Pennsylvania Lawmakers Looking to Regulate Daily Fantasy Sports

Pennsylvania State Rep. John Payne has relocated his online poker bill to the House floor, and now his Gaming Oversight Committee is focusing its attention on daily dream sports.
The Pennsylvania House Gaming Oversight Committee has voted in favor of moving an online poker bill to its chamber’s floor for continued conversation, and now the panel of lawmakers is trying to find a measure that is sufficient regulate and permit daily fantasy sports (DFS).
Next Tuesday, the committee will convene for a public hearing on fantasy activities during the Hollywood Casino at Penn nationwide Race Course, their state’s first of now 13 land-based gambling venues.
State Rep. George Dunbar’s (R-District 56) HB 1197 will be one item of consideration. In their legislation, DFS operators such as DraftKings and FanDuel will be required to partner with state-licensed casinos to operate sports contests that are online.
First introduced May that is last’s legislation has taken a right back seat to State Rep. John Payne’s (R-District 106) Internet poker bill, that has now been forwarded for deliberation by all of Pennsylvania’s 203 House Representatives.
That has cleared the way to tackle HB 1197 now. Dunbar’s proposition certainly needs prompt attention, as DFS continues to clog headlines within the news and gain traction among recreations enthusiasts.
Regulate, Not Restrict
Pennsylvania lawmakers appear bored with taking the length of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in simply outlawing the emerging market and declaring the games illegal. Instead, officials in the Keystone State may actually support implementing the appropriate safeguards for consumer protection.
‘I don’t understand it down that we want to shut. It’s a big business. Lots of people are playing,’ State Rep. Kurt Masser (R-District 107) stated.
Perhaps most astonishing is the fact politicians in Harrisburg say they’ren’t trying to regulate DFS for prospective gain that is financial but to merely protect residents.
Pennsylvania is estimated to account for three percent of this national DFS market. With daily fantasy operators expected to collect $3.7 billion in contest entry fees in 2015, that means just $110 million being wagered in the continuing state, revenues that will not also cause a ripple in the $30 billion budget.
DFS licenses would cost $50,000, with monthly gross revenues taxed at five percent.
‘ I wouldn’t count on it to balance the budget,’ State Rep. Nick Kotik stated (D-District 45), one of eight co-sponsors of HB 1197.
DFS Not Addicting
Council on Compulsive Gambling Executive Director Jim Pappas, (no reference to Poker Players Alliance Executive Director John Pappas), says fantasy sports hasn’t generated increased statistics for problem gamblers in Pennsylvania.
Pappas says their office gets ‘spikes around occasions such as the Super Bowl and March Madness’ with callers reporting they have an addiction to betting, but ‘the numbers aren’t there yet’ to say whether fantasy activities will convert to more gaming that is compulsive.
To make sure that DFS remains an entertainment-first hobby, lawmakers in Massachusetts have actually proposed limiting deposits to $1,000 each month. The Bay State has also suggested restricting advanced players to certain contests while offering novice games for first-time users.
Pennsylvania’s House Gaming users will pay attention to feedback from expert witnesses on those settings week that is next deciding its next steps.
Massachusetts Casino Industry Becomes Local Cause for Concern
Plainridge Park Casino, Massachusetts’ first, has been forced to revise its profits projection for its first 12 months of operation. (Image: bostonglobe.com)
Massachusetts’ casino experiment doesn’t appear to be planning to according plan.
The packaging has barely been unwrapped regarding the state’s shiny, amazing casino industry, but it’s already causing anxiety within the local press.
The first casino to open in the state, has just posted its third straight month of declining revenues, and meanwhile MGM Resorts International has decided to reduce the size of its proposed resort in Springfield by 14 percent, for reasons known only to itself for a start, Plainridge Park.
Then, on the reverse side of the state, in Everett, Wynn Resorts is locked in a messy legal squabble with the City of Boston, which appears determined to do everything it could to disrupt Steve Wynn’s ambitions.
This most likely is not just what the voting populace had in your mind when, in 2011, it opted to amend the constitution to permit gambling enterprises into its midst.
Some could have thought they had been voting to save the legendary Suffolk Downs racecourse and by extension the thoroughbred racing industry in Massachusetts.
Suffolk Downs would have been financially supported by Mohegan Sun had it won the bid for the license in the East, however it don’t quite work out this way, and the racecourse that is historic forced to shut down.
Bad Start
The licensing process itself had been fraught with discord.
Once Massachusetts had voted to legalize and manage casino gaming within its borders, the bidding procedure began, during which casino giants squabbled with one other, often bitterly, as each vied for one for the three licenses on offer.
Caesars Entertainment pulled away from the process early having spent $100 million on its campaign, and subsequently sued the Massachusetts Gambling Commission for just what it advertised amounted to unsubstantiated accusations of links to organized crime.
And then there was the furor FBT that is surrounding Everett, the organization from which Wynn Resorts bought the plot of land that was earmarked for its $1.3 billion development, and its concealment of the fact one of its directors, Charles The Lightbody, had been a convicted felon with alleged Mob links.
Wynn Resorts had been unaware of this, but it needs to have been enough to derail its licensing application under Massachusetts law, though it was not, and this fact is still being used as being a beating that is legal by the town of Boston.
Border War
While Wynn struggles with restless natives, over within the south-east of the state MGM has found itself engaged a full-scale edge war with Connecticut.
The latter has relocated to protect a unique casino interests by amending its constitution allowing the establishment of a ‘satellite casino’ on its border that is northern miles from the proposed MGM project, to be run be by its two tribal operators, the Mohegan and the Mashantucket Pequots.
MGM had hoped to attract a portion that is large of footfall from Connecticut and has now filed a lawsuit up against the state, declaring its go on to be unconstitutional.
Connecticut counters because it is actually forbidden from building a casino 50 miles from the Springfield project under Massachusetts gaming law, so it should really go and mind its own business that it isn’t, and that, furthermore, MGM is not being commercially discriminated against.
Revised Projections
MGM swears that its decision to change the planned hotel that is 25-story with a six-story resort and chop 14 percent from the overall development has absolutely nothing to do with all the forces gathering throughout the border, but the Massachusettsian media is starting to wonder.
And meanwhile, while lawsuits fly, the one casino that has actually opened, Plainridge Park, an operation that is slots-only happens to be forced to downwardly revise its first-year projections.
So what you should do?
‘We can hope that the economy continues to improve, boosting discretionary spending and thus casino revenues, and that all of this intense competition will make the gambling enterprises give its patrons a better gamble,’ published the Lowell Sun. ‘But as many bettors will tell you, the odds don’t give a damn about hope.’
DDoS on line Gambling Hacker Teen Told to Get a true to life by UK Judge, Who Gives Him an opportunity to Have One
Judge Michael Stokes in Nottingham, UK told a 19-year-old DDoS attacker to ‘take up rugby or one thing’ him to probation as he sentenced. (Image: SWNS Group)
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks have plagued the online gambling industry, and online merchants as a whole, considering that the dawn of e-commerce.
These cyberattacks could be devastating to business, crippling an online site’s operations by flooding thousands of simultaneous requests to its bandwidth, rendering it temporarily nonoperational. Often a ransom demand follows.
DDoS assaults directed at the online gambling industry tend be timed to coincide with big sports or battle meetings, or, in the instance of online poker, a huge tournament festival that is online.
Attackers are difficult to locate, and prosecutions are incredibly unusual; in reality, as far as we know only two DDoS online gambling attackers have actually ever been purchased to trial, and something of those happened this week.
But this was no shadowy Russian mafia outfit or ruthless Asian gambling syndicate. Nope, it was a 19-year-old boy from Nottingham in the UK, who lives along with his mother, needs to ‘get out more,’ based on the presiding judge, and who wept in the dock as he was handed a 12-month suspended prison sentence.
‘Take up Rugby or something like that’
Max Whitehouse, 19, appeared in Nottingham Crown Court this week to plead bad to holding out an unauthorized and act that is reckless intent to impair computer operations, in addition to possession of prohibited weapons.
The court heard Whitehouse was 17 years of age when he used their mom’s Twitter account to hold an unnamed online gambling site hostage, costing the business an estimated £18,000 ($27,200) into the process.
When police went along to their home, they found a stash of weapons, including eight knuckledusters, CS gas canisters, and a stun unit disguised as an iPhone, which Whitehouse had purchased online from China.
Judge Michael Stokes QC told the defendant that he had been ‘living a virtual life, not just a real life,’ and that he should ‘take up rugby or something.’
‘ You’ll want to get out more and live,’ he suggested.
‘Staggering Naivety’
Stokes accepted that Whitehouse was just a hoarder of tools who posed little hazard to society and that his motivation to introduce the attack was ‘merely to see if he could do it.’
Sending him to prison would be, said the judge, ‘highly damaging and retrograde.’
‘You were, at the time that is relevant incredibly naive. I have always been satisfied you had no intention whatsoever of selling or circulating any of these items [the weapons].
‘It was an offense of staggering naivety,’ he added.
The defendant ended up being ordered to pay £200 ($300) towards the costs associated with prosecution, while his stash download royal vegas casino of weapons was forfeited.
Incidentally, the first-ever prosecution for a DDoS on an on-line gambling cyberattack occurred when two Polish computer programmers attempted to ransom an online casino located in Manchester, British.
Notably unwisely, the duo decided to meet the director regarding the company to talk about the terms of the offer and were quickly arrested by waiting for police.
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