North Jersey – State Sen. Ray Lesniak, D-Union, on Monday announced at the East Coast Gaming Conference in Atlantic City that he is preparing a bill to allow for private operation of sports betting at the state’s racetracks and casinos – threatening to call the bluff of the federal government regarding sports betting, . Lesniak spearheaded legalization of online gaming in the state as well as its challenge of a federal law now negating the state’s sports betting law. He said he will move forward on the bill in the Legislature should the U.S. Supreme Court decline to hear the…

Casino.org – With just weeks to go until the world’s greatest sporting tournament kicks off in Brazil, FIFA, the international governing body of football, has called on gaming operators across the globe to help them stamp out corruption and match-fixing at the World Cup. FIFA uses the “Early Warning System” (EWS), technology that is proficient in monitoring and analyzing the global betting markets, but the system also relies on the cooperation of betting firms around the world to report any suspicious betting activity they uncover. Gambling partners share suspicious patterns with EWS via a secure communications platform, while the system…

iGaming Business – French-licensed operators ZEturf and Winamax are gearing up for the Brazil World cup kick off next month with the planned launches of their respective online betting offerings. The two operators are number 2 in horse racing pari mutuel and number 1 in online poker respectively in France and plan to cross-sell their football offerings to their horse racing and poker players with the longer term view of diversifying their product base. ZEturf’s fixed odds offering will operate from the domain name ZEbet.fr and will run on the technology provided by operator France Pari’s b2b division Sportnco. For…

iGaming Business – A joint report by University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne and the International Centre for Sports Security (ICSS) has revealed that illegal sports betting is responsible for laundering $140 billion (€102.4 billion) of money, accounting for 80% of all betting on sport. The report, entitled ‘Protecting the Integrity of Sports Competition – The Last Bet for Modern Sport’, presents the findings of a two-year research project. The study discovered all sports around the world are vulnerable to match-fixing, which is driven by illegal betting. Although football and cricket were highlighted as the most vulnerable sports, the report also…

A European Commission-funded study into sports betting rights for event organizers in the European Union has concluded that there is no legal basis or rationale for an EU-wide right to consent to bets. The study, carried out by the Dutch Asser Institute and Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam, was designed to map out the rights of sports organizers in the EU, with a particular focus on sports betting operators. The study found that the “costs associated with the administering of the right to consent to bets will always be considerable” and that there is “no evidence…

Telegraph – Cricket and gambling have been uneasy bedfellows for hundreds of years but never more so than now. As the England and Wales Cricket Board pushes, along with other sports, for Parliament to make match-fixing a crime, is it simply a question of rooting out a few bad eggs or does there need to be a long, hard look at the way sport and gambling interact? The ECB accepts advertisements from bookmakers and allows them to operate within cricket grounds around the country. It also sells TV rights to India, where gambling, apart from on-course bookmaking at horse races,…

The new responsible gambling television advert features a character called Mr Brightside, who is shown enjoying a night out with friends despite having earlier been denied a winning football bet by a decision of a linesman. The advertisement finishes with a message that reads ‘Please Bet Responsibly’ and does not include any promotional or sales messages. Ladbrokes said the advert is one of a number of measures it has taken to help promote responsible gaming, such as the introduction of the Association of British Bookmakers code of player protection, new set limits software on machines and retraining staff to include…

A few weeks after the room welcomed Sweden’s Sofia Lӧvgren and Canada’s Xuan Liu to its already impressive team of ambassadors, 888poker surprised many once more announcing to have inked a deal with Uruguay’s football superstar Luis Suarez. “It’s fantastic to have him on board,” said Senior Vice President of 888 Itai Pazner during a press conference held on May 13. “Luis Suarez is an incredible sporting talent; passionate, competitive, technically gifted, and emotionally invested in the game. It’s those qualities that make him an exciting player to watch, in poker as well as football,” Pazner continued. The 27-year-old Luis…