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Jagajeet Chiba here for Gambling911.com and boy what a day, heh?
Mike Colbert, Director of Cantor Gaming’s sportsbook operations in Las Vegas, was arrested early Wednesday morning in connection with an investigation related to Pinnacle Sports out of Curacao.
Offshore gambling may be a multi-billion dollar industry but it is also rather tight knit. Here are a few ironies that caught our eye today here at Gambling911.com while covering this story:
*Cantor Gaming operates a sportsbook in the M Resort, a hotel and casino owned by Penn National. This is the same Penn National that has spent a fortune opposing gambling expansion in the state of Maryland. And this is the same Maryland that has aggressively gone after online gambling operators.
*Type “Pinnacle” into Google News (like many people are doing today) and the first thing that comes up is that Pinnacle Entertainment has released its 3rd quarter financials (they reported a loss). Pinnacle Entertainment has no affiliation with Pinnacle Sports, but you get the picture. Not everyone is going to realize this to be the case.
*Many believe Wednesday’s news means that the sky is falling. Certainly the arrest of a high profile pivotal part of the Las Vegas sports betting scene is big news but the reality is that Pinnacle Sports is perhaps the ONLY major offshore sports betting operation that the overzealous Queen’s DA Napoleon Bonaparte….err Richard A. Brown hasn’t gone after.
*Pinnacle “left” the US market in 2007, or so it seems. Moral to the story might be “keep taking bets from Americans?”.
*The former long time Marketing Director for Pinnacle Sports began working as the Head of Business Intelligence for Pocket Kings, the technology arm of Full Tilt Poker, two months prior to “Black Friday”. This is just a weird coincidence. Trust us here all you conspiracy theorists out there.
*Pinnacle Sports is licensed by the same Alderney Gaming Commission that pulled the plug on Full Tilt Poker. Nobody’s pulling the plug on Pinnacle Sports. They should do just fine but Alderney may come out of this one with two black eyes. The Nevada Gaming Commission has to be shaking in their boots right now too.
- Jagajeet Chiba, Gambling911.com
