FTOPS XV will provide 27 events featuring various microgaming casinos gamestyles and over $17 million in guaranteed prizes.

Full Tilt has also confirmed that Mini FTOPS events for lower rollers will follow between March 10 and March 21, offering a further 27 events with lower buy-ins and a guaranteed prizepool of $6 million.

In related news, Full Tilt’s major rival Pokerstars has also started the new year with a bang, attracting a massive entry field of 668 entrants on Day 1A alone of the Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure main event.

The event is currently running in the Bahamas and a record entry is anticipated.

Customer insight and database management are among the CDMS services that have been blended with the powerful transactional data provided by Transatis. The merger of the two operations combines complementary services and assets to bring together the scale and range of secure database marketing capabilities that CDMS has established – it handles 1.5 percent of all UK mail and 7 percent of all B2C mail – with the retail transaction data pool Transactis has built through the 160 home-shopping and online casino roulette brands that make up its membership.

Clients of the new Transactis include Nationwide, Betfair, HM Revenue and Customs, Damart and Shop Direct Group, and the combined services offered to marketers includes:

•Insight based on transactional data
•Transactional prospect data
•Innovative technology
•Data and database management
•Graphics, image management and catalogue production
•Bills, statements and customer communications
•Campaign management
•Campaign execution

David Steele will helm the new Transactis’ development as chief executive of the merged business. Steele joined CDMS in June 2009, and has 15 years experience in customer loyalty, relationship marketing, consumer insight and retail data as a senior executive at Dunnhumby.

Steele explained the motivation behind the latest moves this week, saying: “Our services are geared towards turning clients’ transactional data into actionable insight, and then using that understanding to enable clients to set customer strategies, deliver engaging communication and drive business profitability.

“In an age of greater personalisation, one-to-one communication and multiple contact touch-points, we are aligning our staff and resources to meet these changes and provide dynamic marketing solutions.”

Chris Morris, the former managing director of Transactis who launched the company in 2004, will remain with the business as a non-executive director and a key advisor.

From the 1st – 30th November internet gambling players who hit the daily minimum target of 10 PartyPoints for just five days claim the much-deserved reward of an entry into a $5,000 freeroll. The more days a players earns points on, the bigger the prize will be – there’s up to $3,000 cash to be won. PartyPoker has also added a massive incentive for the most dedicated players. Earn 1,000 points every day for the full 30 days and a player secures a seat at next year’s Aussie Millions worth AUD$10,500. The first prize at the main event in Melbourne is estimated to be in the region of AUD$2 million.

A PartyPoker spokesman said:” The Gladiator is back and is stronger than ever before. In this colosseum you don’t have to worry about lions - just sharks, donkeys and fish! This casino promotion isn’t all about maximus PartyPoints, it is about spreading play over a period of time for maximus rewards! It is simple and offers great value and we encourage players to challenge themselves and take a closer look.”

There was a distinct lack of casino bonuses at the announcement last Thursday that the Chocktaw Nation’s Blue Ribbon Downs track will close by November end, the newspaper reported.

The wider horse racing industry is experiencing a downturn compounded by a number of factors such as competition from online casinos, off track betting and general economic woes. These factors are lowering attendance at the tracks.

Electronic gaming machines, installed at some tracks in Oklahoma under measure 712, are preventing some tracks from closing, according to the report.

The newspaper reported that her father Piotr Wozniacki advised her in Polish to retire because a hamstring injury meant she couldn’t play casino games the next round anyway.

The information will be passed to the Tennis Integrity Unit, while the newspaper report suggested the most likely outcome may be a fine for “lack of effort.”

There is some question as to whether these pools will appeal to British punters because of their heavy win deductions. British punters are used to the Tote, where there’s no more than a two percent over-round, the paper states.

What’s not contested is the significance of this agreement which increases and extends Betfair’s presence in the American online gambling market. It’s described as a “gateway to the future” and acknowledged in the report that international common pooling is horse racing’s future.

Researchers presented findings that show positive outcomes in casino gamblers treated with medications often used for substance addictions.

Dr. Jon Grant and his team at the University of Minnesota used tasks that measure cognition to identify what motivates this extreme type of online gambling behaviour. They enrolled men and women with a primary diagnosis of pathological gambling in one of three medication studies.
Study sites varied in size from 70 to 100 participants.

In order to group individuals into categories that address differences in their biology, Grant separated pathological gamblers into two major subtypes: gamblers who are driven by urge (i.e., individuals who report gambling when the desire becomes too strong to control), and those who do not show normal inhibition of impulsive behaviours (i.e., individuals who report being unable to restrict behaviours even when urges are minimal or virtually non-existent).

In the first subtype, gamblers who are driven by urge responded well to treatment with medications that block the brain opioid system (e.g., naltrexone) or certain receptors for the neurotransmitter glutamate (e.g., memantine).

Grant also found that family history plays an important role in refining this group even further. People with a family history of addiction responded even better to the opioid blocker, which has been shown in other studies to decrease the urge to use substances such as alcohol.

The second subtype, gamblers who have difficulty inhibiting their behaviours and react to the smallest desires, respond well to medications that act on a specific enzyme, catechol-O-methyl-transferase (COMT), which plays a major role in the function of the prefrontal cortex.
Researchers found that decreasing the function of COMT can increase one’s ability to inhibit their desire to gamble.

“By understanding these different subtypes, we are able to target the core biology of the illness with individualized treatment,” said Jon Grant, MD, JD, MPH, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota and ACNP member.

Hopes that the worst was over for the New Jersey internet gambling mecca faded on the release of November numbers that showed another double digit decline as revenues for the city’s 11 casinos fell by 13.4 percent compared to the same month a year ago.

Associated Press reports that September and October had seen only single-digit decreases, giving the industry hopes that the turnmaround was in sight, but it was not to be.

Overall, the casinos won $299.3 million, with slots revenue accounting for $206.8 million of that total.

“There’s no sugar coating it,” Joe Weinert, senior vice president of Spectrum Gaming Group, a New Jersey casino consulting firm told Associated Press. “It’s another poor result for the Atlantic City casinos.”

There’s more pain in store for Atlantic City in the year ahead, Weinert said, because still more competition is coming. He noted the scheduled opening of the Sugar House casino in Philadelphia and live table games likely to begin operating in Delaware and possibly also in Pennsylvania.

Only one Atlantic City casino saw an increase in revenue in November, and that was minuscule: 0.1 percent at the Showboat Casino Hotel.

For the 11 months of 2009 thus far, casino revenues are down 13.5 percent compared with 2008.

The disappointing performance of the internet gambling industry, which accounts for about two-thirds of state tax revenues, is the 22nd consecutive month of decline.

On the Strip, gaming revenues were $426.3 million, a 10.3 percent decline compared with October last year. All but two areas of Clark County reported double-digit gaming declines; the Boulder Strip was down 6.3 percent while North Las Vegas casinos were up 3.3 percent.

Tax collections based on the gaming revenues generated in October was $49.3 million, a decline of 12.7 percent. For the fiscal year that began July 1, 2009 total collections are about $50 million short of projections used to set the state budget this year.

The lucky player was Marjorie T from Arizona. One has to play with three coins on this slot game in order to hit the progressive jackpot and Marjorie was doing just that. In one spin she lined up the required symbols on the payline and claimed the jackpot of $435,000. The casino management congratulated Marjorie and asked her how she felt after winning almost half a million dollars. Marjorie was still in shock, but as she said it was the best kind of shock. This win was something she had never imagined when she started playing at VIP Slots online casino. Marjorie said, “Today will be a day I will certainly remember for the rest of my life… I dragged my teenage daughter to the computer to show her what I had won, she immediately asked me for $100!” Kids are street smart these days but Marjorie will not be minding the $100.

The jackpot hit on Pay Dirt was a big event, but an even bigger event awaits players at VIP Slots online casino. The flagship progressive jackpot, Red White & Win, has just crossed the million dollar mark. It stands at $1,012,350. This progressive jackpot climbs slowly. This is because it allows partial payouts and they keep chipping away at the jackpot amount. Players hitting three American Flag symbols with only one coin wagered get 5% of the jackpot and those playing with two coins get 10% of the jackpot. The full jackpot has been hit twice this year but below the million dollar mark. The last hit three months ago was tantalizingly close to a million dollars at $997,740. Hopefully this time around the jackpot amount will not get dragged down by partial hits and the next winner will be a millionaire.

The other progressive jackpot online slot games open to players at VIP Slots casino are Treasure Trail, Win Place or Show and Mega Money Mine. VIP Slots online casino also offers progressive jackpot games in blackjack and stud poker. VIP Slots is a brand of the English Harbour group of online casinos. It is powered by software from Vegas Technology and is licensed by the Directorate of Offshore Gaming of Antigua and Barbuda.