iGaming News

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has asked the White House to clear a rule defining event contracts as swaps, the classification on which its claim to exclusive jurisdiction rests, and a second that would exclude "casino-style gambling products" with immediate effect. Neither text is public, and both arrive days after a second federal appeals court rejected the swaps argument.

The Department of Internal Affairs opened bidding on 29 September for the right to apply for one of up to 15 online casino licences, with a reserve price it will never disclose and no idea, it says, of what the auction will raise. Alongside it, a draft testing regime spells out what the winners will have to prove about their games and platforms.

The International Monetary Fund's 2026 review of Cambodia finds that the casino regulator checks little more than applicants' criminal record certificates and that beneficial owners face no fit and proper test at all. With most casino licences due for renewal around 2027, it wants the gambling law amended first.

Macau's casinos won MOP18.06 billion in September, 1.2% less than a year earlier and 17.5% less than in August: the fourth monthly decline in a row and the weakest month of the year. It came in below a comparison base that a typhoon had already cut, and almost exactly at the figure Citigroup cut its forecast to ten days ago. It was published on the first day of Golden Week.

The affiliate has lowered its 2026 outlook for the second time in five weeks, blaming Brazil's ban and a weak third quarter, and has lined up a €50 million loan and a €50 million share issue from its largest shareholders to clear €91.5 million of bonds due in December.

A national association of mayors has filed a third direct action against Provisional Measure 1.394, Flamengo has been admitted to the Supreme Court's betting cases, and the first 12 amendments in Congress include a slots-only rewrite. None of it has yet stopped the clock: licensed sites go dark on 6 October.

The Ministry of Culture and Equality has put online poker for the state monopoly out to a fast-track consultation, two years after Norsk Tipping asked for it. The proposal comes with tight stakes, loss and table limits, and an open question about whether a Norway-only player pool can compete with the foreign sites it is meant to replace.

A contract from the Casino Secrets leak shows the racing pictures and data supplier agreed in 2022 to serve Santeda's brands for a share of their revenue, according to the Guardian. Its owners include bookmakers that have repeatedly warned about the illegal market, and Entain says it has raised its concerns with SIS.

The regulator has confirmed time and loss limits, an on-screen net position and a ban on turbo and slam-stop features for new Category B machines, after more than 1,000 consultation responses. It dropped the plan to retrofit machines already on the floor, which industry estimated would have put about 7,770 of them at risk.

The justice and finance ministries say they have asked for 5,209 betting domains to be blocked since the ban and reached channels on Telegram with more than a million members. The licensed industry says illegal sites are multiplying, but its own monitors disagree by a factor of ten on how fast, and one says almost none are new.

Deputy prosecutor-general Lucas Rocha Furtado, a declared opponent of betting, has asked the Federal Court of Accounts to push the ban back by almost three months and to make the government account for the R$30 million each operator paid for a licence. The court has not ruled, and its power over a provisional measure is limited.

The Supreme Court has confirmed that the casino regulator was entitled to classify an operator's "skill" machines as games of chance and to discount a laboratory report the operator said proved otherwise. It is one case from the island of Chiloé, but it backs the procedure Chile uses against thousands of machines operating outside its casinos.

The Mecca and Grosvenor owner says a doubling would shut about a third of its estate and hit around 2,000 staff. Its own accounts suggest the arithmetic is real: on a rough estimate, the rise on Mecca's machines alone would exceed what its bingo clubs earn. The new gambling minister, touring one of its casinos this week, has so far spoken about bingo licensing rather than tax.

The licensed operators' trade body has served its summons on Meta, and a day later the House of Representatives backed a motion that would let the regulator fine platforms that keep showing illegal ads after being told to remove them. The regulator, meanwhile, is recirculating a survey on how normal gambling has become.

A week after reports that a smart-table mandate would not come before the second half of 2027, PAGCOR's chairman has named a start date and the four Entertainment City resorts it covers. The requirement is to begin converting, not to finish, and no circular, cost estimate or technical standard has been published.

SkyCity Entertainment Group will run a formal, UBS-led sale of SkyCity Adelaide after inquiries from what it calls "credible interested parties", and has hired advisers to engage with suitors for the entire group. The board says a sale is not certain, and that the approaches it has already had undervalue the company.

The Attorney General's Office wants Betano, Bet365, Superbet and 14 other operators to repay the public health system, pay collective damages and refund double the stakes of diagnosed gamblers they kept accepting. It filed three days after the government banned their product.

A freedom-of-information reply described by BNLData says the ministry held no assessment of what banning betting would do, though the memorandum its minister signed the same day priced the tax loss. The R$38.8 billion social-cost figure the government cited was built from English estimates, and its authors say it shows association, not causation.

Resolution BCB 590 puts the payments ban in Provisional Measure 1.394 into force in three articles and dates the duty from the day the measure was published. It leaves undone the one tool the measure told the Central Bank to build for Pix, the rail that carried most of Brazil's betting money.

Crown Resorts says an excess insurer holding half of two layers of its directors' and officers' cover has refused to pay towards the settlement of the class action over its money laundering failures. With A$27.5 million still due to shareholders next May, the claim is about cash as much as principle.

Century Mile and Century Downs go to Highfield Investment Group, a Calgary developer with a thoroughbred racing business, at 6.1 times last year's EBITDA. The rent Century stops paying is worth nearly half the price every year, which is why the deal matters more to its balance sheet than its proceeds suggest.

Seven months after buying BMM Testlabs, the New York investment firm Visualize has completed its purchase of eCOGRA, creating a testing and certification group it says holds licences or accreditations in more than 800 jurisdictions. The price of neither deal has been disclosed.

Brazil's betting ban does not stop at the federal licences: it also ends the fixed-odds licences issued by the states, and Rio de Janeiro's lottery says it will comply. Football, which took more than R$1 billion from betting sponsors last year, meets the Sports Ministry in Brasília on Tuesday.

The government wants operating a betting site to carry four to six years in prison and has asked Congress to treat the bill as urgent. At the same time, operators' associations have asked the Supreme Federal Tribunal to suspend the ban, arguing that it fails the Constitution's own test for a provisional measure.