THE AMERICAS
Sen. Dean Heller promised he and Harry Reid would make online poker bill passage a priority in the lame duck session of Congress, but Steve Wynn called such efforts a ‘waste of breath’; both Nevada and Atlantic City saw gaming revenues decline; New Jersey approved mobile gambling and filed a defiant response to those seeking to block its sports betting bid; Bally Tech inked a free-play online gambling deal with the Mohegan Sun casino group; Churchill Downs Inc. appointed an Interactive president; California questioned the legality of a supposedly free-play online poker site and Zynga’s executive exodus continued with the departure of Zynga Poker GM Laurence Toney.
EUROPE AND MIDDLE EAST
William Hill will reportedly exercise its right to buy out Playtech’s share of William Hill Online and up its offer for Sportingbet; PokerStars acquired a stake in a London brick-and-mortar casino and suggested it would crack down on all those copycat fast-fold poker products now that it owns the Rush Poker patent; Full Tilt Poker received an Isle of Man license and sent a ‘Dear John’ email to its former US players; the Merge Gaming Network lost a couple poker skins; Paddy Power went on a hiring binge; the Italian poker market continued to struggle; a London casino put the brakes on Phil Ivey’s £7.3m punto banco payday; Israeli officials busted the nation’s ‘biggest illegal online gambling network’; the eGaming Review Operator Awards appears to have omitted an entire continent; Rebecca Liggero took in the sights and sounds at the Barcelona Affiliate Conference and Jason Kirk celebrated Phil Hellmuth’s epic victory at the World Series of Poker Europe.
ASIA
Donaco Singapore pulled off a reverse takeover of Australian interactive media/gambling outfit Two Way Ltd.; Russia’s far east casino zone saw fewer applicants than expected; just in time for Halloween, Aussie anti-gambling MP Nick Xenophon got spooked by a claw; police in West Java claimed to have busted a US illegal online gambling group; an influx of visitors during Macau’s Golden Week produced gaming table revenue of $1.1b and Thailand’s long path to ‘online’ lotteries got a little shorter.
