Forget the week in review, check out Calvin Ayre’s personal look back at the year in gambling news.
THE AMERICAS
Caesars Entertainment and the Tropicana Casino paid a combined $23.4m to loot and shutter Atlantic City’s Atlantic Club Casino Hotel; Colorado officials sought legal advice on the steps the state needed to take to pass online gambling legislation; MGM Resorts won the fight for the last Maryland casino license; the BetonSports.com domain was sold to a former associate of Gary Kaplan; InterPoker became the latest site to make an unexplained exit from the Canadian market; the World Series of Poker released its preliminary schedule for the 2014 event; Hollywood confirmed a sequel to the movie Rounders is in the offing; the Baha Mar casino in the Bahamas inked a crucial travel deal with China; Vince Martin offered a two-part preview of the college football bowl season and Mike O’Donnell broke with tradition by offering his predictions for what won’t happen in 2014.
EUROPE
French politicians rejected a proposal to share online poker liquidity with other regulated markets; Bwin.party insisted its fiscal impotence was a thing of the past; Portugal removed online gambling language from its 2014 budget; UK police foiled a Polish extortion attempt of online gambling sites; Betfred profits rose 30% in its most recent fiscal year; Playtech launched a live dealer ‘dual network’ for Asian ex-pats; UK Labour party leader Ed Miliband launched a mathematically challenged campaign against fixed-odds betting terminals; Plumbee got a $13m cash injection from television prodco Endemol; Bitcoin-only poker site SealsWithClubs had its customer database compromised; William Hill said it would stick with Gibraltar but ditch its Spanish-facing Miapuesta brand; Ayr United striker Michael Moffat had the balls to wager on his own successful performance on the pitch; Income Access’ Louis Deering discussed the importance of social media and shareability; Rebecca Liggero offered her picks for the top iGaming PR stunts of 2013 and Lee Davy conducted annual reviews with Kara Scott, Nicolas Levi, Fabrice Soulier, Sam Cohen, Alexandre Dreyfus, Liv Boeree, Chanracy Khun, Shannon Shorr and Roberto Romanello, while taking media ‘untouchables’ like Tom Dwan to the proverbial woodshed.
ASIA
Sri Lanka approved its three resort casino projects, minus the casino part; Taiwan looked for casino investors in Macau; Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev denied he wants to turn Sochi into Las Vegas; Genting announced a deal with 20th Century Fox to revamp and rebrand its Genting Highlands casino and theme park; South Australia admitted misleading its citizens via a PSA equating social gaming with gambling; Queensland officially fired the starting gun for its Brisbane casino race; China clamped down harder on Bitcoin transactions but Roger ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ Ver told Rebecca Liggero that these situations represent buying opportunities; Melco Crown cut Japan a $10m check to boost its chances of landing a local casino license; Philippine authorities ordered former Pagcor boss Efraim Genuino to repay millions of misused government funds; and our very own Bill Beatty issued a call for unity among members of the Philippine online gambling community.
