iGaming Business – Bookmaker William Hill has confirmed it plans to maintain its online betting base in Gibraltar despite new tax laws that are expected to cost the firm tens of millions of pounds. The company is one of a number of bookmakers that have set up online operations in Gibraltar in order to sign British gamblers while benefiting from lower taxes. However, Great Britain is set to introduce a new 15% duty on bookmakers’ online winnings from British customers from December 2014 in a move that could bring in an additional £300 million (€359.2 million/$491.4 million) each year. Speculation…

Reason – The Wall Street Journal reports that if fully legalized, by 2020 online gambling will generate the same amount of revenue as Las Vegas and Atlantic City combined: $9.3 billion. While online gambling can be made legal at the state level, Congress is considering several bills to legalize it nationwide. The latest Reason-Rupe pollfinds that a solid majority (65 percent) of Americans favor legalizing online gambling, while 32 percent think government should prohibit people from gambling in online poker games. Majorities of all partisans favor allowing Americans to play online poker, but independents who lean Republican were even more likely to favor (75…

Poker News – Maybe we’ll finally learn if the million-dollar top prize at the World Series of Poker has Mike McDermott’s name on it. According to Deadline Hollywood, The Weinstein Company co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein are once again working with Miramax. The new venture will begin quickly with sequels to Best Picture Oscar winner Shakespeare in Love and poker’s cult-classic Rounders. Harvey Weinstein told Deadline Hollywood the following: “I’ve discussed making a Rounders sequel with Matt Damon and I would say that’s going to be instantaneous.. .The guys [writers David Levien and Brian Koppelman] have a great idea, a way…

Poker Update – Last Tuesday’s subcommittee hearing at which U.S. lawmakers looked at Rep. Joe Barton’s Internet Poker Freedom Act of 2013 has allowed the federal proposal to gain a certain degree of newfound respect. It’s a respect that had perhaps been missing when the Texas Republican first introduced H.R. 2666 in July. Rep. Lee Terry (R-Nebraska) indicated as much when he stated near the end of the hearing that he and some of his colleagues were not enamored of the bill upon their first reading over the summer. Terry jokingly said that lawmakers were of the mind that Barton’s…

Poker News – As Bitcoin becomes more and more of an emerging currency market, it should be something that is on every poker player’s radar. In the PokerNews Guide To Bitcoin, Part 1: we discussed what Bitcoin is and how it can relate to poker. For Part 2, we will look at the advantages of Bitcoin on the online felt. To give PokerNews readers a better understanding of the pros and cons of Bitcoin poker sites, we reached out to Michael Hadjuk, owner and CEO of Infiniti Poker, which offered a soft launch of the site on Nov. 27, 2013….

Poker News – PayPal, a company that processes roughly eight million real-money transactions per day, has been linked with a suspect in the UltimateBet coverup. John Mehaffey of USPoker.com discovered that PayPal shares customer information with Iovation, an online fraud prevention company headed by CEO Greg Pierson. In May, Travis Makar, an UltimateBet whistle-blower, released these audiotapes that implicate UltimateBet founder and CEO Pierson along with Russ Hamilton in the cover-up of the infamous cheating scandal. According to PayPal’s private policy, Iovation is on a list of “non-exclusive examples of the actual third parties to whom we currently disclose your…