April 2005 Archives

Online Casino gambling has long been popular in Europe. In some respects the online casino legislation may change sooner in Europe and the UK than in the US. There have been recent debates about it in parliament. French online casinos are no exception to this rule. The French online casino business has been in full swing for several years. It is estimated that the French gamble twice as often and for three times as long as British online casino players.

Land based casino gambling in France is highly restricted and if you want to play casino games in France your only choice is state-managed operations. Government run betting business enterprises are limited to Pari Mutuel Urbain lotto and the National Lottery.

By Adam Goldman -

LAS VEGAS -- Gambling impresario Steve Wynn has finally delivered. His $2.7 billion Wynn Las Vegas debuted early Thursday morning to hundreds of eager people clamoring to get the first glimpse of this city's newest attraction and the most expensive megaresort ever built here.

They fanned out everywhere after the doors opened, swarming the rows of slot machines and gambling tables. They came with cameras and video recorders intent on capturing this slice of Las Vegas history.

By Jack Broom -

By any measure, poker is hot, with the lexicon of Texas Hold 'Em — the flop, the turn, the river — becoming standard vocabulary on college campuses, even in some high-school corridors.

Televised poker tournaments are drawing impressive ratings, and the availability of more than 100 online poker sites means a would-be player no longer needs to round up a group of friends, or even go to the local card room.

By Eric Pfanner -

LONDON The stakes are high, the ante is low, and a lot of bluffs may soon get called.

It's not Vegas, baby, but the freewheeling world of Internet gambling, a $7.5 billion business that is expected to more than double over the next five years.

Rapid growth and a low cost of entry are drawing in investors, but they also raise the prospect of trade battles among the United States, Britain and Continental countries that do not see eye to eye on gambling - or on regulation of the Internet.

By Dan Lewerenz -

CASPER, Wyo. -- D.R. "Doc" Carson made his way to the Internet Cafe every morning and pulled up a chair in front of a terminal. He skipped the keyboard, choosing instead to use the touch-screen monitor. He usually stayed until around 5 p.m., when his wife gets home.

That's a long time on the Internet for a 62-year-old man who describes himself as computer illiterate. But Carson wasn't surfing -- he was playing the sweepstakes.

As countries across the region seek to attract more tourists and create jobs through casinos, Asia is poised to become a gambling hub over the next decade. Singapore this week announced it would establish two casinos as part of "integrated resort" projects, which will also include luxury hotels, shops and entertainment, convention and sports facilities.

* Former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew told the Singapore parliament that wealthy Asians, especially those from China and India, would travel to integrated resorts.

* If Singapore refused the development of casinos, it risked being passed by, said Mr Lee, once an opponent of casinos.

By Brad Cain -

SALEM, Ore. (AP) - Maryann started gambling 10 years ago, playing video poker machines in hotel restaurants in Oregon as she traveled for her job.

``It got so any place I would see a lottery sign and that was a restaurant or other place that was comfortable, I would play,'' says the woman, who is in her 40s.

Gambling and sweepstakes sites are popular with French and Swedish surfers. But southern Europeans seem less likely to bet online.

According to new data from Nielsen//NetRatings, more than 14 million Europeans, or 14% of those online from home, visited a gambling and sweepstakes site in February.

Currently, gambling and sweepstake sites are most popular in northern Europe, with French and Swedish users leading the way, and southern Europe is still lagging, with less than 10% of Spanish and Italians logging on to gamble.

By James Daley -

William Hill, the UK's second largest bookmaker, is in talks to buy the betting shop arm of its smaller rival Stanley Leisure for an estimated £500m.

If successful, the deal will see William Hill overtake Ladbrokes - the betting chain owned by the hotel group Hilton - as the UK's largest bookmaker, adding more than 600 sites to its existing 1,600-strong chain of betting shops.

Internet gambling site GoldenPalace.com continues high-profile purchases as revenues from online betting hit the jackpot.

Providing proof that Internet casinos have more cash than they know how to spend, online gambling site GoldenPalace.com announced on Wednesday that it paid $650,000 for the rights to name a new species of monkey.

The “GoldenPalace.com Monkey” will even have a formal name of Callicebus aureipalatii, Latin for Golden Palace.

By Gene J. Koprowski -

Chicago, IL, Apr. 13 (UPI) -- Regulation of online gambling is emerging in the United States and elsewhere, but that is not likely to slow the worldwide phenomenon, experts told UPI's The Web.

The World Trade Organization last week ruled the U.S. government could regulate Internet gambling and authorities in the United Kingdom are establishing a new public body to police online gaming activities.

Poker is a pop culture phenomenon but investors probably shouldn't bet on the World Poker Tour.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Admit it. You've succumbed to the poker craze. You want to be the next Chris Moneymaker or Annie Duke. You fantasize about bluffing your way to a big pot against Hollywood poker aficionados like Ben Affleck.

Poker is hot, particularly the game known as Texas Hold'em, thanks to TV shows like ESPN's "World Series of Poker" and Bravo's "Celebrity Poker Showdown".

By John Soat -

GETTING ONLINE GAMBLING STRAIGHT ... The World Trade Organization ruled last week the United States could continue to ban online gambling, despite a protest from the tiny country of Antigua, which is home to many online gambling sites, that the ban violates fair-trade practices. The ruling came as the result of an appeal by the U.S. to an earlier ruling by the WTO in Antigua's favor. "This win confirms what we knew from the start--WTO Members are entitled to maintain restrictions on Internet gambling," said acting U.S. Trade Representative Peter Allgeier, in a statement. The WTO lets countries bar certain trade practices if they represent a threat to "public morals" and "public order," which was the basis of the U.S. appeal.

An appeals panel of the World Trade Organisation ruled last week that the United States can maintain many of its restrictions on Internet gambling, largely reversing an earlier ruling that the country was violating its international obligations.

But the appeals panel, ruling in a dispute involving the island nation of Antigua, also found that a 2000 American law on horse racing discriminates against foreign operators.

LONDON - The British government said Friday it was setting up a new commission to regulate gambling, including bets made on the Internet.

The Gambling Bill, which overhauls Britain's outdated gaming regulations, was passed by Parliament and became law late Thursday. Officials hope that within months, a new commission, and a body of some 100 investigators, will be established to regulate the industry.

A major focus of the legislation is to regulate online gambling, which has become increasingly popular in recent years. Online casino companies will be allowed to operate from Britain for the first time.

GENEVA (AFP) - The United States and Antigua both claimed to be winners after the World Trade Organization partly reversed an earlier ruling on US restrictions on cross-border gaming on the Internet.

A WTO appeals body accepted that prohibitions in some US states on cross-border gaming were valid and agreed with Washington's argument that some federal laws could "protect public morals or maintain public order."

The appeal had followed an earlier ruling by the WTO's disputes settlement body entirely favoring a complaint brought by the tiny Caribbean island of Antigua and Barbuda.

By Paul R. La Monica -

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Wynn Resorts, the publicly traded casino company run by Vegas legend Steve Wynn, has soared nearly 400 percent since it started trading in October 2002...and the company's first casino hasn't even opened yet.

Wynn Las Vegas is set to open its doors on April 28. But investors have so far been willing to bet on the reputation of Steve Wynn, the brainchild behind several successful casinos in Sin City, including the Golden Nugget, Mirage and Bellagio. (Wynn's former company, Mirage Resorts, was sold to MGM Grand in 2001 and is now known as MGM Mirage.)

UK -- (PRESS RELEASE) -- The first annual William Hill-Inside Edge Gambling Book of the Year Award has been won by legendary gambler Amarillo Slim's autobiography, A World Full Of Fat People, published by Yellow Jersey Press. The prize of £1000, a £500 free bet from William Hill plus a leather-bound copy of the book was presented at a ceremony at Border's Book Shop in London's Oxford Street.

The two runners-up from an original short-list of ten titles, were Elliott's Golf Form by Keith Elliott (Portway Press) and Bruce Millingtons' Definitive Guide to Betting on Sport(Raceform), both of whom received £250 plus a £250 free bet from William Hill and a leather-bound copy of their book.

WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- The nation's largest and longest-running illegal gambling enterprise, a three-week-long and, by FBI estimates, approximately $2.5 billion series of office pools --a.k.a. the NCAA Men's College Basketball Championship -- will culminate with the championship game on April 4 in St. Louis.

It has been a wonderful tournament brimming with the excitement of overtime games, dramatic comebacks and even a few haughty Goliaths falling to a handful of feisty Davids.