Lee Davy explains how his revised morning schedule has paid dividends in both his personal and working life.

I say daily gratitude.

It’s a new thing for me; one of the many new things my wife has brought into my life. It works. It directs my thoughts to others. That makes me happy. I like being happy. That’s another thing that my wife has brought into my life. Increased awareness of the importance of happiness.

One of my most common gratitude statements:

“I am grateful that I have the freedom to wake up when I want. That I get to choose the structure of my day, and not have it determined by someone else.”

I left school when I was 16-years old and within six months I was working for British Rail. I left 19-years later. In that period of time I never had the freedom to wake when I wanted – weekend excepted. This was true even when I had reached a senior position.

It’s incredibly liberating it is to be in control of your own working hours. It’s become so important to me, I doubt I will ever work for anyone, other than myself, ever again.

National UK newspaper The Guardian has ended its sports betting partnership with FSB Technology. The newspaper announced that it would no longer run its GoWager betting services in its website.

The Guardian‘s partnership with FSB Technology launched GoWager in February 2014, offering customers a full sportsbook with live betting on a range of sports including football, horseracing, tennis, and cricket on selected betting markets.

The newspaper faced criticism and opposition from its readers for promoting gambling products and the publication was forced to review its sports betting partnership. FSB-powered GoWager was switched to a standalone site unaffiliated to The Guardian.

The UK newspaper had taken a strong stance against UK gambling, in particular the issue of fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBT’s) but its commercial department had defended its online sports betting product as an individual’s right to choose and that it was only marketed on the sports pages of the newspaper and website.

“Guardian News & Media is always seeking new ways to innovate commercially, but we are also mindful of the views of our readers, some of which were outlined in a readers’ editor’s column about GoWager last year,” a spokesperson told eGaming Review. “This decision was unrelated to the services provided by FSB Technology and the GoWager website will continue without Guardian involvement,” the spokesperson added.

Dave McDowell, CEO and co-founder of FSB Technology, added, “We really enjoyed working with the Guardian and remain on very good terms. The relationship gave us a fantastic platform to showcase our position as a leading technology supplier.

“We broke new ground in the distribution of a sports betting service by delivering contextual betting opportunities embedded within a media partner’s website. At FSB we want to continue being innovative when it comes to the marketing of those services and maintain our position as the most flexible sports betting solution in the market today.”

Fresh off the successful grand opening of City of Dreams Manila, Melco Crown Entertainment has come out doused any thoughts of building a casino in South Korea.

Speaking to reporters during the grand opening, Melco Crown co-chairman Lawrence Ho said South Korea’s policy of limiting casino access to foreigners-only is too risky a proposition for the company.

“In our opinion, foreigners-only gaming market is difficult. Korea and its policy of not letting locals in, to us, are difficult,” Ho said.

Neither Ho nor Melco co-chairman James Packer believe that the foreigners-only format could guarantee 30,000 visitors a day, a requirement to make a project with that kind of scale to work.

Ho’s stance could also be traced to his company already having a presence in Macau that attracts its fair share of VIPs and Chinese high-rollers, the same market casinos in South Korea are targeting. If locals aren’t allowed to play in casinos, a Melco Crown casino in Korea would essentially be going after the same people that already visit its casinos in Macau.

But the company isn’t completely closing its doors on the country. “If the government changes its policy about locals, we would jump in head first,” Ho said.

For now, though, Melco Crown is focusing its full attention in promoting and building up City of Dreams Manila. The resort’s grand opening was a resounding success and the company is looking to carry that momentum forward.

A family of four, from Birmingham in the UK, have ditched their jobs to focus on becoming full time professional poker players.

Ask poker players if they would recommend the life of a professional poker player, to their children, and a high percentage of them would say no. The reasons vary from the difficulty of eking out a profit; stress, and the fact that you are taking from the world and not giving back.

None of that bothers the Sheils family from Birmingham.

Parents Michelle and Matthew Sheils, and their sons 23-year old Richard, and 19-year old Brandon, have bucked the trend, ditched their jobs and decided to become professional poker players.

The UK tabloids have branded them as masterminds who have uncovered a mathematical formula that allows them to gain an edge. To be fair to the Sheils family that’s probably more to do with the uneducated writer, than any actual mathematical formula – unless they are all Ex-Machina sliding down the fallopian tubes of Cepheus?

“I did my dissertation on poker, the science and math behind the game.” Richard told the Birmingham Mail. “You can see where the gambling is, and where it is not. It would be extremely silly to go down the gambling route. If you meet gamblers, you are going to make money from them.”

Don’t tell that to Ivey.

Johnny Landreth has won the World Series of Poker Circuit Main Event at the Horseshoe Tunica, after beating Tom Thomas, in heads-up action, to capture the first prize of $147,388.

Johnny Landreth will be living on pure adrenaline after an eight-hour marathon against Tom Thomas ended with a World Series of Poker Circuit (WSOPC) gold ring being slipped on his finger.

Landreth takes his total live tournament earnings to +$585,000 after picking up $147,388 for the win, and a seat in the World Series of Poker (WSOP) National Championships. Scott Stewart will join him after his first, sixth, and 18th place finishes were enough to hand him the Casino Championship award.

Landreth and Thomas entered the final table with three quarters of the chips in play, and it took only two hours to remove Aphideth Nakhoneinh, Norman McKeldin, Jeremy Drewery, Keith Murrell, Tommy Bishop, Russell Head and Jamie Strickland from the equation.

But that scintillating start would soon hit a roadblock. Both players squaring off with deep stacks and plenty of patience. After eight hours of play Thomas had ground Landreth down to 15 big blinds, when he flopped a straight versus top two pair, to double up. A point he would power on from to pick up the win – pocket sixes successfully running the gauntlet against K9o.

“I’ve got a lot of friends that have [a ring],” Landreth told the WSOP. “I played a lot of events and it just hadn’t fallen my way. It did this time.”

The win is the biggest since Landreth started racking up Hendon Mob numbers a decade ago. His first-ever cash was for $185,797 after topping a 677-player field in a $1k event at the Gold Strike Casino Resort in Tunica.

Overview of Using Social

In this article I want you to think about social media as a marketer, social media by competitors and how to disrupt the WSOP marketing effort this summer. Start planning now.

I was reading a Neil Patel article, wherein it states that American’s spend an average of 3.2 hours a day using social networks. Digging further I found a link of a 2013 social media marketing industry report. I really liked this report so I took it a step further and pulled up the 2014 report from the same social media marketing industry.

Their research from 2800 marketing firms finds that by 2014, 92% of marketers agreed that social media is good for their business and 97% at least used it in some form. Obviously.

Pro Tip: Obviously use social media.

I pulled these high level graphs below from the http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ website to further illustrate. The actual social media marketing industry reports on the links above have dozens more graphs. If you want to learn about social, you should read them.

Nearly 50% of online customers now gamble on mobile devices with sportsbook accounting for 47% of the mobile market

Paddy Power is reaping the benefits of early adoption of mobile app marketing with 18.9% of the overall organic mobile click share

Blanket ban on real-money applications in Google Play brings challenges but commercial potential is huge

Small number of high value keywords, including ‘mobile casino’ are driving the greatest volume of traffic

Early adopters of mobile application marketing, Paddy Power, William Hill and Betfair are leading the growth of mobile app gaming, according to Stickyeyes latest gambling intelligence report on the mobile app market.

These brands are reaping the commercial benefits of investment in highly usable apps to support half of all online gamblers who state mobile apps are their preferred way to bet or play. Sportsbook is leading this growth in mobile gaming (see supporting figure – online market size by segment), accounting for 47% of the mobile market whilst casino follows with just over a quarter (26%) then bingo (16%) and poker (11%).

The growth of mobile comes despite restrictions on Google Play, which prevents the listing of real-money apps, and forces gaming brands to employ dedicated search marketing campaigns to aid app discovery and adoption. As a result, the mobile keyword landscape is becoming increasingly competitive, with an average of 111,607 searches per month for betting, poker, casino and bingo keywords on mobile devices.

Anthony Apicella has won the French Poker Series Main Event, and first prize of €197,000, after beating the German Felix Lambertz in heads-up action.

Rather predictably, the French dominated the final table of the €1,100 French Poker Series (FPS) Main Event, with six of the final eight players hailing from the land where men like to play in women’s poker tournaments.  What was not so predictable was the make up of the winner.

Prior to this event, 32-year old Anthony Apicella had only ever cashed in two other live poker tournaments. What was the reason for his lack of activity? His priorities lie elsewhere. Apicella only plays a handful of live poker events, each year, because he is busy running a bar in Corsica.

Apicella’s stunning success is once again proof that you don’t have to be a full time grinder to win one of these things. It’s what makes poker such a beautiful game. 1,355 players entered the event, and that created a total prize pool of €1,300,800. It was another record-breaking field for the European Poker Tour (EPT) organizers, surpassing the 1,095 entrants the last time the FPS put on this particular show in Jan 2014.

“This is a victory of love; love of my family, and love of my friends who all supported me throughout the event.” Apicella told PokerStars after his win.

It seems that every day I sit down to write a tournament recap, this week, I am writing about German poker players finishing second. It’s unusual. They usually have their towels draped over the first place spot nice and early – not this week though.

The 2015 Aussie Millions Main Event saw Lennart Uphoff have to settle for second place; the 2015 Aussie Millions $100k Challenge saw Ole Schemion doing likewise, and the FPS Main Event saw Felix Lambertz also filling in that role. Not that he would have minded. His €125,500 was easily the largest single score of his live tournament career.

Casino operator Wynn Resorts saw revenue fall in both Q4 and FY 2014 as the record downturn in Macau took a big bite out of business. For the three months ending Dec. 31, revenue fell 25% to $1.38b, adjusted earnings fell 39.3% to $352.5m and net income fell by half to $109.3m. Revenue at Wynn’s operations in Macau fell 32% while Las Vegas properties fell a comparatively mild 5.8%.

For the year as a whole, revenue fell 3.3% to $5.43b and earnings fell 2.1% to $1.77b. Wynn Macau earnings fell 5% to $1.26b while Las Vegas properties reported earnings up 5.9% to a record $515.2m.

Wynn Macau’s VIP turnover fell 39.9% in Q4 while VIP win rate slipped 0.12 points to 2.8%. Wynn decreased its VIP table ranks to 244 from 273 in the same period the previous year due to renovations on its casino floor, a process Wynn expects to complete before the Lunar New Year celebrations kick in.

Wynn Macau’s mass market revenue fell 15% to $249m in Q4, due to a 8.3% decline in mass market table drop to $634.4m and a win rate described as “the lowest hold rate since the third quarter of 2013.” Slots handle fell 19.5% to $1.1b and win fell 20.9%. Occupancy rate rose 1.9 points to 98.6% and non-gaming revenue fell 1..6% to $95.9m.

In Las Vegas, gaming revenue was down 15.5% to $171m. Table game turnover fell 11.8% while slots handle rose 5.2%. Room revenue rose 6.3% to $95.5m and occupancy rose 1.3 points to 82.1%. Food and beverage revenue was up 5.3% to $103.3m and entertainment, retail and other revenue was flat at $57.4m.

STEVE WYNN SAYS CHINA’S RICH ‘DESTABILIZED’ BY CORRUPTION CRACKDOWN

Speaking on the earnings call, Wynn boss Steve Wynn said he wasn’t threatened by two new projects announced for Las Vegas by Crown Resorts and Genting. Steve noted the proximity of those proposed developments to Wynn properties and said he’d rather see shiny new resorts there than empty lots. Wynn believes that the two new resorts would ultimately enlarge the Vegas pie and potentially add as much as $50m to Wynn’s bottom line each year.

The 2015 World Series of Poker will be another record breaking series with 68 events, 11 new formats, and everything but the kitchen sink.

“If you’ve never thought about coming to Las Vegas for the WSOP, this is the year.”

Those were the words of the World Series of Poker’s (WSOP) Executive Director Ty Stewart, as the full 2015 WSOP schedule started hitting e-mail boxes all over the globe.

I have to agree with him.

After gathering some professional thoughts, and weighing in with my own more recreational ones, I have come to the conclusion that the 2015 WSOP will be the most memorable of my short existence on this planet.

It will be a record breaker.

It’s already a record breaker.

Victor Ilyukhin Sr. wins the Grosvenor United Kingdom Poker Tour opener in London after defeating the Sky Poker UK Poker Championships Main Event Champion, Alex Spencer, in heads-up action.

It’s not often that I am happy to see a larger than life Russian staring out of my computer screen, whilst I chow down on my scrambled eggs, but I’ll make an exception for Victor Ilyukhin Sr.

I absolutely adore the fella.

But it wasn’t always like that.

At first I thought he was a right pain in the ass.

I had seen Ilyukhin on the World Poker Tour (WPT) on many occasions. He stood out because my wife owns Revive Touch and Ilyukhin would hire a masseuse to work on him most of the day.

After Ilyukhin was eliminated he would pull up a pew, next to his son, and watch him play until he was also eliminated. I never had the need to place either of them into my chip counts. Then, one day, Ilyukhin started to grow a stack worthy of mention. Then his son did likewise. As I went to enter them into the back-end of the WPT blog I realized that they both have the same first and last names: Victor Ilyukhin.

I don’t know if this is the perfect time to talk to Seattle Seahawks fans, but I did try to console a buddy of mine who watched the game with me at a packed sports bar.

“Hey, at least the Seahawks are the favorites next year,” I said. It did little to cheer him up. Actually, he might have become even more depressed, knowing that Seattle’s next shot at the Super Bowl, if it makes it that far again, would be a full year from now.

At that time, I didn’t even know if the Seahawks were favored to win in Super Bowl 50 (Quick tangent: God bless the NFL for finally doing something right! No more Roman numbers!). All I knew, and frankly, all I cared about was basking in the atmosphere of the room.

Pats fans were whooping it up like they were going to receive their own Super Bowl rings. Seahawks fans either sat stunned, heads bowed, hands  covering their faces. I overheard a couple in the other table talking about the Malcolm Butler’s incredible interception that sealed New England’s victory, asking themselves if what they just saw really happen?

Then there was my buddy, completely catatonic, unable to even comprehend the dramatic turn-of-events that swung Super Bowl XLIX at least three or four times in the final minute of the game.

“Hey, at least the Seahawks are the favorites next year.”

Turns out, they are.

Cocaine, pornography and reminiscing over past glories are strict no-nos if you want to be a successful gambler. That said, they’re invaluable if you’re looking to get high, hard or allow yourself a brief respite from your mind-numbingly boring current existence, so to each his own.

Dr. David Greenfield, a director at the Center for Internet Technology Addiction at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, told Vice that watching your favorite porn star plugging various orifices with various cylindrical objects activates the limbic parts of the brain. But this cuts off the brain’s prefrontal cortex, where decisions involving moral choices are made.

Greenfield told the Christian Post that when your prefrontal is disengaged, you “don’t have access or full control over [your] judgment,” causing you to do dumb things, like taking a hit on 19. So as tempting as it is to keep that PornTube browser tab open while you’re gambling online, this would be a good time to zip it. If it helps, use this handy mantra: bank now, spank later.

COKE ADDS ERRORS

Meanwhile, a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai shows that cocaine use impairs the brain’s ability to predict losses. The study involved 50 coke addicts and 25 control subjects playing a gambling game while their brains were wired to detect electrical activity. The participants were asked to predict whether or not they’d win or lose money in each trial.

The addicts who’d snorted some blow in the previous 72 hours displayed much higher electrical activity from an unexpected win than a predicted win, similar to the control subjects. The coke users who’d abstained in the previous 72 hours failed to display this activity, suggesting that they used cocaine to normalize a certain brain function.

But bottom line, the results showed the addicts displayed “impaired loss prediction signaling in the brain.” The addicts had a much harder time than the control subjects “computing the difference between expected versus unexpected outcomes.” This impairment suggested these individuals were more prone to disadvantageous decision making, so lay off the blow before you blow on those dice.

Australian casino operator Echo Entertainment saw its profit spike nearly 78% in its fiscal H1 thanks to record spending by Asian gambling whales. Normalized domestic gross revenue – which strips out the wild variance of the VIP market – in the six months ending Dec. 31 rose 12.5% to $824.4m while international VIP revenue rose 96.7% to $332.2m. Earnings rose 31.5% to $261.4m and net profit after tax hit $112.6m.

Echo CEO Matt Bekier (pictured on the right) credited Echo’s flagship Sydney property The Star for bringing in the bacon. The Star’s normalized revenue was up 38.8% to $820m while earnings rose 54% to $136m. The property is finally living up to the performance envisioned when the company completed its $870m refurbishment of The Star in late 2011. Echo’s Queensland casinos added revenue of $340m (+8.6%) and earnings of $78.1m (+19.1%).

While VIPs have drastically reduced their spending in Macau, VIP turnover at Echo’s properties rose 97.2% to a record $23.2b in H1. Sadly, win rate fell to 1.33% from 1.41% in the same period the previous year, but VIP overdue loan markers fell from $40.9m to $21.4m, which Echo credits to strong credit risk management and collections.

Looking forward, Echo says H2 has carried on where H1 left off. Priorities for H2 include expanding the Jupiters Gold Coast property and convincing the Queensland government to award Echo the right to develop the Queen’s Wharf Brisbane project.

PACKER PISSED AT SYDNEY POLS

Echo’s competition for the Brisbane casino derby is rival Crown Resorts, which is also scheduled to end The Star’s monopoly in Sydney come 2019. That is, assuming the local government gets around to granting planning approval on the $2b Crown Sydney project. Speaking at this week’s opening of the new City of Dreams Manila, Crown boss James Packer (pictured left) said he no longer views 2019 as a viable opening date unless the Barangaroo Delivery Authority (BDA) and the Lend Lease property developer learn to make nice.

Lend Lease won a profit-sharing contract dispute with the BDA last August but unspecified outstanding issues have prevented a permanent resolution. Despite Packer claiming that there was “nothing more important to me than Crown Sydney,” Packer declined to offer specifics on the nature of the BDA/Lend Lease dispute, saying he was “not in the middle of it.” Packer hasn’t been shy about publicly sharing his disdain for government regulation of the gaming sector in recent months.

On February 20, 2015, a hospitable capital of Georgia will play host for Georgia Gaming Congress, a professional international forum devoted to gambling business. Both international and Georgian experts in all market segments of gambling will visit the event. In particular, Nicolas Fleiderman, current Europe-bet.com’s CEO, will deliver his report within the framework of the event.

Nicolas Fleiderman is an Israeli/Argentinean gaming veteran with more than 10 industry experience. Nicolas has more than a decade of experience in the igaming market. He has operated, counselled, and revamped a number of new and established gaming operations during his career. His clientele includes expekt.com, Net Entertainment, Boylesports, Netrefer, William Hill Online, WinUnited-Youwin.com, Interwetten and CityClubCasino. He has founded CBN Gaming, a technology company broadcasting live games from traditional casinos to the internet.

Europe-Bet.com is one of the leading organizations in the market of betting and online gambling. Its services combine a wide range of online products such as betting, online casinos, roulette, blackjack and classic games of the region (backgammon, dominoes, borax and seca). In January 2011, Europe-Bet.com launched online poker. In June of the same year, it launched the online version of one of the most popular game of the region – backgammon. In May 2012, Europe-Bet.com launched online slots of the world’s leading manufacturers.

Main values of Europe-Bet.com, in particular, honesty, integrity, pioneering spirit and commitment to new technologies and techniques, help to provide the best quality in betting and online gambling.

Do not miss the speech of Nicolas Fleiderman at Georgia Gaming Congress; discover new opportunities and solutions for your business.

Buy a ticket now

Detailed information about Georgia Gaming Congress and all the speakers can be found on the event website g3congress.ru.