Daily Archives: March 18, 2021

As an iGaming affiliate, it is important to remember that compliance is a must at all times. Many countries are currently reviewing their online gambling laws and introducing new practices that could mean that your casino affiliate links are added to blocklists. Knowing how to navigate these changes and potentially alter campaigns is a must for all affiliates.

Blocklists have been steadily rising over the past few years. In the last six months of 2020 alone, blocked domains in many European countries went up by 21.4%, giving a total of over 110,000 links on various blocklists. This is an increase of over 34,000 domains compared to just two years ago.

It is thought to have been caused in part by the COVID-19 pandemic. There has been a noticeable increase in the number of people betting online especially given the closure of retail betting and various sports events. Due to this, many governing authorities have taken this as the opportunity to review online gambling, and as a result have increased the sites that they deem to be unlawful.

As an affiliate, you cannot be offering your customers links to a site that is blocked in their country. It is quite simple if they are unable to access the site then they are not going to be able to take advantage of the offers that you can present them. You are not going to be able to drive sales or conversions, and you potentially could run into further problems.

Blocklists typically are domains that operate illegally within a certain country. For example, in the UK an online casino must be licensed by the UK Gambling Commission to be able to offer their games and services here. Though they might be available to customers in other countries such as Sweden or Malta, their lack of this specific clause means that they should not be able to operate in the UK.

It is therefore fruitless for you as an affiliate to offer links to UK customers. Though you might have ones for Swedish or Maltese ones, you cannot have the same deals for UK-based customers as this goes against compliance.

Working across multiple jurisdictions as an affiliate can be difficult, but it is something that you must get right. Staying compliant is a must at all times.

Make sure you closely monitor the regulatory news from any countries that you operate in. If one of the casinos that you have links for is added to blocklists, you need to make sure that you are removing those links or updating them to ones that are available. This is a clear issue of compliance that cannot be ignored, and it is your responsibility to ensure that you are following these rules.

Review your links today, and find out if they are on the blocklists for certain jurisdictions or territories. This is an issue that is only going to become more prevalent as further changes to regulations are made.

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Blocklists - what affiliates need to know - AffiliateINSIDER

Conscious Gaming has announced the creation of an advisory board, as the independent philanthropic organisation established by GeoComply strives to deepen its commitment to responsible gaming effectiveness.

The group states that the move is made as it aims to continue to build scale and deepen its commitment to utilising advanced technology to strengthen responsible gaming and exclusion programs across the igaming and sports betting industries in the US.

Members appointed to the advisory board include Brett Abarbanel PhD, director of research at the International Gaming Institute at UNLV; assistant professor at William F Harrah College of Hospitality; and research affiliate at the University of Sydney

Gambling in the US is going through massive growth, in which platforms compete to create the most appealing digital gambling experiences, said Dr Abarbanel.

I value the opportunity to assist Conscious Gaming in applying their vast, advanced technological knowledge to a variety of important social responsibility initiatives in the gambling space, with the shared goal of developing a sustainable environment.

Further members include Debi LaPlante PhD, director of the division on addiction at Cambridge Health Alliance, and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Kahlil Philander, PhD, assistant Professor of hospitality business management at Washington State University.

Conscious Gamings advisory board will guide efforts to build technical solutions based on evidence-based research to better help people deal with gambling-related problems and provide the industry with preventative tools.

In order to shape our initiatives and achieve our goals, it is imperative we collaborate with leading academic organisations and stakeholders dedicated to responsible gaming policy and the prevention of problem gambling, explained Anna Sainsbury, Conscious Gaming trustee.

We are honoured these incredibly accomplished individuals have agreed to come aboard and help us tackle the challenges in front of us.

Individually, they are among the best in the world, and combining their talents and expertise on the Conscious Gaming board can open up tremendous opportunities for us to pursue in the future.

Read more from the original source:

Conscious Gaming appoints members to newly created advisory board - Casino Beats

Two of the biggest proponents for mobile NY sports betting will officially be at the negotiating table with the governor.

Assemblyman Gary Pretlow and Sen. Joe Addabbo Jr. were both placed on the Economic Development Committee this week. That committee will, among other topics, handle negotiations over the mobile NY sports betting proposal made by both the Assembly and Senate in their one-house budgets.

Addabbo told LSR on Tuesday the fact that theres common ground with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who also supports mobile sports betting this year, is a good starting point. Now, Pretlow is ready for the two to fight to get their model approved.

The two of us in tandem will try to pressure the governors office to accept our proposal, Pretlow said.

New York must approve a budget by April 1. How focused Cuomo can be and what influence he holds on budget negotiations remains an important question as the embattled governor faces multiple scandals.

Like most years, Addabbo and Pretlow dont have an easy task in front of them. Cuomos proposal for sports betting is quite different and calls for a much narrower market than the legislative proposal.

That has led to significant support for Addabbo and Pretlows proposal. That includes tribal casino operators, sportsbook operators, sports leagues and their player associations, potential affiliate operators and more, Pretlow said:

Ive spoken to numerous stakeholders in sports betting and every single one of them does not like the governors plan and loves our plan, Pretlow said. Its been said by an expert in this field that the plan the senator and I have put forward is the best sports betting bill in the entire nation because it has everyones concurrence.

To be fair, it probably was not hard to get the leagues on their side. The proposal includes both official league data for in-play bets and an integrity fee of 0.2% of handle.

The two legislators authored bills S 1138 and A 1257 that propose two skins per casino operator for 14 total, a $12 million upfront fee and a 12% mobile sports bettingtax rate.

Both Addabbo and Pretlow know there is going to be something they have to give up to get this done. Considering Cuomo wants to see the state get more revenue through his model, those taxes and upfront fees might have to change.

Pretlow said both are options to negotiate, though he would really rather not.

Id prefer not to [change] either one of them, Pretlow said. If I had to do one, I would opt for raising the tax rate.

Read the rest here:

Whats Next In Mobile NY Sports Betting Negotiation Between Cuomo, Legislators? - Legal Sports Report

Guys, weve got a $60 million gap to fill.

The room murmured for a moment, then someone shouted, Jim, its actually $130 million.

Thats a bad start. We just went backwards, Jim Millstein sighed. This was about to get harder.

Millsteins frustration could be forgiven. This meeting should have been wholly unnecessary. For a generation, Millstein had been one of the top advisors in the world of corporate bankruptcies, first as a lawyer and later as an investment banker. Just a few years earlier, he had served in the Obama administration as the inaugural Chief Restructuring Officer of the United States. But now, on September 23, 2016, Millstein was five years removed from his stint as a Washington insider. He had set up his own firm, Millstein & Co., to capitalize on his sterling reputation and experience. However, he had not fully appreciated just how nasty the restructuring world had become in his absence. After having the power of the US Treasury Department behind him for the better part of two years, he now found himself being mistreated by ex-Ivy League jocks almost half his age.

That morning, he was surrounded by a group of scowling hedge fund managers and their advisors in the offices of the Kirkland & Ellis law firm high atop New York City. Kirkland had a famously impressive set-up for such high-stakes meetings. Entire floors in the Citigroup Center in midtown Manhattan consisted of conference room after conference room, where white marble hallways lined by floor-to-ceiling wood panels gave way to larger open spaces and sprawling views of the city.

Millstein was trying to, once and for all, solve the restructuring of Caesars Entertainment, whose twists and turns had riveted Wall Street. The knock-down, drag-out affair was finally at its endgame. The fighting that had begun more than eight years ago after an ill-timed $28 billion leveraged buyout of the storied gaming company was mercifully being put to rest, along with Millsteins nightmare. The brightest financial minds in the world just had to find an extra $130 million to bridge the gap between what was being offered and what was asked. These investors merely had to pledge back pennies on the dollar to clinch this deal.

If everyone chips in, the bank debt and senior bonds are good to do the same, Dave Miller said, speaking on behalf of himself and Ryan Mollett. Miller and Mollettwhile only in their mid-thirtieshad already established themselves as superstar distressed debt investors. Miller was with the feared hedge fund founded by Paul Singer, Elliott Management. Ryan Mollett worked at GSO, an affiliate of the juggernaut investment firm Blackstone. Collectively, the pair represented dozens of Caesars creditors holding $12 billion of Caesars debt. The two had been bitter adversaries early in the case but had long since made peace.

Gavin, I need $6 million from your group, Millstein demanded from Gavin Baeria, an executive at hedge fund Angelo Gordon, as politely as one can for such a sum.

Baeria, finding the spectacle comical, could only laugh. The $6 million would be fine but the sheer absurdity deserved at least a chuckle. This triviality could have been handled in a straightforward email.

I cant talk for the group but I cant imagine were not going to be OK with this, Baeria said.

Millstein turned to the last group represented in the room. Ken, that leaves

We are not chipping in! shouted Ken Liang. This was the moment Millstein had been dreading. There was an old expression in complex restructuringsjust get everybody into a roomabout hashing out a lasting compromise. That approach suddenly did not look so promising.

Millstein had cut his teeth as a lawyer in the mid-1980s just as corporate raiders and private equity firms were emerging on Wall Street. They were called barbarians, both for their slash-and-burn tactics and their insatiable thirst for profits and glory. Thirty years later, private equity had become a mainstream, if not celebrated, part of the financial establishment. No longer were private equity firms condemned as savages; rather they were earnest entrepreneurs, builders of businesses, and saviors of pensioners.

The distressed debt hedge fund now filled the pirate caricature on Wall Street. The invention of the junk bond had fueled the takeover mania of the 1980s. High yield bondsor junkallowed small or risky companies, along with buccaneering raiders, to tap the capital markets from which they had otherwise been closed off. As those deals went bust in the early 1990s, the debt became distressed, and the vulture investor was born. Vulture funds could scoop up the debt of troubled companies for nickels and dimes and take control of over-indebted but otherwise viable companies.

By September 2016, Caesars debt was almost exclusively owned by these distressed debt investors. These men were not just financial wizardsthey had also weaponized the law, using their knowledge of dense legalese in loan agreements and bond indentures to play their hands in both boardroom negotiations and in courtroom showdowns. These funds were now poised to take control of Caesars and make billions of dollars on their distressed debt wagers.

Liang was an executive at Oaktree Capital Management, the $100 billion money manager in Los Angeles co-founded by two of the earliest and most successful distressed debt investors, Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. Oaktree was one of Caesars junior second-lien bondholders. Liang, like Millstein, was in his late 50s but looked a decade younger. He had been a corporate lawyer for a time before joining Oaktree as its founding general counsel in the 1990s. Over the years, his knowledge of transaction law made him instrumental in navigating distressed-debt transactions. He had also forged a well-earned reputation as an obstinate, if not unpleasant, negotiator.

Millstein had known Liang for two decades and had his share of run-ins with him. Oaktree was about to become a huge winner in the Caesars bankruptcy, so Millstein was hoping for some magnanimity or at least pragmatism. Instead, the two Oaktree representatives at Kirkland that dayLiang had come with his 37-year-old colleague Kaj Vazaleshad only brought fury that had been simmering for almost three years.

The central figure in the Caesars brawl was, however, absent from the room. Apollo Global Management had been one of the two principal private equity firms who had acquired the storied casino chain in 2008. Apollo was defined by two traits: genius and impunity. The firm was co-founded by Leon Black, Michael Milkens right-hand man at Drexel Burnham Lambert. Milken had famously invented the junk bond market in the 1980s. After Milkens fall from grace, Black, in 1990, had formed Apollo to exploit the imploding debt markets that Milken and Drexel themselves had wrought.

Over its twenty-five-year existence, Apollos hallmark had become discerning opportunity where no one else dare tread and then striking deals everyone else was too timid to make. Apollo also liked to play by its own rules, forcing its adversaries to think twice about confrontation. As Apollos success compounded over the years, only a few ever stood in its way. Apollo had become, unquestionably, the most feared private equity firm in the world.

In the lean years after the financial crisis, Apollos clever deal making had, against all odds, kept Caesars alive in the hope that its fortunes would eventually snap back. Apollos Caesars investment was led by Marc Rowan, regarded by many as the canniest investor at Apollo and perhaps on all of Wall Street. Rowans apprentice was a young fireball, David Sambur, whose intellectual horsepower and doggedness left him basically running the casino behemoth while in only his early 30s. Rowans calm and charm belied his ruthlessness. Sambur, on the other hand, was a pit bull constantly in attack mode.

Together, their gifts kept Caesars afloat longer than any other private equity firm couldor even shouldhave. Caesars filed for bankruptcy in early 2015 under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code, leading to a court-supervised free-for-all to determine who would have the right to take control of the revitalized company: Apollo and its partner TPG Capital, or the vulture distressed-debt investors, who happened to be the worlds biggest, baddest hedge funds.

The bankruptcy would eventually shine a harsh light on Rowan and Samburs relentless financial engineering that had sustained Apollos investment in Caesars. Their machinations had led to credible accusations of a modern day casino heist; fraudulent transfers and boardroom impropriety to the tune of $5 billion in liability. All the while, a complicated game of three-dimensional chess had broken out between multiple creditor groups and the private equity owners. The dispute even migrated to the back rooms of Congress.

For years, it looked like Oaktree would be crushed by Apollo. Junior creditors like Oaktree rarely did well in situations like Caesars. Apollo was masterful at rallying senior creditors to crush those at the bottom of the totem pole. In fact, that is exactly what Apollo had done in joining forces with Elliott and GSO. But through the course of the 2016 bankruptcy case, Oaktree and its running mate, the fabled Appaloosa Management, had methodically outfoxed Apollo in court. Suddenly, they had the mighty Apollo over a barrel. Now Oaktree and Appaloosa were on the verge of making billions for their group. All they had to do in this conference room was to show a little grace and kick back $50 million into the pot. Alas, that was still too much for Liang and Vazales to bear.

Now guys, theres no need to be unreasonable, Ryan Mollett calmly explained to the Oaktree duo. Oaktree was risking the massive profits all the creditors group were going to make at the expense of Apollo by not paying their penny. Oaktree needed to be a team player, explained Mollett.

Go fuck yourself, Liang told Mollett. We fought our way into this room. All of you were cramming me down for zero fucking dollars during the last two years. Where was the team then? Where is the team on the preferred stock sweetheart deal Elliott is getting now? The rest of you can pay for this. If the deal breaks, fine. If you think its such a great deal, then give back some of your 120 percent recovery. Im not reaching into your pocket. Dont reach into mine, screamed Liang.

Ken, we are at the one-inch line, Mollett pleaded again.

The senior creditors like Molletts GSO and Millers Elliott were set to make recoveries greater than 100 percent. Liangs junior creditor group was allocated sixty-six cents on the dollar, which was less than 100 cent par recovery they were theoretically owed. Still, sixty-six cents was nearly ten times what they were slated to get two years earlier.

The Kirkland conference room had glass windows that made the room visible to the outside lobby but could be fogged for privacy by hitting a switch. For better or worse, the windows remained clear for the duration of the meeting and several lawyers sat outside watching the fireworks involving their clients. One of them remarked that the wild-but-silent gesticulating was reminiscent of a Charlie Chaplin film.

We are asking you, institutionally, to do the right thing here, Jon Pollock, the co-CEO of Elliott, jumped in.

Who are you? shouted the incredulous Liang.

Pollack had not, like Dave Miller, been handling the Caesars investment on a day-to-day basis. There was no particular reason the Los Angeles-based Liang should have known who Pollack was. Still, he was an elder statesman of Elliott and highly respected across Wall Street. Liang was well-known for his outbursts, but this insolence shocked everyone and probably should have embarrassed Liang. Liang, however, was too busy gloating about his triumph in the case and taunting all these putative allies in the room whom he believed had betrayed him.

Apollo stole from us. They can pay the difference. We are leaving thirty-four cents on the table. We are in the business of loaning money to private equity companies and this would be bad for business, Oaktrees Kaj Vazales interjected, explaining the precedent that caving now could set. Whatever grievance Oaktree had with its fellow creditors, it paled relative to the rage it harbored for Apollo, whose wheeling-and-dealing was the single, defining issue of the bankruptcy. Oaktree is here to drink the blood of Apollo, one person in the room would recall thinking at the time.

Oaktree does private equity stuff too. Maybe next time Oaktree is on the other side of this, Millstein tried to reason.

Let me know the next time Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh get personally sued and have their personal bank statements subpoenaed, Liang fired back. Lumping the Oaktree founders with Apollo did not sit well with Liang.

Rowan and Sambur, along with David Bonderman, the TPG co-founder, were facing the possibility of personal liability in the case, a highly unusual situation that underscored the severity of the wrongdoing allegations against them. Worse yet, the week prior, the bankruptcy judge had allowed creditors to review their personal financial information to understand their wherewithal to satisfy a potential judgment, a decision that helped prompt this endgame.

But Apollo told Millstein they were not committing any more than the nearly $6 billion they had pledged to settle the Caesars case. The deadline for the deal was roughly 13 hours later at midnight on Friday, September 23.

Im disappointed in you, Ken. Oaktree has a reputation for being constructive, Millstein said.

Well, Im disappointed in you, Jim! Liang fired back. Millstein and Liang then retreated to a private side room to continue the negotiation.

Ken, youve done your grandstanding. Now you are just making a bad deal for yourself.

As a restructuring banker, Millstein was fundamentally a dealmaker: Efficiently get adversaries on board to make a fair compromise and move forward. It was not supposed to be emotional or moral, but rather purely transactional. Thats how everybody made the most money. Good and evil, right and wrong, did not apply in this world.

But as Liang had already proved, emotion had long overtaken Caesars, and Millstein, as one ostensible referee in the process, had been caught in the crossfire between Apollo and all the creditors. The whole episode was sickening and exhausting to him. The restructuring world had seemed to take a turn for the worse since he had returned from Washington. Too many peopleand often twenty- and thirty-something-year-old men trying too hard to prove themselves as tough guysprivate equity and hedge fund alike, were fighting merely out of vanity. Most of these funds took money from identical pensionsTexas Teachers, CalPers, CalSTRS. These fights to the death just moved money from different pockets of the same investors.

Oaktree and Appaloosa, unsurprisingly, had a much different perspective. Vazales stayed in the main room and continued the negotiation with the rest of the creditors.

We had to claw our way to victory. Weve driven this case to its conclusion and you are not spending our recovery, Vazales said. He was a mild-mannered fellow far less prone to theatrical outbursts than his colleague Liang, yet he remained militant. Unlike Millstein, the teams from Oaktree and Appaloosa believed there were higher stakes at play. Private equity firms, they believedbest exemplified by Apollohad become far too abusive of creditors, wielding legal documents and hardball negotiating tactics as swords to take value from loan and bondholders that simply did not belong to them. To Oaktree and Appaloosa, nothing less than the sanctity of the US capital markets was at stake in this room.

The senior Caesars creditors were not thrilled with Apollo either. But they were less sanctimonious about it and had been begging Oaktree and Appaloosa for months to back off their crusade, which was imperiling a delicate compromise with the private equity firm.

Jim Millstein and Ken Liang returned to the large conference room after their sidebar conversation. Oaktree and the junior bondholders were not going to budge.

Dave Miller and Jon Pollock quickly left the meeting since there was nothing left to discuss. They knew there was only one way this deal was going to get done in the next 12 hours. Higher powers needed to be summoneda group of billionaires, who Wall Street types often referred to as the MoUs, the Masters of the Universe.

After Elliotts exit, Liang and Vazales left to have lunch and debrief at Casa Lever, a Midtown power spot. On the walk over, Liangs phone rang. It was an Oaktree number. The founders of the firm, Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh, were on the line. Paul Singer just called us and he was just wondering what you guys are doing on Caesars?

Financial Times U.S. Lex editor Sujeet Indap and Fitch Solutions news editor Max Frumes are the authors of The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Power and Greed of Wall Street. Their book launched this week.

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Apollo, Caesars, and Wall Street's 'Billionaire Brawl' for Control of a Gaming Empire - Institutional Investor

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If Oklahoma House Bill 2022 passes in the state Senate, medicinal cannabis will be just as accessible to Texans as legal gambling is.

The bill would open up the states medical weed program to residents from all 50 states. Under the current program, only people with medical licenses from other states qualify for the program. Additionally, the bill extends the length of time a medical weed license is valid from 30 days to two years for nonresidents.

Oklahoma Rep. Scott Fetgatter, who filed the bill, told The Oklahoman, There are patients out there that need longer opportunities, whether they have cancer or some other medical issue, so I felt it was necessary to just extend that out so theyre not having to constantly renew that license.

To qualify, nonresidents would need to get approved by an Oklahoma doctor and pay a $200 fee for a license that would then have to be approved by the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority.

Daryoush Austin Zamhariri, creator and chief editor of the Texas Cannabis Collective, a Fort Worth-based cannabis news site, said this could make medicinal weed available to millions more people.

What youre gonna see is very similar to the casino issue, Zamhariri said. Its almost coming to the point where, as a medical marijuana patient the idea is: OK, well, if you live anywhere on the border of Texas, access is not going to be the issue. Its about enforcement. And if we can just end the arrests for marijuana possession, then we dont really have to worry about a medical marijuana program in Texas.

As far as Texan marijuana fans are concerned, it would be a good thing: Oklahoma is close (especially to us North Texans), and the states medical weed program is far ahead of Texas'.

In 2015, Gov. Greg Abbot signed the Texas Compassionate Use Act allowing some qualifying patients to access to cannabis with 10% or more cannabidiol (CBD) but no more than 0.5% tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), too little THC to get anyone high. It also allows regulated businesses to cultivate, process and distribute low-THC cannabis to certain patients.

It was later expanded to include more qualifying conditions, but Zamhariri said its still one of the most restrictive in the country for both the industry and the patients. Texas has only three licensed dispensaries overseen by the Department of Public Safety.

"And if we can just end the arrests for marijuana possession, then we dont really have to worry about a medical marijuana program in Texas. Daryoush Austin Zamhariri, Texas Cannabis Collective

Zamhariri said dispensaries are already plentiful in Oklahoma. The state has more dispensaries than any other. According to KFOR, the Oklahoma City NBC affiliate, the state has over 10,000 active licenses for dispensaries, growers and processors

The Texas-authorized cannabis is only in oil form, and to get it, patients must be enrolled in the Texas Compassionate Use registry and treatment has to be prescribed by a doctor who is also in the registry. Zamhariri said its a very long process.

Marijuana bills have had more success in the Texas House of Representatives in recent years. Some promising Texas bills have been filed, including one that further extends the Compassionate Use Act.

However, Zamhariri isnt confident there will be any significant changes coming from the Legislature this session. A big obstacle this go-around will be the focus on COVID-19 and the power grid. The attention to these issues may divide focus and support for significant weed reform.

Oklahomas medical weed program, on the other hand, is a lot more progressive. With a medical weed license, you can possess just over 84 grams, six mature plants, six seedling plants, just over 28 grams of concentrate and about 2,037 grams of edibles. Additionally, at your residence, you can possess about 226 grams of weed.

This is huge, considering the comparably measly less than 2 ounces Dallas and the local police departments have been debating about. (An ounce is28.35 grams.)

Possession of up to 42.45 grams by someone who can state a medical condition but doesnt have a medical is a misdemeanor charge in Oklahoma, punishable by a fine no more than $400.

Approximately 365,464 Oklahoma residents are medical marijuana patients. This pales in comparison to Texas, which has about 25 million more people. According to The Texas Tribune , only 3,519 Texans are registered with the state to use medical marijuana. Advocates say far more are eligible under the current law.

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws doesnt even recognize Texas as a medical marijuana state because there are so many limitations. Additionally, medical cannabis products in Texas are capped at 0.5% THC, only 0.2% more than hemp products sold all throughout the state. Because of this, NORML considers Texas a medical CBD state.

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Oklahoma Bill Could Make Its Medical Weed Program Accessible to Texans - Dallas Observer