After the cricket gambling scandal which surrounds the test between England and Pakistan, the Secretary-General of the European Sports Security Association (ESSA) Khalid Ali, offered his views on the problem of match-fixing in sport arguing that sports federations could do more to root out corruption from now on. “Sport’s collective efforts to root out corruption have not been 100 per cent successful”, stated Khalid. “Bookmakers are the biggest losers when it comes to match-fixing. Let’s not forget the only people that can fix a match are the participants themselves. Many sports would still rather bury their head in the sand than come up with a robust-enough code of conduct and rigid enforcement procedures to prevent this”.

There was a time when Singapore was a prime destination mainly for bankers and businessmen, but now the city-state also has started drawing tourists with some new attractions, the most popular being two casino-complexes built at a cost of over $10 billion that opened earlier this year: the Genting Resorts World Sentosa and the Marina Bay Sands. The two casinos and their related attractions represent the new face of a city that wants to transform itself from regional trade and financial centre into a place for both work and play. Though both casinos have yet to complete all their attractions, visitors to the city-state of 5.1 million people rose by over a-fifth to around 6.5 million in the seven months to July from a year ago. Hotel occupancy hit 90 percent in July, up 10.2 %.

Net revenue from Canada State gambling operations in the country totalled $13.75 billion in 2009. This sum, which remained virtually unchanged from the same study the year before, was collected from lotteries, video lottery terminals, slot machines and casinos. The Lotteries collected 26% of the total revenue (video lottery terminals earned another 19%), casino gambling accounted for 34% while slot machines brought in 21%.

A new gambling cruise company will begin operating in Florida next month. Jacks or Better Casino, which plans to hire 100 people, will sail with 17 gaming tables twice daily starting September 15th. "I pulled a lot of money out of the stock market because it is more of a gamble than this, I was looking for a business where you knew where you had a reasonable chance of having the odds in your favour” stated Mark Slotkin, the company’s president.

Zynga’s No Limit Texas Hold’em poker, which attracting over 28,000,000 players to the free money games of Facebook is second only to Farmville among thousands of Facebook application, expanded in the Far East. Zynga’s poker is going to be very soon available in Mandarin, so it could see tens of millions more players competing for free on the most popular social network of the world.