THE AMERICAS
Oklahoma inked a new gaming compact to allow a tribe to launch a real-money online gambling site; New Jersey got a schedule for its PASPA court appeal filings while Moody’s claimed online gambling would hurt Atlantic City casinos; Churchill Downs acquired Maine’s Oxford Casino; New Mexico struck a gaming compact that keeps online gambling off its radar; Nevada casinos decided sports betting kiosks represented an existential threat; PokerStars drafted football legend Ronaldo as one of its new ‘SportStars’; Mike O’Donnell wondered if bonus culture had worn out its welcome; Vince Martin measured the Q1 performance of gambling stocks and Guerilla Inc. founder Sandeep Aggarwal spotlighted the importance of social networks in gaining Google’s respect.
EUROPE
Betfair completed its acquisition of Blue Square; Zynga stock leaped as it debuted its real-money UK-facing poker and casino sites; Coral CEO Andy Hornby was scolded for his former banker past; Intrade’s rescue plan means customers settling for 50 cents on the dollar; the UK and Europe hold an estimated 54% of a global $30b online gambling market; online poker was declared irrelevant for laundering the proceeds of crime; iPoker launched anonymous tables; Merge lost another skin as PokerView shut down; Mecca Bingo added tablet gaming to one of its halls; Romania finally got around to creating a national gambling regulator; HoGaming got an Italian live dealer online license; MyBet and Tipp24 published annual results; Becky Liggero finished her discussion about social gaming with Arooga CEO Karl Jeffrey and Lee Davy interviewed pretty much everyone at the World Poker Tour Venice.
ASIA
Vietnam’s government breathed new life into the stalled Ho Tram Strip casino project; Taiwan proposed a 13% gross gaming revenue tax on new casinos; an illegal ‘embassy casino’ in Japan was linked to a European diplomat; PokerStars’ app was called illegal by Australian politicians; PhilWeb’s 2012 profits topped 1b pesos for the first time in the company’s history; Crown’s James Packer showed more interest in building a Sri Lanka casino; SJM held on to its top-dog status in Macau’s casino market, which posted a new monthly revenue record in March; the new Louis XIII casino in Macau warned peasants to stay away and Lee Davy spoke with World Series of Poker spox Seth Palansky as the first WSOP Asia-Pacific got underway.
