Zynga has been in the gambling news a lot lately, but I’m wondering if they should just go back to running Farmville and leave gambling to, well, the gambling experts. If you aren’t familiar with Zynga, they are the company behind the popular Facebook game Farmville. If you aren’t familiar with Farmville, congrats! You’ve avoided what will undoubtedly go down in history as the “time suck” of the 21^st century.  Farmville is a game where players earn coins by growing crops and “make friends” by sending gifts to other Farmville players.  The game is designed to keep people returning to Facebook every couple of hours to harvest yet another crop.

But Zynga hasn’t stopped with virtual farms. The company’s online poker room is said to have over 300 million players. Currently Zynga poker isn’t played for real money, but there is serious talk of that becoming an option.  But it remains to be seen if 300 million poker players who play for fake money will play for real money. Also, I’m not really sure how many of those 300 million are active players. I do have a Facebook account and actually have played Zynga Poker once or twice. I think that keeps me listed as one of their players, though I seldom play.

But now Zynga has run into a little trouble with their latest offering – Zynga Bingo. It seems that the company is being accused of ripping off software from other social media apps, in this case Buffalo Studio.  Buffalo Studio is  a less well known game developer also on Facebook and it seems Zynga Bingo looks a lot like a copy of their Bingo Blitz game.  There’s no word on whether or not Buffalo Studios plans any legal action, but I’ll be watching this play out.  Maybe Buffalo Studios could work something out with a lawyer that would force Zynga lawyers to log onto a computer every couple of hours and repeatedly click to hold the lawsuit at bay.

Gamblers in Britain are beginning to fuss about some of the off shore gambling sites doing business in the UK. And the sites have Alderney to blame for that. Now, in the world of online gambling, the purpose of a licensing location is to make sure that the online casinos and online poker rooms are conducting business fairly and to take action if they aren’t. But what action? That question appears to be the problem in the case of Alderney.  The Alderney Gambling Control Commission (AGCC) is the now infamous gambling commission that licensed Full Tilt Poker.

Let’s break this down to one problem — they are the licensing authority that had nothing in the rules that said Full Tilt couldn’t use money held in player accounts as operating money.  This is the one single action that has resulted in Full Tilt Poker being unable to pay off players after being forced out of the United States market and now being called a Ponzi scheme by US officials.  This action was fully acceptable under Alderney’s licensing laws.

But they had a plan on what to do when things went wrong, right?  See, there’s something players expect of a licensing board — that they will work on the player’s behalf if a site is accused of fraud and of not paying out players. And the AGCC acted. By suspending Full Tilt’s license. Eventually. After treating Full Tilt with kid gloves and even hold a private meeting on the site’s financing.

So, what have they done for players? Well, they’ve suggested that if a player feels Full Tilt ripped them off, they should go to their local authorities.  Now in the US, the “local authorities” are already taking action. This may result in jail time for some Full Tilt owners, but it’s unlikely to result in players getting their money back.

But the question it’s making many ask is — so what’s the value of a Alderney license on an online casino?  Should UK players only play on sites licensed by the UK Gambling Commission?

I won’t say 2011 was an up and down year over at Full Tilt Poker because mostly it was a down and down further year. The year kicked off with a bang for Full Tilt when they were one of the online poker domains seized by the FBI over in the United States. Now, that shouldn’t have affected players in the UK and EU because there was no action taken against them internationally. At least not at first. See, it turned out the Full Tilt had been using player money to fund their operation, which meant they didn’t have the funds to pay out the suspended US accounts. And of course at the same time, they lost revenue coming in from the US.  Soon players elsewhere were complaining that they too weren’t able to make withdrawals from their accounts.

The Alderney Gambling Control Commission finally had to step in to review Full Tilt’s practices. It turns out there really wasn’t any rule over at the AGCC against funding the operation out of money in player’s accounts. However, in retrospect, this turns out to have been a very bad business process. It’s led to Full Tilt being compared to a Ponzi scheme where the organization was kept afloat only as long as new players kept investing money in the system. It’s led to big name players, like Phil Ivey, having to answer questions regarding his involvement with the poker room.  And while there are talks going on that Groupe Bernard Tapie may take over Full Tilt, it seems that Alderney just wants to wash their hands of the situation. Players going to the AGCC with complaints and questions about Full Tilt Poker are being advised to go to the police if they feel they’ve had money stolen from them. US players may be in a bit of a bind here because of the legal questions regarding online poker in that country. But Full Tilt may soon find themselves facing more charges and even lawsuits from former players. Which put recovery of the brand in danger.

For more casino news and information for UK players, check out casinoparty.co.uk

It’s really not been a good few months for horse racing in the UK. First there was that cheating scandal that had two jockeys banned for “not riding a horse to its merits” and 9 others banned from the sport for various reasons and various lengths of time.   It’s almost enough to make one consider giving up playing the ponies. But we don’t, do we?  No, it’s on our blood. As long as there are horses, they must run. And when they run, we will bet. It’s what we do.

But now Betfair has run into an issue that they’ve actually termed a “bizarre situation” during a race and that bizarre situation caused them to cancel millions of pounds in bets. And worse, it happened during Christmas! Come now, you can’t let people down during Christmas. It’s not sporting. The problem was a customer exceeding their exposure limit, a term so vague I had to go check the Betfair site to be sure I was understanding it properly.

At Betfair, as in most online services, a customer may only bet what they have in their account. So, you can’t owe the bookie for the bet but must place the money up front. But people place multiple bets on various diversions and certainly some of those should be winning bets to offset the losing bets. If not, perhaps one should consider another hobby.  A customer’s exposure is the amount they stand to lose of all their bets fail.  This is Betfairs method of ensuring the bettor has enough money to cover the bets.

If reports are correct, during the Christmas Hurdle a technical fault let one customer exceed their exposure limit by about 23 million pounds and Betfair cancelled bets to resolve the issue. According to the Guardian, customers are threatening to take legal action regarding lost winnings and we will wait to see what occurs in those cases.

Bodog is probably best known for its online poker room though the brand also boasts online casino gambling, sports betting and even horse race betting. It’s an all in one brand that players love. Or have loved until now. It seems the poker players are a bit up in arms over the new anonymous tables at Bodog Poker.

Now, anonymous tables aren’t completely new to the world of online poker. Other poker rooms have offered them as an option. It’s the option part where Bodog has set players a flame with anger. See, the folks in charge of Bodog somehow reached the conclusion that the one thing holding back casual poker players was the data mining that takes place online poker rooms. Now, data mining is done by companies that gather poker player data and then sell it to sharks and even poker pros who want to know how the competition plays. It would strike me that if one is truly a casual player, it might not be worthwhile for a shark to expend the effort to go after one’s data, but alas, not being a poker shark, I can’t say for certain.

What apparently we can determine for certain is that making all the tables in a poker room anonymous seems to annoying the players. Bodog’s online poker traffic has dropped by nearly 10 percent since the new playing system was introduced, though they are denying that’s because of the new system. Apparently only  a couple of blokes have actually withdrawn their money and their poker playing business from the site, though that may be because others are simply waiting to see how long the anonymous table effort lasts. But if you want to play poker free from data mining, you might want to check out Bodog poker to see what the action looks like there.

The online poker room PokerStars wants to set a new world record on December 4^th and you can be part of the effort to get into the Guinness World Records. It will cost you but on $1.00.  On December 4^th PokerStars is going to attempt to set a new world record for the world’s largest online poker tournaments and they are inviting all the poker players they can find to take part in the effort. They’ll be gathering the troops with a radio show featuring chats with top poker players and prizes for lucky callers.  Also, anyone who joins the poker room and makes a real money deposit will get a free roll ticket into a later tournament with a $1 million prize pool.

What do you do if you want to take part? Just go to the PokerStars site and register for a real money account. Make a deposit because you’re going to need to spend a dollar to get into the game. Then be prepared to join the action on December 4^th because win or lose, you could still be part of a world record as PokerStars tries to steal the existing record of 149,196 players away from PokerStars. Yep, they hold the current world record. But here’s the little problem they’ll face. The current record was set when they still operated in the US. So now they have to try to set a new record without the help of a massive continent. They’ll need all the help they can get – so get out there and play some poker!

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