Group items tagged

"Borgata's vice-president of information technology John Forelli demonstrates in-room gaming at Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa in Atlantic City, N.J., Monday, Feb. 11, 2013. The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City said it's the first casino in the United States to let guests gamble over hotel room TV sets. Gambling from a home computer is the next step in convenience gambling, after legislation legalizing online gambling was recently signed into law. (AP Photo/The Press of Atlantic City, Michael Ein)"

"The bill, called the Internet Gambling Consumer Protection and Public-Private Partnership Act of 2012, would allow for $30 million licenses for gambling outfits with whom Zynga could potentially partner to offer online poker to players within California. The California legislation stalled earlier this year, but may yet be reprised."

But even with this approval, Bally and IGT still have to wait for individual casinos to be licensed for this sort of gaming.

In April, Wynn was in talks with Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA), the world's largest social gaming developer, to form a strategic online partnership. (See our previous post: Wynn Takes Hard Look At Online Gambling Market With Zynga) Speculation is rife that Wynn is interested in partnering with Zynga for this project. Zynga enjoys a dominating position in the social gaming industry and has about 232 million average monthly active users across 166 countries.

"If you are gambling on your smartphone, if you are gambling on your computer, you are absolutely on your own."

When California State Senator Roderick Wright attempted to legalize online poker with SB 1463, he sold it as a way to help patch up California's busted budget , which is indeed in dire trouble. Surprisingly, the strongest resistance came not from the ever-more-irrelevant anti-gambling moralists, but from powerful pro-gaming special interests clinging to lucrative state-granted privilege.   "There's no way that we can do something that might be the death knell for our industry," says David Quintana, lobbyist for the California Tribal Business Alliance, which opposes any form of online poker legalization on the grounds that it could negatively affect the economic activity of California's Indian tribes. 

PARLIAMENT yesterday unanimously voted through a controversial bill regulating gaming, which includes a ban on online casinos and exchange betting. Betting exchange is where players bet among themselves with the mediation of a company, which receives a commission from the transactions. The provision had been removed in committee but was resubmitted and pushed through by a respectable margin

Ralph Topping, chief executive of William Hill Plc., used his personal blog to call for online social gaming to be regulated. Topping said the London-based firm has adopted a "watching brief" stance when it comes to social gaming. "Social gaming is no longer the next big thing for gambling, it is already a very big thing," Topping wrote. "Over one billion dollars has already been spent by 'traditional' gambling companies alone in mergers and acquisitions and hundred of millions of dollars in revenue is already being generated."

"The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Zynga is working hard to try and push online gambling in the United States. The company has spent as much as $75,000 to lobbying policy which would make online gambling legal in the US."

Great story emphasises the problem of accountability