Daily Finance – There may be pretty lights, free-flowing cocktails and a theatrical buzz at the casino, but don’t go thinking that the treat for the senses is cheap. Slot players collectively walk out with as little as 90 percent of their money, on average. The odds are slightly better at the table games — including blackjack, poker and roulette — but there is no diversion where gamblers have the edge over the establishment. The house always wins. The odds are more favorable at a casino than state lotteries that only return as little as half of what they take…

iGaming Business – The social-casino game market hit $2 billion in 2013, and a good chunk of that came from women. A new survey from International Game Technology shows that more than a third of social casino poker players are women. IGT is the largest maker of slot machines, and its DoubleDown Interactive division is one of the biggest makers of social casino games. The number of women playing online social casino poker games was up 22 percent in 2013 compared to the year before, the survey said. That should be informative for the designers of social casino games, which…

Calvin Ayre – A protest movement has been underway in Venezuela since early last week over economic destabilization caused by President Nicolas Maduro’s currency and price controls. The government issued a ban on all protests after they turned violent, killing three students and leaving dozens more injured – a turn of events the opposition leader, a Harvard-educated former mayor from the country’s east named Leopoldo Lopez, blames on pro-government militias. (No points for guessing who the government blames the violence on.) Despite the protest ban, the anti-government protests have continued. And despite a media blackout – all the local media…

Tech News World – Trawling porn sites used to be the best way to pick up an electronically transmitted disease on your smartphone. That’s not the case anymore. Every one in five times a mobile user is redirected to a malware site on the Internet, it’s done through a malicious ad, according to a report released last week by Blue Coat. That’s three times what it was two years ago. One reason malicious ads have been able to outperform porn sites is they can garner more traffic than the smut peddlers. “We’re seeing a shift in mobile user behavior,” said…

Wall Street Journal – These days it’s easier than ever to pay for goods and services – without cash, card, pen or paper featuring anywhere near the transaction. Most financial obligations can even be met with just a few taps on a smartphone screen. But for American businesses, the old-fashioned paper check remains the preferred payment method, writes CFO Journal’s Vipal Monga, and that legacy comes at a cost. A survey last September by the Association for Financial Professionals found U.S businesses still pay half their bills by check. “In this day and age it doesn’t make sense,” says Mr….

The Telegraph – With 43 varieties of pillow, 150-year-old bottles of cognac and breathtaking, neon-lit views, no expense is spared for high rollers at the Las Vegas of the East. At the entrance to the Galaxy casino, elegant Filipina glamour models usher gamblers past a giant model diamond into a world of palm-lined artificial beaches and £48-a-time cocktails. This is Macau, a former Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast that in just over a decade has become the undisputed global king of the casino. It is also a world of money laundering, corruption, human trafficking and over-indulgence that stands in…