We counted six last time out, but The Telegraph is reporting that the field of suitors for the UK Tote has dropped to four. With red ink spewing out of every orifice, Gala Coral have apparently decided they really can’t afford to splash out on anything fancy this year. That leaves Betfred’s Fred Done, the Reuben Brothers, former British Horseracing Board chairman Sir Martin Broughton, and the Racing Foundation featuring Tote execs Mike Smith and Trevor Beaumont. That last one sounds like a really bad ’70s band…
Mitch Garber seems determined to at least attempt to prove Calvin Ayre wrong about that whole ‘never having run an online gambling company’ thing. Not only is Gerber’s Caesars Interactive Entertainment (CIE) bringing the World Series of Poker Europe to the Casino Barrière de Cannes Croisette in the south of France, the WSOP brand will soon have a French presence online as well. The on- and offline partnership between CIE and French casino heavies Lucien Barrière will offer WSOP-branded tournaments via BarrierePoker.fr. This year will also witness the launch of WSOP.fr, initially as a news site before real-money poker is thrown into the mix.
Finally, for all you ‘under the hood’ types, Bet365 CTO Martin Davies gave Computing.co.uk a jargon-heavy peek into how his back end functions. (That would be the company’s back end, not Davies’, you sick bastards.) We’re big fans of Bet365, but we offer readers this warning – while we completely understood the bit about Bet365 employing 160 in-house software developers in addition to the 300 IT staff keeping the gremlins away, the rest of Davies’ chat might as well have been written in a foreign bloody language. For those of you with bigger brains, the whole conversation can be found here.
