THE AMERICAS
An up and down week in New Jersey, as legislators passed their online gambling bills (again) but a federal judge allowed sports leagues to continue their legal opposition to the state’s sports betting plans; US citizens said they preferred legal sports betting over online gambling; now that Harry Reid has come up short (again) at the federal level, Rod Wright reintroduced his California intrastate poker bill; Howard Lederer settled his civil suit with the DoJ; the collapse of the BetIslands sportsbook had punters crying foul; Antigua expressed annoyance with the WTO for delaying the country’s request to impose sanctions against the US; SHFL Entertainment posted record annual revenue and inked an online poker deal with Amaya Gaming; the sports betting industry lost a pioneer with the death of Doc Sports’ Morris ‘Doc’ Moseman; Vince ‘Ebenezer’ Martin said ‘bah, humbug’ to those looking to get their Yuletide ya-ya’s out, while Calvin Ayre played Father Time by looking back at the year that was for the gambling industry.
EUROPE
Playtech caused more headaches by threatening to block the William Hill/GVC acquisition of Sportingbet; Schleswig-Holstein dramatically complicated Germany’s gambling scenario by issuing its first online casino/poker licenses; Bet365 and Denise Coates had another lucrative year; Turkey intends to privatize its Spor Toto business; PokerStars inked another convergence deal with a Spanish brick-and-mortar casino; 888 Holdings pulled out of France and partially out of Australia; Zynga offered UK audiences a tease of its soon-to-come real-money gambling sites, and betting shops’ fixed-odds betting terminal revenues topped the over-the-counter take for the first time.
ASIA
Macau casinos found new ways around the gaming table cap; Galaxy Entertainment plans to spend $6.5b on its new Cotai project; Chinese authorities’ crackdown on online gambling shows no signs of letting up; an Intralot-led consortium won the Taiwan Sports Lottery concession; SHFL Ent. won the right to appeal an LT Games intellectual property injunction; despite the Great Social Media Firewall, Tatjana Pasalic smuggled out news of the first World Poker Tour China champion; despite a stream of negative headlines, the Philippines reappointed PAGCOR’s senior executives; Angelia Ong discussed Japan’s gambling potential with Dr. Toru Mihara and Macau junket operators are taking a closer look at Bitcoin technology.
