iGaming Business – Bookmaker Ladbrokes has moved to capitalise on this summer’s Fifa World Cup by launching a bespoke Facebook application designed to facilitate a daily community derived from bets on the national team football tournament. According to Thedrum.com, the BIG Score app is a crowd-sourced, free-to-play, accumulator-style betting competition that allows players to grow a community pot by selecting one of five daily bets on which to wager. Once a player has entered their virtual bet, they will be entered into a prize draw for that day. The overall winner of the betting competition will be awarded £5,000 while…

Poker News – As every poker player knows, there’s nothing quite like a tournament. Every participant in the field — from the underdogs to the overwhelming favorite — begins play with the same sense of hope and optimism, knowing that few fortuitous plays and a little good fortune can fuel them to a run at the title. For forty-five years this maxim has been proven true under the searing heat and summer sunshine of Sin City, as the World Series of Poker brings the game’s greatest players together to test their mettle in tournament play. And while the WSOP is…

Eurasia Net – Just about everyone knows that the FIFA World Cup football tournament gets underway June 12 in Brazil. But in a parallel football universe, a little-known tournament has already been completed, and the champion is a land that stretches across portions of France and Italy. The alternative tournament featured 12 teams representing internationally unrecognized nations, places like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, separatist territories that are formally part of the Republic of Georgia, as well as Nagorno-Karabakh, the focal point of an unsettled conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Teams representing Darfur, a strife-torn region of western Sudan, Kurdistan and…

For some soccer fans, the burning question of World Cup match fixing is almost as important as wondering which national team will be crowned champion. That question looms over the upcoming 2014 event is not can matches be fixed by gamblers, but will they be? FIFA assures us that every precaution has been taken to prevent World Cup match fixing from corrupting the games played in Brazil. The organization has begun an “Integrity Initiative” among players, featuring the catchy mantra “Recognize it, resist it and report it.” To aid in this program, FIFA instituted a hotline for players, team officials…

Aljazeera – The man in the dark green shirt and matching scarf, stood, statuesque, on Stevenage Road, in the upper-middle-class district of Fulham in west London. Some other fans, in Scottish kilts, stopped to take his picture. He wanted to be noticed, because he held a placard in front of his chest with words written in red ink across it: “We don’t fix matches, we WIN them.” Across the road, at Fulham’s Craven Cottage stadium, the placard bearer’s beloved Nigeria team was about to kick off against Scotland, in the first of Nigeria’s friendly preparation matches for the World Cup….

SCMP – Hong Kong police are launching a month-long operation against illegal soccer betting in the run-up to the World Cup. Working in conjunction with Interpol in nine other countries, local police are coordinating efforts to eliminate the multimillion-dollar problem. Police in the city also say they are being thwarted in attempts to stamp out illegal soccer betting as most syndicates operate online, on the mainland and offshore. Superintendent Dan Ng Wai-hon, from the Organised Crime and Triad Bureau, said yesterday that criminals had moved to the mainland and regions such as South America and Taiwan since local authorities got…