I wrote a blog post a week ago suggesting that Brent Beckley, who pleaded guilty on December 20th to two federal counts in the Black Friday indictments, may not be a co-operating witness for the government. This was based on a reading of the press release issued by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (the USAO) and a comparison of what we know of Mr. Beckley’s situation with what we know of Bradley Franzen’s circumstances. Recall that Mr. Franzen pled guilty this past May to three counts associated with the same superseding indictment. Last week’s post was not based on a review of Mr. Beckley’s plea agreement, a copy of which was posted at the Association of Players, Casinos, and Webmasters’ website.

Based on a comparison of Mr. Beckley’s plea agreement with Mr. Franzen’s plea agreement, I’m even more convinced that Mr. Beckley is not a co-operator.

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This week’s online gambling news included several poker pros as the latest victims of “Black Friday”. Plus, some of the stupidest stories we could find… with a Chuck E. Cheese lawsuit and the end of life on this planet!

Not everyone is unhappy about the elimination of PokerStars and Full Tilt from the American online poker marketplace. Shares of Bwin/Party soared today on the London Stock Exchange, closing up nearly 35 percent on rather high trading volume.

And while in some ways this graph looks like the inverse of Party Gaming’s graph in ’06 come the UIGEA and their subsequent, calculated US pullout. But zoom out and you’ll see today’s rise for Party (now officially Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment) is merely a token blip in their long-term efforts to get back atop the online gaming world.

In fact, they had plummeted rather hard just this month as US legislative efforts began making it seem as if Stars and Tilt would be white-list operators in any future, regulated American online gaming economy.

Meanwhile, Scarlet got her hands on some detailed equity research from the venerable banking institution Barclay’s … assessing the impact of of the US DOJ’s actions on the European gaming market. Good in some spots, not as promising as some might think in others.

Click here to see for yourself.

The “bull case” they make, interestingly, is a scenario where both Stars and Tilt end up in full collapse.

Rep. John Campbell (R-CA) intends to take the lead in a Republican-controlled US House of Representatives on the internet gambling debate by bringing forth legislation similar to what Barney Frank (D-MA) has been pushing for years, according to Gambling Compliance.

Frank has reportedly signed on as the lead Democratic co-sponsor.

You may remember Campbell from his efforts to remove sports betting from last year’s Frank bill.

Campbell will be on hand in San Francisco in May as a keynote speaker for GIGSE 2011. The Global iGaming Summit and Expo was once one of the pre-eminent “annual” gaming conferences in the world, but went on a two-year hiatus after a move from Montreal to Malta. Returning to North America, and specifically US soil (California, no less!) seems to be a big deal for the conference and the gambling industry overall.

GIGSE says it has no political agenda — though its 2011 lineup of speakers suggests licensed and regulated online gaming in the US really is a matter of when not if. In addition to Campbell and likely supporters of his bills such as the PPA, conference speakers will include representatives from the Department of Justice, California Indians, other Native American gaming interests, Caesars Interactive, iMEGA, the Kentucky horse racing industry, various lottery interests, Jeffery Pollack’s Federated Sports+Gaming … and several others who have long found themselves at opposing ends of mutual interests.

Sounds to me like this could be the biggest think-tank confab of people shaping our lives ever. Or, at a minimum, if they can’t all put their heads together to reach the same overall endgame, it could turn into a massively awesome battle royale that could include the throwing of chairs.

The Las Vegas Sun reports that the name change is now official, citing chairman and president Gary Loveman as the source. The Sun gives no context, however, as to why this time he really means it, other than to provide a rather generic summary:

“The new name can open new opportunities for the company in the future.”

Hmm, a name leading to new opportunities? Harrah’s has been talking about the name change for more than a year — pretty much ever since they opened up their non-poker online gambling opportunities at CaesarsCasino and CaesarsBingo dots-com — but have never gone through with it, at least in any marketable or taxable way. But sure enough, a form filed with the SEC yesterday confirms that Harrah’s Entertainment Incorporated would now, finally and officially, like to be called Caesars Entertainment Corporation. At least in the eyes of Uncle Sam.

And while the new monicker may lend itself to illustrations of Loveman in a toga eating grapes and future mockery should Harrah’s-cum-Caesars ever wanna deny its imperialistic nature … some of us can’t help but wonder if there isn’t even more to it than that. Why now for such a bold move? Surely it will cost a few million bucks to get everyone new business cards and change the labels on bottled water … so what relation, if any, might it have to seemingly accelerated online gambling pursuits and/or, most recently, a (suddenly) delayed IPO — both specifically addressed in the same document as the name change.

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Time for some of the major legal developments in gaming over the past week, as selected by @GamingCounsel:

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1. Netherlands I-Gaming Attitudes - Probably the most interesting international story of the past week is the ruminations from the Netherlands that the new government may be interested in liberalizing the country’s Internet gambling laws. It’s not clear how far this process would go and what games or betting would be included, but a lot could happen in what has been a very restricted online market in the EU thus far. [eGaming Review]

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2. Nova Scotia Says No (That’s in Canada, Folks) - Another international piece is the recent pronouncement of the premier of Nova Scotia that that province will not pursue a government-sanctioned Internet gaming offering. Nova Scotia’s finance minister added that any estimate of the revenues associated with Internet gaming would be “a wild guess.”(That’s an interesting comment given that the province of Ontario has publicly estimated that it could turn a profit of at least C$100 million/year; many have questioned the basis for such a projection.) The CEO of the Nova Scotia Gaming Corp. (rightly) pointed out recently that Internet gambling will continue to grow whether the government is involved or not. [Globe and Mail]

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3. Betfair Move - Hot on the heels of the Betfair IPO announcement, there is speculation that Betfair may move out of the UK to a jurisdiction with a lower tax rate. William Hill and Ladbrokes recently moved to Gibraltar because they perceived that UK taxes were too high. Some are saying Betfair may make a similar play. With competition increasing among Internet gaming jurisdictions, more and more operators are paying attention to applicable taxes. [CasinoGamblingWeb]
   

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4. Station Casinos Trademark Infringement/Cybersquatting Suit - Station Casinos Inc. has sued two website operators in Federal Court in Nevada: SL Enterprises (www.vegasstationcasino.com) and Ryan Murphy (www.stationcasinos.org). If the Station marks have sufficient rights attached to them through use and/or registration, they should have a good case. This kind of thing happens in i-gaming all the time and it’s a big problem for operators; it’s tremendously time-consuming and potentially expensive to vigilantly prosecute misappropriation of property rights. [Las Vegas Sun]
   

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5. PartyGaming in Venezuela - PartyGaming plc has set up an online poker offering in Venezuela. This continues two trends: Party’s continuing march around the world into new markets and the increased interest in South America as a lucrative and growing market for interactive gaming. [Gambling Zion]

We’ve been saying for awhile how critical Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is for any regulated online gambling legislation to stand a chance at making its way into law. And despite non-denial denials from his office regarding plans for a forthcoming poker-only Senate bill, the Reno Gazette-Journal is reporting that Reid is now saying something more directly suggestive of his online poker intentions:

[Gaming] executives said Reid, D-Nev., told them he would support the legalization of online poker in the United States but drew the line there — he would not support any other form of online gaming — during an Aug. 16 meeting at the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa [in Reno].

This falls in line with what Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV) told the same paper earlier this month — that Reid’s position against online gambling had “softened dramatically” — after she and Nevada’s two other representatives made a serious push on Reid to support Barney Frank’s HR 2267. Berkley and Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) are Frank bill co-sponsors, and Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) “cautiously supports” it.

The problem Reid’s supposedly running into now are non-Harrah’s B/M casinos in northern Nevada asserting online gambling is a threat to business and Nevada tourism … thereby costing the state jobs. And as outdated and arguably inaccurate as that argument is — we’ve heard it before, from the same Vegas ops and Indian tribes that now support online gambling — anything that opponents can spin against Reid as anti-jobs probably isn’t something the senator would want to risk heading into November, as he faces a statewide election in the state with the highest unemployment in the nation. At a minimum, wading into such waters would require a lot more money for internet ads to smear Sharron Angle out of contention.

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Nightline gets into the online gambling fray by taking a deeper look at internet poker players under age 21 — represented by defending WSOP champion Joe Cada and others — tonight on ABC at 11:35pm ET/PT.

For a preview:

Teenage Poker Players Go ‘All In’ Online
Before They’re Old Enough To Set Foot in Casinos, Teenagers Rake in Thousands

I’ve been a fan of John Stossel, and his willingness to call bullshit on conventional wisdom, since the days I started noticing the difference between good journalism and bad. He has since moved from ABC News to Fox, where his libertarian shtick is a tea-party-friendly line of fiscal conservatism that challenges the moral contingent who want to impose on personal freedoms. Thus, the newest cause he’s taken up (at least for a week) is gambling … specifically online gambling.

Stossel outs himself as a recreational poker player in an episode of his namesake show on Fox Business that aired Thursday: Bans on Betting.

The show re-aired throughout the weekend, and will be on one more time tonight, Sunday, at 10 PM ET.

His efforts to bring the online gambling issue to the fore last week extended far beyond his own show. Here he is on The O’Reilly Factor:

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In a story that was originally reported in August, Canadian payment processor Douglas Rennick pleaded guilty in New York City to a charge of processing offshore bets to US residents and forced to forfeit $17,100,000.

Sentencing for Rennick is scheduled for sentencing on September 15th, with a prison term of six to twelve months expected.

I didn’t intend to go here, but while looking up where J. Todd got his information about the $5.2 million spent on online gambling lobbying in Q1 2010, I dug a little deeper into the Bola Verde report (“Business Intelligence for Intelligent Business”) on the IGaming Special Interest in Washington.

(Just a little deeper … the 96-page report itself, which was written in February and updated a week ago, costs $1,200.)

Click here for a detailed summary.

You’ll see that the online gambling lobbying spend is actually down from Q4 2009, but mostly because of cuts from the US Chamber of Commerce. (Had no idea they were even on our side … nor that they were allowed to lobby, lol! Go jobs?)

Also, a breakdown of who’s dropping the dough:

Harrah’s topped the list of spenders at $1.22 million followed by Poker Players Alliance ($785,000), UC Group ($717,239), USCC ($664,442) and the Interactive Gaming Council ($412,580).

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I can always count on the APCW to keep me updated about issues and shenanigans related to the affiliate side of the poker (and general online gambling) industry … and in this week’s episode of Perspectives Weekly, J. Todd gives what I think is one of the best, most concise summaries of the UIGEA storyline — from 2006 to 2010 — and where that leaves us today:

I agree with just about everything he says in his analysis here. If all stories have a beginning, middle, and end, you can see why he believes (as do I) that we are clearly in Part 3 … and that the law we’ve long bawked about really is on its way out by no later than October 2011.

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Apparently, some in the non-poker media recognize the historic nature of the first-ever UIGEA charges — and they’re not happy about it. Check out Reason Magazine’s jumping to the defense of Daniel Tzvetkoff, or at least being extremely of Department of Justice pursuits:

Getting Away With Poker
How is helping people play a card game like murder?

I find this article particularly interesting because of how it pairs politically with the recent story in The Hill about legalized online gambling creating jobs, according to a new study. Though jobs are appealing on both sides of the aisle, it’s clearly an issue the Dems are looking to own in coming months.

Meanwhile, Reason, a Libertarian magazine, speaks more to the Tea Party set. So regardless of what happens to Tzvetkoff, you gotta like the plausibly bipartisan sales pitch taking shape in the Beltway for whatever online poker bills may or may not come to fruition later this year.

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An article by Howard Stutz at the Las Vegas Review-Journal states that the Nevada Gambling Control Board is considering establishing a set of guidelines between casinos and the .net section of online poker sites, which could lead to widespread changes into how poker tournaments are run in Nevada. In 2007, Harrah’s established a series of rules that prevented online poker sites that took US customers from registering their satellite winners directly into the World Series of Poker. Those sites were also prohibited from having their players promote .com sites, while they were allowed to promote their “poker school”, with a .net suffix.

When these guidelines will be finalized is unknown, they could have a huge effect on the World Series of Poker, North American Poker Tour, and televised poker programming such as Face the Ace and Poker After Dark if .net sites were also not allowed.

We saw it coming … Iowa is following in the footsteps of California, Florida, and Italy, pushing a measure to legalize intrastate online gambling. Poker, of course, included.

@BigRussPoker was unavailable for comment on whether or not he would be considering a move should the measure make it to law. But it’s an interesting concept, if this intrastate thing starts to take hold and spread … might you see some old-fashioned rounders traversing the country looking for the best action?