knockout phase on Wednesday night. Then on Sunday they entertain their fiercest rivals Real Madrid in El Clasico.

It’s a time for their players to chill.

Jason Somerville: Leading Poker into a Brave New World Video

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The Global Poker Index (GPI) will be hosting the European Poker Conference on March 25th2014 at The Portomaso Marina Hilton Hotel, St. Julian’s, Malta.

The goal of the diverse conference is to give poker world representatives more easily discuss and address trending industry topics, offer them a place to network and become more tightly inter-connected, and discover the Global Poker Index’s many new and existing initiatives.

Participants will have a chance to meet players and tournament organizers, to networking with new prospective projects and partnerships between poker rooms, tournament tour/ event managers, and industry stakeholders, to gain knowledge on new technologies to better equip professional cash games and live tournaments to operate more effectively and more seamlessly and to hear more of GPI’s latest updates and many new industry initiatives.

The conference will be held at the same time as the European Poker Awards— an event celebrating the achievements of players, industry operators, and personalities within the thriving European poker scene for over 13 years.

Taylor Paur has picked up his second major title after defeating Isaac Baron, in heads-up action, to win the $1.2m first prize in the World Poker Tour Bay 101 Shooting Star Main Event. Anthony Zinno maintains protocol by winning the $25k High Roller.

Taylor Paur is the latest member of the World Poker Tour (WPT) Champions Club, after winning the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star Main Event in San Jose, California.

How did Paur feel about his win?

Wow this really meant the fucking world

Yuguang Li is the latest Red Dragon Macau Cup champion after defeating Hong Kong’s Yunye Lu, in heads-up action, to take the HK$1,848,000 first prize.

China’s Yuguang Li has won the PokerStars sponsored Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) Macau Poker Cup Red Dragon Main Event. He defeated Hong Kong’s Yunye Lu in heads-up action to win the first title of his career.

Macau casinos may have experienced the first annual decline in revenues (2014 was the first year that had happened since 2002), and are continuing to plummet like one of those heavyset Angry Birds, but poker seems to be holding its ground.

The latest installment of the Macau Poker Cup Red Dragon event (it seems every single tournament in Macau carries this title) attracted 987 entrants. It made the HK$5 million guaranteed prize pool look like a ridiculous offering. HK$10,339,812 was gathered from the players, and HK$3.5m of that was divided between the top two.

World Poker Tour Tilt Events have inked a deal that will see the two working together to produce World Poker Tour National Series events in the Italian cities of Venice and San Remo.

The World Poker Tour (WPT) continues to place emphasis on their European National Series model after agreeing a deal with the Italian poker industry event organizer Tilt Events.

The pair, who has worked together before, will host three WPT National Series events in 2015. Two of them will be held in the Casino di Venezia Ca’Vendramin Calergi, in the floating city of Venice, and a third event will be held in the Casino di San Remo, in San Remo.

The Italian poker operator Gioco Digitale will sponsor the events. A brand that was acquired, in 2009, by WPT owners bwin, one year before they merged with partypoker to create Bwin.party Digital Entertainment.

THE AMERICAS

Lotteries pushed for an exemption from the Restoration of America’s Wire Act but Rep. Jason Chaffetz told lotteries to get stuffed; a California tribal coalition warned legislators about PokerStars’ treachery; New Jersey’s online poker market continued to slide; Atlantic City casino revenue caught a cold; GameAccount inked a free-play online deal with Maryland Live; Louisiana proposed using unclaimed casino cash to fund medical exams for rape victims; WPT player of the year Mukul Pahuja went on an epic Twitter rant; Sheldon Adelson topped the Forbes’ list of gaming billionaires; a judge told Caesars Entertainment to bend over and spread ‘em wide; Scientific Games revenue spiked following its Bally acquisition; High 5 Games sued International Game Technology for contract violations; Gaming and Leisure Properties made a $4.1b offer for Pinnacle Entertainment’s real estate and Sue Schneider explained what distinguishes iGaming North America from all other conferences.

EUROPE

Bwin.party’s earnings fell for the third straight year; Italian financial cops accused PokerStars of a €300m tax fraud; Novomatic subsidiary Greentube acquired social and mobile gamers AbZorba Games; Denmark’s online gambling market grew 20% last year; Russian online bookmaker traffic fell 11%; Intertain’s revenue rose almost as much as its debt; the European Commission approved Poland’s gambling amendments; Paddy Power hired new mischief makers; GamCrowd and Innvotec brought crowd-funding to the online gaming industry; Rob Painter talked up SkyBet’s new Football League sponsorship and Casino Saga’s Georg Westin discussed his company’s trademark beef with King.com.

Singapore’s lone remaining floating casino is making a comeback, spurred by gamblers seeking to avoid the S$100 daily entry levy at the city-state’s land-based casinos.

Business at the Lido casino on the Leisure World cruise ship nose-dived in 2010 after Las Vegas Sands’ Marina Bay Sands and Genting Singapore’s Resorts World Sentosa opened their doors. A spokesman for New Century Tours, the Singapore-based operator funneling gamblers to the Queenston Maritime-owned Leisure World, told the Straits Times that the ship had “fewer than 500 passengers on some days.”

Two other casino cruise ships that used to ply their trade in international waters off Singapore went belly up after the integrated resorts opened. But the passage of time means the novelty of the land-based casinos has worn off while interest in more cost-effective gaming options has increased. The New Century spokesman said Leisure World’s daily passenger rates are back up between 600 and 700, four of five of whom are Singaporeans (the rest Malaysians).

Leisure World has proven particularly popular among older Singaporeans, who pay just $23 on weekdays for a day trip that includes free buffet meals. Those under 55 years old pay $43. Another appeal is the low minimum bets at the Lido’s 40 gaming tables, with bets starting at $2 rather than the $25 minimums at Singapore’s resorts. (The Lido also offers 200 electronic gaming machines, but these are less popular.) And unlike its land-based competition, the Lido doesn’t require Singaporeans to pony up S$100 to cross the threshold.

Italian lottery and gaming technology supplier GTECH enjoyed a “robust” Q4 thanks to strong product sales in its Americas and International markets.

Revenue in the three months ending Dec. 31 hit €809.5m, up 4.7% year-on-year. Earnings were up 6.7% to €281m but the company reported a net loss of €92.8m due to one-off costs, including those associated with GTECH’s $6.4b acquisition of US gaming device maker and social gaming operator International Game Technology (IGT). Excluding those one-offs, net income rose 83% to €53m.

The Americas segment reported revenue up 10% to €252m largely on strong VLT sales in Oregon. Healthy instant ticket sales also helped to offset a decline in multistate jackpot lottery sales. Since the quarter ended, GTECH expanded the Georgia Lottery’s online options and inked a deal with casino operator MGM Resorts to build GTECH’s first Nevada sportsbook and on-premise mobile gaming deployment.

The International division saw revenue rise 34% to €113m, thanks to product sales in Belgium, higher machine sales to casino customers in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and higher systems sales in Europe. The quarter saw GTECH awarded up to 5,550 of Greek betting operator OPAP’s initial 16,500 new video lottery terminals.

Gaming and lottery technology supplier Scientific Games Corp (SGMS) revenue jumped 29% in Q4 thanks to contributions from the recently acquired Bally Technologies.

Revenue in the three months ending Dec. 31 hit $565.8m, counting 40 days of Bally contributions since the $5.1b acquisition officially closed in November. Despite the windfall, $75.8m in costs related to that acquisition created a net loss of $47.1m for the quarter. SGMS finished the year with $8.5b in debt, up from $3.2b in 2013.

SGMS’ gaming division, which includes not only Bally’s slot machine operations but 2013’s big acquisition WMS Industries, saw revenue nearly double to $301.7m. This sum is broken down into gaming operations ($134.8m), gaming machine sales ($119.2m), gaming systems ($27.7m) and table products ($20m).

SGMS’ interactive division reported revenue up 43.3% to $43m thanks to a full quarter of contributions from WMS’ Williams Interactive operations. Social gaming, particularly the Jackpot Party Social Casino and the new Gold Fish Slots app, was credited with driving most of the interactive gains. The ranks of daily and monthly average users posted good gains but average revenue per daily average user fell 15% to $0.22.