A consultation exercise is under way in south Cumbria into how the council should manage gambling licences.

The cost of gambling licences for betting shops on Jersey could increase four-fold under new proposals.

Even the global gambling capital is not immune to the economic crisis. For the first time Macao’s multi-billion dollar business is suffering. But the financial downturn is not the only reason.

With no competition, Macau’s new leader was appointed Sunday while the world’s gambling capital and Chinese enclave struggles with an industry slump brought on by the economic crisis and tougher visa restrictions.

In the face of a legal challenge from every major sports league (sorry, UFC and MLS and PGA and WWE) to its brand-new plan of legalized gambling, the state of Delaware will “vigorously defend” its effort to raise funds for publicly-provide services and to improve the local economy.

The Vic govt has been accused of not doing enough to fight problem gambling, on the back of recent figures.

Black Hawk, Colo., bolstered by a huge expansion of legal gambling that was approved last fall, is alive and pushing the frontier.

A gambling trade group is pushing Congress to once again legalize online poker.

PETERSBURG, VA (NBC12) – Petersburg Police shut down two C & S Business Center Internet Cafes Saturday because of illegal gambling. One in the 800 block of East Washington Street.

A gambling operation is shut down, and numerous gambling machines confiscated in a Rusk County raid.

A new state-ordered study concludes that legalized gambling is a boon to the Connecticut economy, but the state has done a poor job of regulating the industry and more people are becoming addicted to gambling.

State gambling regulators meet today to consider whether to authorize the first expansion of Iowa’s gambling industry in four years.

A shill is an associate of a person selling goods or services who pretends no association to the seller and assumes the air of an enthusiastic customer. The intention of the shill is, using crowd psychology, to encourage other potential customers unaware of the set-up to purchase said goods or services. Shills are often employed by confidence artists.

The word “shill” is probably related to “shillaber”, a word of obscure early-20th century origin with the same meaning.

Shills are illegal in many circumstances and in many jurisdictions because of the frequently fraudulent and damaging character of their actions. However, if a shill does not place uninformed parties at a risk of loss, but merely generates “buzz,” the shill’s actions may be legal. For example, a person planted in an audience to laugh and applaud when appropriate, see “claque”, or to participate in on-stage activities as a “random member of the audience”, is a type of legal shill.

Shills in gambling

The illegal and legal gambling industries often use shills to make winning at games appear more likely than it actually is. For example, illegal three card monte peddlers are notorious employers of shills. These shills also often aid in cheating; they will disrupt the game if the mark is likely to win.

In a legal casino, however, a shill is sometimes a gambler who plays using the casino’s money in order to keep games (e.g. especially poker) going when there are not enough players. (This is different from a proposition player who is paid a salary by the casino for the same purpose, but bets with their own money.)

Links

• “Strange bedfellows: Journalists as corporate shills”
• Mainstream Media Shills For NATO
• I Quit, Confession of a Republican Shill
• Confessions of a Government Shill | By Andy Borrowitz
• Corporate Shill Enterprise: A Corporate Lobbying Front Group
• American Media: Government Shills?
• Some American journalists accused of being spokespeople for the administration
• The Hazards of Online Auctions
• Internet Shills: Old Trick, New Tech
• EBay’s policy

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Former NBA star Antoine Walker is facing criminal charges over $822,500 in gambling debts to three Las Vegas casinos.

The Tasmanian Gaming Commission has been given the go ahead to implement a range of new measures to tackle problem gambling.

SPRINGFIELD – An industry group says state lawmakers have seriously underestimated the amount of money a new tax on video gambling will provide and is urging Gov. Pat Quinn to instead veto the proposed increases in liquor taxes.

Morgan County’s Sheriff Greg Bartlett wants those who want to make a living gambling to know if they are caught, they will be arrested and their machines confiscated.

New Jersey’s horse racing and casino gambling industries still have a long way to go in developing a collaborative strategy to meet the competitive challenges emerging in neighboring states.

In the high-stakes court battle over the constitutionality of a federal law banning all Internet gambling transactions that would be illegal in the gambler’s state, a trio of federal appeals judges appeared unlikely Tuesday to strike the law down. Instead, all three judges on the 3rd Circuit panel seemed inclined to uphold the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 and to reject …

It is useful to look at the chances different starting hands have of either improving on the flop, or of weakening on the flop. One interesting circumstance concerns pocket pairs. When holding a pocket pair, overcards (cards of higher rank than the pair) weaken the hand because of the potential that an overcard has paired a card in an opponent’s hand. The hand gets worse the more overcards there are on the board and the more opponents that are in the hand because the probability that one of the overcards has paired a hole card increases. To calculate the probability of no overcard, take the total number of outcomes without an overcard divided by the total number of outcomes.

Where x is the rank 3–K of the pocket pair (assigning values from 3–10 and J–K = 11–13), then the number of overcards is (14 – x) x 4 and the number of cards of rank x of less is 0 – (14-x) x 4 = 4x – 6. The number of outcomes without an overcard is the number of combinations that can be formed with the remaining cards, so the probability P of an overcard on the flop is

P = ((4x-6)/3)/(50/3),

and on the turn and river are

P = ((4x-6)/4)/(50/4) and P = ((4x-6)/5)/(50/5), respectively.

The following table gives the probability that no overcards will come on the flop, turn and river, for each of the pocket pairs from to K.

Holding pocket pair	Overcard on flop		Overcard by turn		Overcard by river
	Prob.	Odds	Prob.	Odds	Prob.	Odds
KK	0.7745	0.29 : 1	0.7086	0.41 : 1	0.6470	0.55 : 1
QQ	0.5857	0.71 : 1	0.4860	1.06 : 1	0.4015	1.49 : 1
JJ	0.4304	1.32 : 1	0.3205	2.12 : 1	0.2369	3.22 : 1
TT	0.3053	2.28 : 1	0.2014	3.97 : 1	0.1313	6.61 : 1
99	0.2071	3.83 : 1	0.1190	7.40 : 1	0.0673	13.87 : 1
88	0.1327	6.54 : 1	0.0649	14.40 : 1	0.0310	31.21 : 1
77	0.0786	11.73 : 1	0.0318	30.48 : 1	0.0124	79.46 : 1
66	0.0416	23.02 : 1	0.0133	74.26 : 1	0.0040	246.29 : 1
55	0.0186	52.85 : 1	0.0043	229.07 : 1	0.0009	1057.32 : 1
44	0.0061	162.33 : 1	0.0009	1095.67 : 1	0.0001	8406.78 : 1
33	0.0010	979.00 : 1	0.0001	15352.33 : 1	0.0000	353125.67 : 1

Notice that there is a better than 35% probability that an ace will come by the river if holding pocket kings, and with pocket queens, the odds are slightly in favor of an ace or a king coming by the turn, and a full 60% in favor of an overcard to the queen by the river. With pocket jacks, there’s only a 43% chance that an overcard won’t come on the flop and it’s better than 3:1 that an overcard will come by the river.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.