Boy, oh boy. If there’s anything that Real Madrid-Schalke barnburner just taught us, it’s that you can expect a whole lot of nuttiness in the Champions League this season. I’ll be the first to admit that I had written off Schalke even before that return leg to Madrid. A 2-0 deficit against Real Madrid and then trying to make that up at the Bernabeu? Yeah, good luck.

Turns out, I was wrong. Way wrong. Schalke not only scored a 4-3 win, but they came so close to pulling off what would’ve been a stunning upset against the defending champions: Incredible! Real Madrid should be thankful they escaped with a 5-4 aggregate win, but not before they made everyone in Madrid lose their collective minds.

With that result, Madrid moves on to the quarterfinals where they’ll join FC Porto after the latter dismissed FC Basel rather convincingly in the other game earlier today.

Now it’s time to check out the remaining six games that will be played in the next six days.

Universal Entertainment’s Philippine gaming unit Tiger Resort Leisure and Entertainment has requested an extension of the deadline to complete Manila Bay Resorts

In a letter dated February 15, Tiger Resort told the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) that the company plans to increase the gross floor area of the property by 97,000 square meters, explaining that the additional space would be used to add “guest rooms and parking area and would also contribute to the strengthening of the structure and architectural design.”

Officials from both Tiger Resort and PAGCOR appeared before the House Committee on Games and Amusements earlier this week as part of the continuing investigation surrounding bribery charges filed against Okada. But instead of discussing those issues, the hearing mostly discussed the project’s timetable and the new extension requested by the casino operator.

Tiger Resort legal counsel Jose Lis C. Leagogo confirmed to reporters that the group requested for an extension, but PAGCOR, through President and Chief Operating Officer Jorge V. Sarmiento, reiterated its stance that any more delays could cost the company a significant chunk of money. “The immediate effect is if they (Okada group) failed to finish by March 31, 2015, it would mean forfeiture of the P100 million bond they submitted to us,” Sarmiento told reporters after the hearing.

Taj Mahal Casino can keep the Trump on its name as Carl Icahn reached an agreement with Donald Trump on Monday to allow his name to remain on the casino.

Under the agreement, which needs approval from U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, Trump Entertainment will pay Trump $172,000 to please a ground lease claim, among other things.

“The Trump Taj Mahal, under the right leadership and with the proposed significant reinvestment in the property, can be, once again, a wonderful place for travel and entertainment,” Trump said in a statement.

The agreement also requires Trump Entertainment Resorts to remove “any and all vestiges” of the name from Plaza casino, where the sign was removed but the name is still outlined in dirt or rust in many areas.

Photo Credit: sbcnews.co.uk

Skrill 1-Tap introduces instant mobile payment solution

Leading digital payments company Skrill, today announces that online bookmaker RaceBets.com has added Skrill 1-Tap to its mobile and desktop offerings.

With the 2015 Cheltenham Festival around the corner, RaceBets customers can now benefit from a convenient and secure payment process when placing bets at the jewel in jump racing’s crown and at race meets across the world.

Macau’s VIP gamblers aren’t being paranoid, Beijing really is watching them like a hawk.

Li Gang (pictured), director of Beijing’s liaison office in Macau, told the Beijing News that China’s crackdown on corruption had left public officials with no doubt that if they travel to Macau to gamble, “they will be discovered.” Li boasted that any public officials with even a hint of naughty conduct on their records “now dare not go to Macau to gamble.”

Without getting into specifics, Li said Beijing had put measures in place to ensure that no public official gets in or out of a Macau casino without being identified. Among these measures are identify checks that are now conducted for anyone wishing to gain access to a casino VIP table.

Such measures may be responsible for the reported revival by some Macau casino operators of proxy betting, in which a junket operator representative sits at the gaming table and relays play-by-play card information to a VIP on the mainland, who then advises the proxy how much to wager on any given hand.

Russian gaming company First Gaming, which operates under the brand name Rub90, has released a study of the country’s bookmaking industry in 2014.

There were 5,518 land-based bookmaking outlets in Russia in 2014, 354 more than in 2013. However, the 7% growth rate pales in comparison to 2013’s 53% and 2012’s 69%. Seventy of 2014’s new shops opened in the Krasnodar region, while 60 opened in the Moscow region (44 within the city itself). Of the 10 regions studied, only Sverdlovsk and Samara recorded year-on-year declines. (Read full results of the study – in Russian – on Bookmakersrating.ru.)

In terms of market share, Fonbet remains the land-based betting titan with 21.4% of issued bookmaking licenses. Baitbet was a distant second with 14.3%, followed by Bookie Pub (1XBet) at 11.6% and lottery operator Bingo Boom at 10.1% (although Bingo Boom doesn’t offer sports betting). The rest of the chart ran as follows: Euromir (8.9%), Liga Stavok (8.8%) and all others (24.9%).

Fonbet also ruled the online betting market, as its site recorded 2.5m visits per month. Marathonbet.com was next at 2.2m monthly visits with BetCityru.com in third at 1.6m. The rest of the pack finished thusly: 1xbet.com (1.5m), Parimatch.com (1.1m), Zenitbet.com (1m), Baltbet.com (550k), Ligastavok.com (500k), Olimp.kz (350k), WinLineBet.com (250k), with Favbet.com and Tennisi.com each notching around 100k.

The Season XII World Poker Tour Player of the Year, Mukul Pahuja, takes the World Series of Poker, The World Poker Tour and Phil Hellmuth to task during a Twitter rant of epic proportions.

Mukul Pahuja has had enough.

“The blatant disregard for our collective intelligence is straight up nauseating.”

Those were the words of the Season XII World Poker Tour (WPT) Player of Year (POY) after the World Series of Poker Circuit (WSOPC) decided to guarantee a $1m prize pool, in their Main Event in Baltimore, when according to a Pahuja tweet, the prize pool had already hit $960,000.

Local boy Zal Irani takes down the Chicago Poker Classic opener, after defeating Anthony Parille, in heads-up action, to win the $100,000 first prize and a seat into the $2,000 Main Event.

Zal Irani has just won $100,000, and not even his Mum is taking a piece of it.

The 42-year old former financial planner, took down Event #1 $360 No-Limit Hold’em, at the Chicago Poker Classic, in the Horseshoe Hammond, and it looks like he will keep every single penny.

“In this place, I can’t ever swap or sell. I cut [my mom] off this time which was so hard to do,” Irani told the WSOP after his win.

PokerStars have slapped a $5m guarantee on the side of their 10th installment of the low stakes grinding wet dream: The MicroMillions.

The MicroMillions is one of the only times of the year you can drag your partner in front of the computer screen to show them that you are buying in for peanuts, and are coming home with the monkey.

It’s a low stakes grinders wet dream.

It’s the 10th time PokerStars have paid attention to the little person. It gets bigger each year. The series starts Thursday 19 March with Event #1: $0.11+R NL Hold’em {Hyper-Active}, and ends on Sunday 29 March with 10 events including Event #98: $22 No-Limit Hold’em Main Event.

Maryland’s top casino operator Maryland Live! has inked a free-play online gaming deal with systems and software outfit GameAccount Network.

The new Simulated Gaming offering is expected to launch sometime in Q2 of this year via MarylandLiveCasino.com. The system will be integrated with the casino’s Live! Rewards program, allowing players to earn loyalty points via online play.

Maryland Live! president Robert Norton said GameAccount had successfully pitched the merits of its Simulated Gaming product and also “demonstrated their regulated gaming capability in New Jersey.” While there’s no indication that Maryland will join New Jersey in regulating real-money online and mobile play anytime soon, Norton said the GameAccount deal “provides us with a strategic partnership to execute both options.”

The two parties in this deal are far from strangers. In 2011, Maryland Live! inked an online free-play deal with nLive, which at the time was a joint venture of GameAccount and Australian slots operator Aristocrat but Aristocrat bought out GameAccount one year later.

The United Kingdom and Ireland Poker Tour Season 5 2015 stops have been announced and it’s all aboard for Marbella, Bristol, Isle of Man and Edinburgh.

PokerStars have announced the remaining Season 5 2015 United Kingdom & Ireland Poker Tour (UKIPT) stops, and Bristol is the surprise returnee.

This is the tale of the tape.

• Nottingham – Apr 12th-19th

Canadian gaming operator Intertain Group capped off its year of acquisitions by reporting revenue of $40.8m in 2014.

The figure is all the more impressive considering Intertain didn’t record any revenue in 2013, the year it agreed to acquire the B2C WagerLogic operations (since rebranded as InterCasino) from fellow Canucks Amaya Gaming. Intertain followed that $70m deal with the $45m acquisition of UK-facing online bingo operator Mandalay Media last June and the €89m acquisition of Nordic-facing online casino operator Vera&John in October.

Intertain says InterCasino provided $22m of 2014’s revenue pie, with $17.2m from Mandalay Media and $1.6m from Vera&John. Had Mandalay and Vera&John been contributing to Intertain’s coffers for the full year, their revenue would have come to $35m and $54m respectively.

However, to paraphrase Peter Parker’s dead uncle, with great acquisitions comes great debt. Intertain’s 2014 adjusted earnings came to $20m but net losses came to $26m thanks to $19.8m in acquisition-related expenses. Both revenue and debt will grow even larger in 2015 thanks to last month’s £425m acquisition of the Jackpojoy and Botemania online bingo brands from UK gaming operator Gamesys

3D video slots software developer Betsoft Gaming has had a busy time of late, adding three names to its growing list of clients.

Deal #1 involves the Oriental Group, an Asian-facing live dealer online casino operator. Oriental recently launched Betsoft’s Slots3 suite of 3D video slots as well as the ToGo mobile games.

Betsoft commercial director Mark Allison celebrated the deal’s potential to bring Betsoft’s products to “an entirely new market of players via Oriental Group, a respected titan in the enormous Asian market.” Oriental Group’s Brian Ang said the addition of Betsoft’s titles – particularly the ToGo mobile games – would greatly enhance players’ online casino experience.

Deal le Deux seeks to build on Betsoft’s Asian market presence by providing desktop and mobile games to Virtus Information Ltd., which operates the Asian-facing 998bet.com. Virtus’ Choong Leo Ong said the new products should be accessible by his company’s customers within the next few weeks. Betsoft account manager Julian Camilleri said the two company’s “common philosophy will ensure that this partnership is both long-lived and mutually lucrative.”

Entertainment Gaming Asia (EGT) reported revenue up sharply in Q4 as increased casino products sales offset falling gaming operations revenue.

For the three months ending Dec. 31, EGT revenue rose 63% year-on-year to $8.3m, primarily due to $4m in gaming chip and plaque orders from two Philippines casino operators – Melco Crown Entertainment and Bloomberry Resorts. Gaming products revenue was $4.2m in Q4, up from $729k in the same period the previous year.

Gaming operations revenue fell 7% to $4.1m. EGT’s slot machine operations in the Philippines fell 16% to $648k thanks to increased competition from those new Entertainment City Manila casinos to which EGT supplies chips.

Cambodian gaming operations fell 3% to $3.2m. EGT operates the Dreamworld Poipet slots hall on Cambodia’s border with Thailand and supplies slots to NagaWorld, NagaCorp’s flagship casino property in Phnom Penh. The Poipet property saw lower player traffic while NagaWorld enjoyed increased VIP traffic and improved daily net win per unit.

Real estate investment trust Gaming & Leisure Properties Inc. (GLPI) announced on Monday that it had offered $4.1 billion to buy Pinnacle Entertainment‘s real estate assets.

News of the offer by GLPI, which was spun off from casino operator Penn National Gaming in 2013, was made public after Pinnacle reportedly refused to discuss GLPI’s initial offer in January.

“Notwithstanding the attractiveness of this offer, Pinnacle has again refused to engage, which is why we are bringing our value-enhancing proposal directly to their shareholders,” GLPI CEO Peter Carlino said, as quoted by Reuters.

Under the proposed deal, Pinnacle shareholders would receive one share of Pinnacle’s casino operations and 0.5517 shares of GLPI for each share in Pinnacle that they own. That would amount to $36 in assets for every share Pinnacle shareholders currently own, a total value of $2.17 billion. GLPI also said that with the inclusion of debt, the transaction would be worth close to $4.1 billion.

GamCrowd partnered with Innvotec Limited, an FCA-authorized fund management firm to launch the first Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) dedicated for the gambling industry.

The GamCrowd 2015 SEIS Fund opens for investors today—a day before the start of Cheltenham Festival, where hundreds of millions of pounds is wagered.

GamCrowd has already begun assessing companies, judging to meet the relevant regulatory and licensing requirements. Once the qualified companies are selected, GamCrowd will advise Innvotec on GamCrowd 2015 SEIS investments, evaluating the potential of all start-ups against strict growth criteria and assisting through the pre-funding process, prior to helping the companies to deliver the objectives agreed at the time of investment.

“SEIS is one of the most advantageous tax schemes available to investors anywhere in Western Europe,” said GamCrowd CEO Chris North. “Because of the UK government’s generosity and enthusiasm to funnel tax payers’ money towards UK start-ups, many specialist funds have been started. But, until now, none has existed in gambling, despite it being a huge industry.