Betcha.com was one of the most promising online sportsbooks in the business since they allowed bets on almost anything. Betcha didn’t relegate gambling to just sports since customers could also place bets on politics or even obscure things such as whether or not there would be a full moon. Other features of Betcha.com were that gamblers could wager up to $1,000 on a single bet, and they could also opt not to pay a losing wager (though this would negatively affect their rating).

Unfortunately for Betcha.com, they didn’t get to operate for very long when the state of Washington ruled that Betcha was operating illegally. Before, Betcha.com thought they were safe because losing bettors had the option to not pay their debts. But according to the Washington Supreme Court, simply giving people the option on paying losing wagers does not void the fact that Betcha was making a profit off of gambling. According to Justice Tom Chambers, “Under the statutory definition of bookmaking, it is immaterial whether or not Betcha users were engaged in gambling activity.”

Seeing as how Washington is so tough on internet gambling, it didn’t seem like Betcha.com had much of a chance of surviving. The only forms of gambling that Washington allows includes tribal casinos and low stakes cardrooms. Online bookmakers and poker rooms are definitely not on the list of acceptable gambling, and those caught playing in this state can even do jail time.

888 is currently trying to enact measures that will cut their operating expenses by $6 million in addition to revamping marketing efforts too. The software has also undergone major changes as seen by the online poker software, which ditched the old green look in favor of a sleeker, black design.

888 Holdings is blaming their problems on difficulties seen in the internet poker market where revenues are slightly down across the board. The drop in 888Poker has become even clearer since 888Bingo overtook poker to become the company’s main source of revenue.

Gigi Levy, the CEO of 888 Holdings, addressed the problems that have plagued his company during the first half of 2010 by saying, “Our business experienced a difficult first half against the backdrop of a challenging economic environment.” He continued by saying, “In order to continue investing for future growth and to support potential acquisitions, the board has decided not to declare an interim dividend at this time and finalize the full-year dividend when the full-year results are available.”

While some people might be wondering about 888 Holdings’ future, Levy is very confident that his company will survive the turmoil as he stated, “We remain confident in the underlying fundamentals of the business and believe the move of 888, and the industry, to become a locally regulated gaming-entertainment operator, presents significant opportunities for growth and merger and acquisition activity.”

Apparently short on a babysitter, Thuan Huy Nguyen and Panfila Phu Phan decided to leave their 7-week old baby in a casino parking garage for two and a half hours. Nguyen and Phan went inside the Thunder Valley Casino while their baby was left unattended in the car. A security guard who was patrolling the parking garage eventually found the baby and alerted the police. Upon arriving at the scene, the police determined how long the baby had been in the car, and arrested the couple.

After waiting two months, both Nguyen and Phan were finally sentenced to 60 days in jail by a Placer County Superior Court judge. On top of this, the parents will be forced to take a mandatory parenting class to determine if the couple is still fit to take care of the baby. Aside from the parenting class and two-month jail sentence, both parents will be serving four years probation.

Assuming Nguyen and Phan can pass their parenting classes with flying colors, they could regain custody of the baby during the four years of probation. But it’s surprising that the two won’t be forced to attend any sort of gambler’s anonymous meetings seeing as how they left a baby in the hot California sun for almost three hours. But at least the judge didn’t let them get off too easily as evidenced by the 60 day jail sentence.

But that’s exactly what Nick Bogdanovich did when he made the decision to allow former NBA star and current degenerate gambler Charles Barkley to place a $500,000 wager on the New England Patriots in the 2002 Super Bowl. The problem wasn’t necessarily that Bogdanovich let Barkley place a bet of this size, but rather that he let Sir Charles make the wager based on credit. Even worse, Barkley wasn’t even forced to sign a marker before placing the half million bet that the Patriots would beat the spread against a heavily favored St. Louis Rams team (the Patriots went on to win the game and Barkley won his bet).

Sadly for Bogdanovich he was fired the next day, and has failed to land a job anywhere near the prestige of his old job; one of these jobs was as a strip club director. Apparently Bogdanovich wasn’t bringing in enough rowdy drunks with one dollar bills since he eventually dropped the strip club job too before becoming a handicapper.

But Bogdanovich isn’t just any kind of handicapper…..he’s one of the fellows involved in those unreputable operations that send spam through email filters offering outrageous guarantees. For just $299 a season, you can win at the same rate Bogdanovich does. In fact, he makes numerous guarantees claiming that you’ll be a guaranteed winner just by investing in his services.

He even throws out numbers such as a $1,500 profit in 4 weeks. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a guarantee in sports betting, and hopefully people can see right through his emails. No wonder Mandalay Bay got rid of him.

In something similar to the mid-90’s when online gambling was first being established, their site – PlayNow.com – has experienced tons of problems after the initial launch. And the biggest problem involved a “data crossover” where some gamblers were able to access the accounts of other members. In all, 134 players had their information accessed by other people, which led the B.C. Lottery Corporation to shut down their website shortly after the mid-July launch.

In fact, PlayNow.com didn’t even last a single day since it was shut down just a few hours after the July 15th unveiling. At first it was reported that the site was shut down because too many players were accessing it at once thus causing a server overload. Now it’s clear that the security issue was the real reason behind the site shutting down.

Fortunately for those behind PlayNow.com, the site is up and running again. And it features a sleeker, newer look similar to many of the top online casinos today. And it will have to bring in money like the top online casinos since it lost $150,000 for every day that it was shut down. In all, it is estimated that the B.C. Lottery Corporation lost $5.4 million in the month-plus that its website was inoperable.

The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation has plans to be the next government-regulated online casino by the year 2012. Hopefully they can iron out the kinks of their website before launching it unlike PlayNow.com.

Party Poker was once the world’s largest poker room before President George W. Bush signed the UIGEA into effect in 2006. After the bill was signed into effect, Party Poker dropped out of the US poker market and fell back into 4th place. However, there were other poker sites such as PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker which stayed in the US market despite the UIGEA. Seeing as how PokerStars and Full Tilt have risen to the number 1 and 2 spots on the poker food chain, it’s obvious that they benefited from their decision.

However, Bwin CEO Norbert Teufelberger strongly believes that both sites will be shut out of the US gaming market assuming the country repeals the UIGEA. Teufelberger even went as far as to say that the companies are operating illegally by stating, “We would expect that once the US regulates, these two companies will not have access to the market, and once that happens we’ll then see who the leader will be. They say they’re not operating illegally but I think they are. Let’s see who is right.”

He continued by saying, “I used to be personally licensed and operated in the land-based environment in the US so I know how stringent the US authorities are in their licensing process, and I cannot imagine that a company, which in the view of the DOJ (Department of Justice) and several state licensing authorities in the US, that acts illegally will be able or qualify to get a license. In my view, this will be absolutely impossible. What does that mean in the end? I don’t know. They may be prosecuted….they may not be prosecuted.”

Of course, all of Teufelberger’s comments are based on the assumption that online poker will finally be regulated, which isn’t a given on any level.

Ultrinsic is giving college students the opportunity to bet on their ability to potentially make grades. So assuming someone thought they could pull an A in their chemistry class, they could create an account at Ultrinsic, wait to see what odds the company would give them on making the grade, and place a bet.

Along with creating an account, betting students must also give the company access to their grades and obviously lay some money down on any wagers that interest them. The betting is capped at $25 for beginning bettors while it increases the more a person uses the service.

Since the service is offered in the United States where gambling is a debated topic, many people are wondering if Ultrinsic is legal or not. CEO Steven Wolf believes it is perfectly legal as he said, “The students have 100 percent control over it, over how they do. Other people’s stuff you bet on, your own stuff you invest in. Everything’s true about it, I’m just trying to say that the underlying concept is a little bit more than just making a bet…..it’s actually an incentive.”

Wolf’s argument certainly makes sense, but there are other factors besides just skill that go into making a grade. There have been cases in the past where professors hand out all A’s or F’s because they didn’t make tenure while other students might cheat to make their grade and earn the money.

In the end, betting on grades is just as debatable as any other form of gambling in the United States right now. But assuming Mass. Representative Barney Frank can get his gambling regulation bill passed, any form of gambling might become acceptable in the US.

Frank has been pushing a bill for the last few years that would regulate poker in the United States, and essentially make it totally legal to play. Unfortunately, Frank still has some obstacles to overcome in order to get the bill passed, but many believe he is closer then ever before. So how does this involve the social networking giant Facebook you may ask?

Well Facebook runs a little poker operation of their own called Zygna poker. Zygna currently draws 60 million users for all of the games that it offers while poker tops the list. Basically this means that Zygna has several million poker players and they don’t even offer any real money games!

Assuming Frank’s bill passes though, Zygna could begin offering Facebook users real cash games. If even 10% of the several million Zygna players created a real money account, this would mean hundreds of thousands of real money players. Obviously not all of them would become regulars, but a fair share of them would eventually hit the felt every day.

Of course, Facebook is not talking about the possibility that Zygna could one day offer real money poker games. They told Business Insider that it’s too early to be speculating on the possibility of real money games. And while they won’t go public with intentions of creating real money software, it’s speculated that Facebook will indeed hop into the online poker market assuming Frank’s bill is passed.

Unfortunately, Michael Jackson’s estate did not condone the usage of his image nor did the King of Pop come out of his grave just to say the website operators could promote their business using him. All of this combined to bring the Jackson estate’s attorney Howard Mann into the mess. Mann vowed the website would be taken down and that he would seek $100 million in damages. The website was taken down, but it doesn’t look like the drama is over quite yet.

As initially reported, it was believed that Mann would go after the online casino operators. However, it now appears as if Mann thinks he can sue GoDaddy.com – the site that michaeljacksoncasino.com was registered through. And after looking at the cheesy Jackson casino website, it looks like GoDaddy is the only place he could get the money from.

It’s unclear at this time as to whether or not Mann has a legitimate case since it wasn’t GoDaddy that was running the website. Plus GoDaddy.com has agreements and legal binding forms they expect people to read and agree to before creating a website. Seeing as how GoDaddy is one of the most successful web domain companies in the world, they should have some good court representation too.

However, the World Wide Web is also a murky subject when it comes to court battles so it will be interesting to see who wins out in this case.

Even with the fact that many bookmakers are struggling, Ladbrokes decided to get rid of many of its senior managers. The top brass at Ladbrokes feels as if something needs to be done quickly in order to reclaim Ladbrokes spot at the top. This was reiterated by Ladbrokes CEO Richard Glynn when he said, “In recent times, the strength of our brand has diminished. We feel the need to regain our primacy.”

The Wall Street Journal recently documented Ladbrokes problems in an article that examined several other large bookmakers too. One of the sportsbooks was William Hill, which experienced a resurgence to position themselves as a global leader. This only caused further problems for Ladbrokes since their rival took a sizable share of the market with this spurt.

With the firing of senior managers, Ladbrokes hopes that they can compete with William Hill not only for bragging rights as the top UK bookmaker, but also among the world’s elite. Of course both sportsbooks will be heavily aided if Mass. Representative Barney Frank can get his legislation to pass sometime this year; Frank’s bill seeks to rid the United States of the UIGEA and make America a friendly place for gambling companies once again.

Online casinos and sportsbooks see the US as a goldmine when it comes to gambling so if Barney Frank’s bill does pass, it would definitely boost the gambling economy.