Month: August 2023

According to Krail, 72.3% of sites withdrew operations in Ukraine following intervention by the regulator. This covered the period from 25 January 2022 to 8 August this year.

Websites operating in Ukraine without the relevant licence are subject to regulatory action. Those contacted by Krail over unlicensed activities must cease operations in the country within three working days.

Krail did not disclose the number of sites contacted during the period, nor the identity of any of the operators. 

Tackling illegal gambling in Ukraine 

The news comes amid a crackdown on illegal gambling in the county by lawmakers, Krail and authorities.

Over the weekend, Ukraine’s Bureau of Economic Security shut down four underground gambling establishments in Kyiv. This included venues in the Shevchenkivskyi, Solomyanskyi and Svyatoshynskyi districts.

In June, detectives also uncovered an underground casino and seven other gambling houses. Some UAH100,000 was seized of the course of the operation.

The police in May also exposed a criminal conspiracy involving a Ukrainian bank and a large number of gaming operators.

Tougher laws to stop unlicensed activities 

Ukraine is seeking to introduce tougher measures on illegal gambling. 

Last month, a new law outlining procedures for organisations subject to anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing (AML/CTF) risk came into effect. This means operators in the country now face stronger inspections.

The law outlines the circumstances in which a gambling operator may face a scheduled or unscheduled inspection of their facility.

A set of proposals from Krail were also included in the government’s 2023 action plan. These included a reform of laws concerning the process of suspending and cancelling the licences of gambling operators.

However, the future of Krail as the gambling regulator for Ukraine remains up in the air. Ukrainian deputy prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, in May submitted draft law proposing that Krail be dissolved and replaced with a new executive body.

Florida’s sports betting market came to an abrupt halt just weeks after launch when a legal challenge blocked the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s updated compact with the state. 

After two years of legal action the DC Circuit Court reversed the decision, paving the way for the Seminoles and Hard Rock Digital to relaunch. That may come as soon as this month. 

Does Florida sports betting face further challenges?

But how deep does the ruling go? The case clears the way for a relaunch, but steers clear of ruling on whether the compact should have been permitted without a constitutional amendment. That issue goes back to the Florida courts to decide. 

What this ultimately means, and whether it grants the Seminoles a monopoly over betting in Florida, remains to be seen. There’s contrasting views on what may happen next, as you’ll hear from our guests Professor Bob Jarvis of Nova Southeastern University, and Jeff Ifrah of Ifrah Law. 

Professor Jarvis, for example, feels any legal challenge will fail as the state constitution only refers to constitutional amendments for casino gambling. Sports betting, he says, doesn’t fall into this category. 

There could be a delay in relaunching sports betting, Jarvis admits, but not as long as the two year gap they faced between 2021 and 2023. In short, he believes any challenge is just delaying the inevitable. 

Can the Florida sports betting case impact other states?

Jeff Ifrah, meanwhile, is doubtful the case is going to reach the Supreme Court. At least, as a “narrow, nerdy issue”, he’s unsure it would even pick it up. 

He does expect challenges at a state level, though these are by no means guaranteed to get to a judge. 

But what does this mean for tribes in other states? In Texas it’s unlikely to result in statewide compacts, but Californian tribes will be watching with interest. Florida, Texas and California, incidentally, are the biggest markets for offshore books. 

It’s unlikely to have an impact in California, Ifrah adds however. The case was very specific to Florida, and the DC court only assessed the compact as a contract. There wasn’t any attempt to legalise off-reservation mobile betting, he points out. 

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Consumers in Indiana spent $203.8m betting on sports in July, a 1.4% drop from $206.6m in July 2022. This was also 9.1% behind $224.1m in June this year.

Baseball remained the sport of choice among Indiana bettors, drawing $69.4m in total bets. A further $12.6m was wagered on basketball, while $56.2m was spent in parlay bets and $62.9m betting on other sports.

Taxable adjusted gross revenue reached $23.3m, a 11.5% increase from last year. This was also 19.5% ahead of the $19.5m generated in June 2023.

Read the full story on iGB North America.

Issued by the AGCO Registrar, the penalty relates to alleged violations of the Registrar’s Standards for Internet Gaming.

Among these breaches was a failure to conduct required interventions with players who may be experiencing gambling related harms. This included a case of one player losing $2.0m in less than four months without any intervention from Apollo.

AGCO also identified a failure to implement an adequate voluntary self-exclusion programme. The regulator added that Apollo did not provide sufficient tools for players to set financial and time-based gambling limits.

In addition, AGCO said Apollo failed to ensure its employees understood the importance of responsible gambling. This included assisting players who may be experiencing gambling-related harms.

Apollo takes significant steps to address failings

Since AGCO spoke with Apollo about the issues, the regulator said Apollo has taken “significant steps” to strengthen its processes. 

Apollo retains the right to appeal against the decision and subsequent penalty. However, the operator is yet to confirm whether it will take this route.

“AGCO’s goal is to ensure Ontarians can enjoy online gambling on sites that operate fairly, responsibly and provide important player protections,” AGCO CEO and registrar Tom Mungham said.

“All registered operators have an obligation to proactively monitor patron play for signs of high-risk gambling. They must take appropriate actions to intervene and reduce the potential for gambling-related harm.”

Specific breaches of AGCO’s standards 

AGCO said its responsible gambling framework was developed following an in-depth review of approaches taken in other jurisdictions worldwide. It was also subject to stakeholder consultations, including with Ontario’s responsible gambling community. 

Detailing the sections breached by Apollo, these included section 2.01, which requires all licensees to implement and follow policies to identify, prevent and minimise risks of harm.

AGCO also flagged 2.11, covering a requirement to assist players who may be experiencing harm and implement tailored interventions. Apollo was also ruled to have breached section 2.12, which relates to ensuring staff understanding of responsible gambling.

Other breaches include section 2.14, covering the need to provide a voluntary self-exclusion mechanism and section 2.23, which ensure players are provided with an easy way to set gaming limits.

Apollo was awarded an igaming licence in Ontario in September last year. The Ontario regulated igaming market launched on 4 April 2022.

The government in June announced plans to pursue a proposed rise in casino tax set out by the previous administration. In December 2022, the existing government said land-based casino tax rates would increase with effect from 1 July this year.

Planned increases included non-rebated duty rate rising from 17.91% to 20.25% and rebate duty rate 10.00% to 12.50%.

In addition, poker machine duty rate would switch from a flat 20.91% rate to a tiered system. This ranged from a 0% rate on machines making under AU$2,666 (£1,369/€1,583/US$1,741) a month, up to 60.67% for machines with over $12,000 monthly revenue.

However, this led to criticism from Star, which branded the proposals “flawed” and said they would not be sustainable. Star operates the Star Sydney casino in NSW.

In response, the NSW treasurer agreed to meet Star to discuss amended rates. The operator has now reached an in-principle agreement, although these must first be formalised in order to come into effect.

Reduced taxes lower than proposed rates

Proposed new rates include rebate play increasing from 10.0% to 12.5%. It was also agreed the rate for non-rebate play on table games will rise from 17.91% to 20.25% as planned.

In terms of poker machines, also known as pokies, the non-rebate play rate will remain as planned until 30 June 2030. This is currently set at 20.91% excluding goods and service tax (GST).

However, from 1 July 2024, this rate will rise to 21.91% and then again on 1 July 2027 to 22.91%. After 30 June 2030, the rate will switch to a tiered system as previously proposed by the government.

Machines with an average poker machine revenue (AMPR) under $2,666 will not need to pay tax. Those making between $2,666 to $6,667 will be taxed at a rate of 37.6%. The next bracket of $6,667 to $12,500 face a rate of 42.1% and machines above this threshold will be taxed at 51.6% – all exclusive of GST.

Between 1 July 2030 and 30 September 2030, Star may request a good faith review of pokies rates and thresholds.

As for other rates, an additional levy equal to 35% of Star Sydney gaming revenue above $1.13bn for each financial year will come into effect. This runs from 1 July this year to 30 June 2030.

In addition, the government confirmed there will be no change to the current responsible gambling levy. This remains set at a rate of 2% and will not apply to the new additional levy.

Revised rates will protect jobs – Star CEO

Star CEO and managing director Robbie Cooke said the amended rates will protect jobs in NSW and the viability of Star Sydney.

“While the in-principle agreement will result in an uplift in duties payable to the state, it has due regard to the circumstances of our Sydney business,” Cooke said. “And as such helps to create a sustainable path forward for Star Sydney. The expected additional duty payable in FY24 is circa $10.0m.

“It is also designed to provide employment certainty for team members in arrangements agreed with the United Workers Union.

“The arrangements enable us to continue working at pace to implement the significant reforms required to restore Star Sydney to suitability, earn back the trust of the community and ensure we remain a valuable contributor to the NSW economy.”

Star seeking to regain trust in NSW

The amended rates will come as a welcome relief to Star, which has faced something of a challenging period in NSW.

In April, Star said it would engage cost and restructuring initiatives. This came after it warned of “significant” and “rapid deterioration” in operating conditions in the state.

Star has been the target of multiple parliamentary inquiries into misconduct. It has also set out plans to restructure due to the compounding impact of regulatory operating conditions and exclusions. When combined with an “emerging weakness” in consumer spending, Star said it had led to this adverse environment.

The business also said that its Star Sydney casino – still its largest single source of revenue – “continues to operate in an uneven competitive environment”. This is due to the impact of ending its junket affiliations.

Kentucky will open its legal online wagering market next month, as per a schedule agreed last month. This came after the governor, Andy Beshear, approved legal betting by signing off on House Bill 551 in April.  

Retail wagering will go live on 7 September, with mobile following on 28 September.

Applications for licences in the state have been open for some time, with the KHRC receiving proposals from a number of major operators.

Joining Bet365 and FanDuel in applying for mobile licences are BetMGM, Caesars, Circa, DraftKings and Penn Sports Interactive.

Kentucky racetracks eye retail licences

In terms of retail permits, the KHRC said seven of the state’s licensed sportsbooks have put forward applications.

These include Churchill Downs in Louisville, Oak Grove Gaming and Racing in Oak Grove, Ellis Park in Henderson, The Red Mile in Lexington and Turfway Park in Florence.

Other applicants are Cumberland Run, which opens soon in Corbin, and Sandy’s Gaming and Racing, a new site in Ashland. BetMGM last week partnered with the Sandy’s venue to secure market access in Kentucky.

Racetracks that secure a sports wagering licence may open retail sports betting facilities at their satellite locations.

All applications will be subject to a vote at a meeting of the full Commission on 22 August. It warned that applications do not guarantee licensure in the state.

Governor Beshear reiterated previous comments that legalising sports betting in Kentucky will help generate more funds for the public purse.

Countdown is on to legal betting

“Kentuckians can plan to place their first sports wagers in just 27 days,” Beshear said.

“Bringing sports wagering to the state not only gives Kentuckians a much-anticipated new form of entertainment, but also brings money to the state to support pensions.

“This frees up money that can be used to build a better Kentucky through the funding of education, economic development, disaster recovery and other necessary projects, like providing cleaner water, building roads and high-speed internet.”

KHRC chairman Jonathan Rabinowitz added: “The KHRC is excited to open sports wagering and is working efficiently to meet the necessary deadlines. This is a careful process dedicated to wagering integrity and protecting bettors in the state of Kentucky.”

Sports betting rules in Kentucky 

Signed off by Beshear in the spring, House Bill 551 succeeded where previous attempts to legalise sports wagering failed.

The bill makes nine Kentucky racetracks eligible to offer on-site retail betting. Each track can also partner with up to three online operators. This means up to 27 licences are up for grabs.

Kentucky will operate with a two-tier system for taxation. Online tax rate is 14.25% of gross gambling revenue and retail 9.75%. A licence will cost a racetrack $500,000 and an online operator $50,000 to partner.

However, the bill does not contain tribal provisions. Neither of the state’s two tribes – the Southern Cherokee Nation of Kentucky and the Ridgetop Shawnee Tribe of Indians – are recognised by the US Department of Interior. This means they do not qualify for state gaming compacts under the Federal enabling law for tribal gaming the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

Each suspension came into effect on 25 July and will remain in place until the ITIA decides sanctions. Each case relates to breaches of the Tennis Anti-Corruption Programme (TACP).

Kazakhstan’s Khabibulin, who reached a career-high ATP singles ranking of 753 in 2016, was found to have breached the TACP 18 times between 2014 and 2018.

In the case of Fayziev, he committed five breaches of the TACP following an approach from Khabibulin. The Uzbeki national had a career-high ATP ranking of 253 in 2017.

Finally, Smilansky of Israel breached the TACP three times after also being approached by Khabibulin. He had a career-high ATP ranking of 451 in 2018.

Tennis match fixing – corrupt approaches

The players were collectively found to have contrived aspects of matches, related to tennis match fixing. They were also ruled to have facilitated wagering, failed to report corrupt approaches and, in Khabibulin’s case, offered money to negatively influence players’ best efforts. 

The decision on sanctions for the three players will follow in due course. Meanwhile, the suspension prohibits the players from competing in or attending sanctioned tennis events organised or recognised by the sport’s governing bodies.

Independent Anti-Corruption Hearing Officer (AHO) Janie Soublière ruled on the cases and upheld the initial ITIA charges. 

If, as a famous saying goes, the thoughts of a young man turn to love in springtime, then at this point in the summer – at the start of the football season – it’s all about what bookmakers are going to lay.

For trading teams, there are a multitude of factors to take into account – the significant one being transfers.

New signings can generate a lot of excitement among fans in the same way that losing a key player can be a big blow. Tottenham have drifted by around 7% to finish in the EPL top four next season, largely on the back of Harry Kane heading to Bayern Munich.

While the transfer spending firepower of both the Saudi Arabia and MLS leagues and the subsequent means of offloading expensive unwanted players is good news for some Premier League clubs, it also adds a lot more volatility into which players are likely to be leaving before the transfer window closes. 

Making moves

At the time of writing, Mo Salah may be on the move to Al-Ittihad; Liverpool could look to replace him with a loan of Mbappe and PSG might have attempted to cover this by pinching Kane before Bayern came calling.

It’s an unlikely scenario, but it is an example of the type of transfer that can now happen and would cause multiple price moves in both short- and long-term markets – all moves that trading teams need to take into account.

Aside from transfers, early season form also causes a lot of uncertainty. Wrexham drifted by around 10% to win League Two on the back of a single opening-day defeat and it isn’t unusual for the “stalking horses” of the fallow summer period to become dead donkeys once the season is in full swing.

However, the last game a team plays contributes only a tiny part of their overall “rating” in models that use exponential smoothing – possibly less than 1%. But the impact a defeat can have on the price for that team in the market usually far exceeds this. 

Leveraging the true price

The art of bookmaking isn’t in laying the “true” price. It is in understanding what the true price is and then laying a price to your customers that is as far away from that as to be advantageous to the operator.

If your customers believe the probability of something occurring is 20% when you consider it to be only 10%, then you consequently have that “margin” in your favour. 

The difficulty for operators is in knowing what the “true price” actually is. How do you price up teams when there are a near infinite number of variables? For example, if last year’s home form was exceptional what is that worth in a new season (hint – not very much)?

How do you rate the strength of a manager? Does it matter how good your players are come matchday if you get a bad referee? Is one defeat a blip or a signal?

Reading the signals

In today’s industry, signals are hard to come by. Operators have outsourced large parts of their trading operations to supply chains that have no experience of constructing prices without a market to copy from.

The result is that most prices are blindly following market moves, in a belief that “staying in line” means staying away from bad business. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what the price to lay should be on an outcome, if your business model is built around restricting access to customers that show they know more about betting than your supply chain does. 

The only long-term sensible answer for operators is to find a way to buck this trend.

Price optimisation

There are two key changes that operators can make to optimise their pricing. The first approach is to utilise “ratings” models predicated on deeper and wider arrays of data.

As a result, when a transfer happens in the market or games take place, robust models that are built to take more variables into account can immediately be updated and give an understand of what the true reflection of the outcome is.

Operators who switch to using models built in this way, or to suppliers that have them, can therefore optimally position themselves around the prevailing market noise and maximise trading margin.

Analysing the data

The second method is for operators to use the data implicit in their customers’ bets.

The growth of AI means that there is machine-learning technology that can distil and react to any “information” contained in the bets that customers place. Even very small numbers of bets can enable users to optimise prices.

Combining this with the sort of sensitive ratings models outlined above, plus the oversight of expert traders, will enable operators to begin to generate industry-leading, or “alpha”, returns.

So, back to Harry Kane. Is he really worth 7% over a season? Bookmakers out there are still trying to price that in for this week. At 10star we’re confident we know. And we’re just glad none of us are Spurs fans.

The charges come as part of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation’s (DCI) sports integrity probe.

Among those charged was Iowa State running back Jirehl Brock. He is accused of placing four bets on games involving his own team. Prosecutors allege that he played in two of these games.

The first round of charges were issued on 1 August. At that time, seven individuals were charged.

In May, the University of Iowa reported 26 athletes across five sports were suspected of betting on sports. Betting on sports is against National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) rules.

Use of third party accounts to conceal betting

The four have all been charged with using a third party sports betting account to make bets. This practice would have concealed that the now-charged individuals were placing the bets.

Over the course of his wagering activity, Brock placed 1,327 mobile bets for a collective cost of $12,050. In addition, Brock placed 13 bets on Iowa State basketball games.

Brock is accused of using a third party’s account to hide his wagers, which were made on the FanDuel Platform.  

The prosecutors said this represented a “scheme… enabling Brock to disguise his identity and manipulate online/mobile transactions to create the appearance that sports wagering transactions conducted by Brock were conducted by [the third party]”.

“This deception enabled Jirehl Brock to conceal unlawful gambling activities from law enforcement and other regulatory bodies.”

The prosecutors claimed this violated FanDuel terms and conditions, as well as NCAA and university guidelines. Additionally, they chose to highlight the unfair wagering implications, the potential for conflicts of interest and the tax implications of his betting.

Deshawn Hanika, Isaiah Lee and Jacob Remsburg were also charged. Prosecutors allege that Hanika made wagers totalling $1,262, Lee made wagers of $885 and Remsburg made wagers totalling $1,108 during the time periods alleged.

University responds to latest charges

“Since becoming aware of potential NCAA eligibility issues related to sports wagering by several of our student athletes back in May, Iowa State university has been actively working to address these issues with the involved student athletes, and that process remains ongoing,” said Iowa State senior athletics director Nick Joos in a statement released Thursday.

“We will continue to support our student athletes as our compliance staff works with the NCAA to sort out questions surrounding their future eligibility for athletics competition.”

Chris Smart, SVP of Global Gambling at Emerchantpay, details how important frictionless payment solutions are for both operators and players. With a successful 2023 tackling operators’ biggest payment challenges, Emerchantpay has seen global expansion, opening offices in Latin America, as well as continuing to build on its popular ewallet product.