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Florida internet cafe owners offering “sweepstakes” style online gambling are again under threat following the reintroduction of legislation designed to outlaw the use of simulated gambling devices in Internet cafes and arcades, reports TC Palm.

Republican state representative Scott Plakon has reintroduced his measure targeting the pastime, which died in a recent session of the state legislature when state Senator Nancy Detert put all proposals regulating gambling in limbo pending a study by her staff this summer.

“I think there is a greater awareness among legislators as to the problems with simulated gambling devices,” Plakon said. “I am hoping we will receive a warmer reception in the next legislature.”

Plakon said he expects a long list of individuals and organisations to testify on behalf of his proposal during legislative committee hearings. These include the Florida Sheriff’s Association, the Florida Chiefs of Police Association, the State Prosecutors Association and the Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling.

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is also expected to support the bill.

“Commissioner of Agriculture and Community Services Adam Putnam has also said he thinks the Florida law covering arcades and cafes needs to be clarified,” Plakon said.

In a statement earlier this year, Putnam claimed that state law is so vague that sheriffs and other law enforcement agencies have problems determining what is legal and what is illegal under its provisions, making enforcement and prosecution difficult.

Proponents of internet gaming claim that internet cafes sell Internet time and give away free chances to win a cash prize through a sweepstakes process. Winners are predetermined and no element of chance is involved, they assert.

The Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling is concerned at the proliferation of internet cafes offering this form of entertainment, claiming that the number of Internet cafe or arcade-style locations has increased from around 600 in 2005 to more than 1,400 in 2010.

Risky financial tactics allegedly deployed by Full Tilt Poker to work around a US processing problem may have been short circuited with serious consequences by Black Friday’s enforcement actions, according to an absorbing article on the Subject:Poker news website this week.

Apparently the story is well known in player circles, although it has yet to fully surface in mainstream media reports on the US enforcement actions against individuals associated with the US closure of major sites like Full Tilt, Pokerstars and Absolute Poker.

The Subject:Poker article reveals that from around September 2010 to February 2011 Full Tilt Poker was accepting player deposits and crediting the amounts to their Full Tilt accounts, but not drawing the funds from the players’ bank accounts.

In other words, as the report succinctly summarises, Full Tilt gave its players funds to use on its site for nothing.

Although the phenomenon was widely discussed and speculated upon in player circles, the extent of the practice was not appreciated until one of the Black Friday indictees, Bradley Franzen, pleaded guilty, and the enforcement authorities issued a press release that appears to confirm the tactics used by the online poker provider.

Subject:Poker points specifically to one paragraph in the release which claims:

“….Franzen admitted that in early 2011 he had been asked to help Full Tilt Poker deal with a $60 million shortfall created by the company’s inability to find a payment processor to process transactions involving U.S. player accounts. The company was facing the shortfall because it continued to credit funds to player accounts despite being unable to actually debit (or”pull”) funds from customers.”

Subject:Poker notes: “In other words, this was not simply an accident, as many had suspected. Full Tilt Poker was actually accepting deposits and crediting player accounts without payment processors in place to collect the money….effectively (it had) given players loans without telling them, under the assumption that (it) could collect the debt later.”

Around March 2011, and with some processing power perhaps in place, Full Tilt apparently decided to recoup the amounts it had credited to its players’ Full Tilt accounts.

The company began emailing thousands of players, advising them in advance that due to processing delays their deposits had been credited to their FT accounts to allow them to play, but that these deposits were not actually recovered from their bank accounts, and that as this was now about to take place, the player should ensure that funds were available in his or her bank account.

The article relates the various reactions of players to this announcement; some thought it was a scam and ignored it; others thought it a mistake; some “…changed their bank account details, reversed the transactions, or emptied their bank accounts before Full Tilt was able to remove the funds. Others thought that they had been hacked when they saw the money removed from their bank accounts.”

The resultant barrage of financial enquiries, complaints and instructions created serious administrative problems for Full Tilt, an unidentified inside source told Subject:Poker, necessitating the involvement of other departments within the company to deal with the sheer volume of correspondence.

More alarmingly, the recovery effort was apparently less than successful, with the source claiming to Subject:Poker that only 70% of recovery attempts had been fruitful.

Then Black Friday dawned, completely dislocating the process. The report admits that the percentage of unprocessed deposits the company had managed to clear by then is unknown, but the recovery exercise had not been completed.

Following the enforcement action, the federal authorities have said that the withdrawal of funds from Full Tilt is allowed, but deposits by US players are prohibited. FTP has apparently agreed that any financial transactions with players located in the United States are strictly limited to the return of those players’ funds held in account with FTP.

The enforcement action included the seizure of bank accounts that may have included millions of dollars, further complicating the financial situation of the companies involved.

Read the full article here: http://www.subjectpoker.com/2011/06/ftps-60m-shortfall/

Ten years on from its initial introduction to poker players, the analytical tool PokerTracker has been updated and improved in the fourth version of the popular software, due for release soon. PokerTracker 4 has been designed around player suggestions and recommendations, according to material released by the company.

Company executive Steven McLoughlin said of the new version: “Our vision is no longer ours alone, it’s the vision of our users. We’re now interpreting the vision of the players to the best of our abilities by showing them video previews of the application in development. Our users can see what the program is going to look like based on their suggestions and then we’re going to comb through every single piece of feedback that we get and revise our software accordingly.”

PokerTracker 4 has two main differences following changes to the interface and the next generation HUD. The company boasts that the new Vector HUD Engine is the crispest, cleanest HUD that has ever been released…and it’s the most responsive and flexible HUD yet.

“With PokerTracker 3, you could already create your own custom stats if you wanted to. But in PokerTracker 4, not only do you have your own custom stats, but you can also have the counts of the number of big blinds in your stack if you want. You can look at your opponents’ information for just that session or the complete history of information against that player,” said McLoughlin this week.

New HUD components, specifically the Toolbox, make for a more integrated product – a sort of one-stop-shop for pop-ups that provide the most important decisions needed by the player pre-flop and post-flop.

PT4 offers a completely redesigned hand replayer, money flow charts, quick filters, social media connections, and additional plug-ins of practical use to its users, all integrated into the core package without users having to purchase add-ons… and there will be an ongoing stream of new additions going forward.

One new addition is a program called LeakTracker, a tool designed with the amateur player in mind, but one that can also be useful to professional players. This provides players with a statistical range analysis to help plug leaks in their game. The user can define whether his or her game fits more in the median of winning players or is outside the norm.

“There are third-party applications that do this, but this is the first time that this has been included within the parent tracking application and is part of the base price without an additional fee,” claims McLoughlin.

Other useful features of the product include an automated note system; a drag ‘n drop profile editor for the HUD; street by street hand equities displayed at showdown and big blind per player stack size counts.

PokerTracker imports the hand histories that poker sites write to the user’s computer, and then parses the hands and stores poker statistics about the hands into a local database so that the player can look at every possible angle of both his/her and the opponents’ poker game.

Full details of the product can be found here: http://www.pokertracker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=35061&start=0

With a strengthening northern hemisphere summer bringing the big tennis tournaments back to Europe, it’s a good time to launch an appropriately themed online slot, and Playtech have done just that with the new 5 reel, 40 pay-line slot Tennis Stars.

The new game offers entertaining features like wilds, scatters, multipliers, free spins and a bonus round, with the tennis theme carried through symbols that include tennis players and accessories such as shoes, balls, rackets and trophies.

The maximum single line win in the game is 5,000 coins and the top prize in the free spins round amounts to 15,000 coins. Playtech have also included a gamble feature which allows players to increase their winnings by predicting the colour of the next card.

Players can win up to 10x their original bet, along with 15 re-triggering free games with a 3x multiplier if the wild Trophy symbols appear over reels 2,3 and 4.

In the Championship Bonus Round; players choose if they want to play Men’s or Women’s singles and get to select the type of serve before playing against the computer to determine the cash win, with ace serves bossting the multiplier.

Black Friday has proved profitable for county police forces assisting US federal authorities in their investigations into online gambling and subsequent cash and asset confiscations, it appears.

The Baltimore Sun reported this week that the Anne Arundel County Police Department has hit the jackpot – getting nearly a half-million dollars for working with federal agencies in a sting operation that closed down major online poker sites.

Calling it “the single largest asset distribution in county history,” County Executive John R. Leopold accepted a check worth $470,407.62 this week for helping to seize millions in a two-year investigation called “Operation Texas Hold’em.”

Leopold said that the department expects to receive more forfeited assets in the future. William Winter, the special agent in charge of the Homeland Security Investigations office in Baltimore, said that the Maryland State Police, which also participated in the sting, will also receive some money.

Asked how the money was shared out so quickly — the indictments were only unsealed last week – Winter said, “The money that was shared back today is from seizures that happened more than a year ago.”

The Baltimore Sun was told by police spokesman Justin Mulcahy that the county police have worked with immigration authorities on their investigations since 2006. Three county officers are assigned full time to Winter’s office, a division of U.S. Immigation and Customs Enforcement. They include Cpl. Scott Gunn, who was part of the sting operation that began in December 2008.

The department’s portion of the money recovered during this operation was based on the number of hours Gunn spent working on the case.

The Anne Arundel County police force receives about $250,000 in forfeited assets in a typical year, according to Teare, who told the newspaper that the money received from this operation will help pay for new undercover vehicles, equipment and officer training.

“We just went through a very tough budget where we’re getting vehicles taken away,” said a county official, commenting on the value of the seized funds in a depressed economy. “This infuses money to be able (to buy) vehicles, weapons that are less lethal and to do training that is much needed for these officers to do their job.”

In the gambling case, federal investigators in Baltimore set up a phony New Jersey-based business called Linwood Payment Solutions and handled more than 300,000 transactions worth more than $33 million. The case involves international owners in five different countries operating off-shore betting operations, mostly in Costa Rica.

“We were doing only a small portion of business for some of these companies,” Special Agent Winter said. “Forfeiture is a powerful tool … to seize assets used by criminal organizations in their illicit enterprises or through their criminal activities. We seek to deprive criminal organizations of their main motivator – money.”