The construction of the Dream Las Vegas, the property envisioned as the new Las Vegas landmark, has come to a halt. The developer Bill Shopoff”s funding funnel run dry leaving him with short-term cashflow promises and pending liabilities toward contractors in the $ 550 million hotel-casino project.

Safety Stop:

The Dream las Vegas developer Bill Shopoff, president, and CEO of Shopoff Realty Investments told the press that construction works have fully stopped ”other than anything required for safety.” He also said that he owes around $25 million to $30 million to the construction work contractors and that the works will resume as soon as the financing terms are finalized.

Shopoff confirmed the delay and said that the owners of the property that broke ground last summer – that have been paying cash for the project so far – are currently working to secure around $400 million of the funding pipeline for the project. Shopoff continued that his group has active discussions with its lender expecting to finalize the transaction in the next few weeks.

He added that the total investment in the Dream Las Vegas resort will reach the amount between $550 million and $575 million, which is in line with the developer’s plans from the beginning of the project.

Boutique-Style Resort:

The resort broke ground on Las Vegas Boulevard just south of Russell Road in July 2022. It’s set to feature 531 guest rooms, as well as restaurants, nightlife areas, meeting, and event space, and a new pool deck to open in late 2024. The companies behind the project, Shopoff Realty Investments, and Contour said that the Dream property will rather offer a smaller, boutique-style experience to be easily distinguished in the multitude of massive hotel-casinos located in the same corridor.

Funding to be Secured:

The stoppage of funding produced the developer’s outstanding receivables towards the Dream’s lead builder, contractor McCarthy Building Companies, but Shopoff said that his group will duly settle its contractual liabilities. “They will be paid, and the project will get built,” he said and added that there have been some factors affecting the project from the beginning.

The closure of the last year’s deal with the property owners taking longer than expected, the Federal Reserve’s moves raising borrowing costs and the recent banking industry issues have been the factors adding uncertainty to market prospects. Shopoff assured that his team will secure the funding and ”get the project back on track” in two to four weeks.  “Obviously people want to get paid for their work,’ he said, ‘and we want them to be paid.”

Filled with Enthusiasm:

During the Dream’s ceremonial groundbreaking last July, McCarthy Senior Vice President Ross Edwards indicated that around 1,200 construction professionals would be working on-site. He said on the occasion: “I can assure you our industry is filled with enthusiasm around the opportunity to help build a new Las Vegas landmark and will do so in a work environment that is committed to safety, and is welcoming, inclusive, and empowering to all.”

On March 10, 2023, Edwards signed a lien notice recorded by McCarthy stating that the construction company had received about $43.3 million in payments but indicated that almost $40.2 million was still due for the project at the time the notice was recorded.

A Series of Obstacles:

Before the latest funding issue, the Dream Las Vegas project faced some significant obstacles, such as a series of design changes imposed by security concerns due to Dream’s location next to the Las Vegas airport. Also, the developers discovered the next doors newly built facility in spring 2021 encroached by around eight feet on Dream’s property and the issue was settled before the court.

Finally, the Dream Hotel Group was recently acquired by Hyatt Hotels Corporation for $300 million. The corporation announced the acquisition and said it would pay the base price of $125 million, with the remaining $175 million falling due over the next six years “as properties come into the pipeline and open.”  Shopoff said that no changes to the project’s name or programming will be made as a result of the Hyatt deal.

Plenty of contingencies surround the project as it moves to the milestone expected to get the funding required to drive the project forward. The developer and the contractor’s 1200 workers await the financial injection to resume construction works and bring the controversial project closer to the completion date set for late 2024.

The fox and the hedgehog

Allen Kessler has turned to the wisdom of crowds to solve a decades old question: who is better at No-Limit Hold’em, Phil Ivey or Phil Hellmuth?

Kessler set up a Twitter poll to see what the poker community thinks. The question he asked was phrased as: “Who’s better at no limit holdem?”

They both have strong cases.

It’s a difficult call to make. They both have strong cases.

Phil Ivey always appears in any discussion of the greatest all-around poker players. Phil Hellmuth, however, is a contender for best-in-class when it comes to tournament No-Limit Hold’em.

Can the adaptive fox beat the specialist hedgehog at its own game? NLH is the home turf of our hedgehog, but even so, 88.3% of the first 4,998 voters in Kessler’s poll went for Phil Ivey.

Negreanu berates the brat

Kessler’s prompt for the question was a clip from Poker After Dark in which Negreanu hammered Hellmuth over claims of being the best poker player in the world. The epic rant took Hellmuth to task over not playing in high roller events and above all for Hellmuth’s claim to be better at tournament Hold’em than Phil Ivey.

“You want me to tell you you’re better at something than Phil Ivey at something, then what?” Negreanu asks.

Hellmuth sheepishly asks if he’s not better at Texas Hold’em than Phil Ivey, only to to be told that he is “not better at anything than Phil Ivey,” by Negreanu.

Hellmuth is no stranger to confrontations at the poker table, but even he seemed shaken by the exchange.

Part of what makes the comparison difficult is the lack of comparable results between Ivey and Hellmuth. They don’t often play the same formats.

Phil Ivey only rarely plays tournament poker now, favoring cash games for the most part. Phil Hellmuth plays almost nothing but tournaments. When Ivey does play tournaments, it is usually super high roller events. Hellmuth, on the other hand, is rarely seen in a tournament with more than a $10,000 buy-in outside of the World Series of Poker

Hellmuth seeks publicity wherever he can

The biggest difference between the players isn’t the games they play though. It is that Hellmuth seeks publicity wherever he can, while Ivey is a quiet player whose time playing private games lends his results an air of mystery (for years, Ivey vanished into the back rooms of Macau).

This difference may also give us a clue as to the true answer to Kessler’s question: Ivey’s talent can speak entirely for itself, while Hellmuth’s requires a full-time salesman.

The post Allen Kessler Wants to Know Which Phil Is Better: Hellmuth or Ivey? appeared first on VegasSlotsOnline News.

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France’s gambling regulator, l’Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ) has issued blocking and delisting orders against online gambling sites and has created and published a public blacklist in the form of a downloadable CSV spreadsheet of illegal gambling sites while the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has ordered eight more sites to be blocked, including an advertiser as well as gambling operators.

The French blacklist can be found through a link on the government’s official announcement page (here). It includes well over 500 entries, most of which are redirects or mirrors of sites that were obviously targeting players in markets the operators were not welcome in with operators such as VegasPlus accounting for nearly 10% of the total through more than 45 unique URLs relying on various reiterations of the core name.

Obvious Attempted Circumventions

MaChance casino accounted for more than 50 iterations while Unique / WinUnique clocked nearly 50 entries.

The internal list shared with legal authorities, certain operators, and internet service providers in France has tracked 532 websites from over 150 operators since June of last year but has finally been made public, albeit in a non-user-friendly format. The list will be updated monthly according to the ANJ.

Several months before the then-nascent list was compiled, the regulator was given extraordinary powers to block or demand the blocking of gambling websites as well as the power to delist them through requests or demands delivered to search engines and other indexing databases.

Legal censorship in the name of the public good is a craft the French regulatory body is perfecting with each new development and the ANJ no longer has to wade through 4-6 months of red tape to get the job done. Now, they can simply request that ISPs (internet service providers) block the sites after a quick consultation with an administrative judge, and the marketing websites as well as any known iterations of the gambling domains can be blocked within 30-60 days.

Only about 18 online gambling websites are sanctioned by the government in France as well as internationally in French-administered jurisdictions while La Française des Jeux enjoys an exclusive monopoly on lotteries and related games throughout French law-administered governments worldwide.

Google addresses delisting thusly: “Google may temporarily or permanently remove sites from its index and search results if it believes it is obligated to do so by law; if the sites do not meet Google’s quality guidelines, or for other reasons.”

A ruling by the European Court of Justice, the EU’s highest court confirmed in 2011 that France’s monopoly on horse race betting was justified and legal as long as its purpose was to prevent harm to the public and was applied in a consistent manner. The case (a law allowing Pari Mutuel Urbain a monopoly on horse-race betting) set the stage for further breaks in anti-monopoly law interpretations and upset the assured competition among member states throughout Europe.

The ANJ stated on its website last Wednesday: “Indeed, when a French Internet user plays on an illegal site (for example, in France, all online casino sites are illegal, no casino license can be granted under the legal framework in force), it exposes you to multiple risks:

• Collection of personal data;
• Payment fraud;
• Installation of malicious computer programs on the computer or mobile phone without the knowledge of the player;
• Frequent non-payment of winnings;
• Absence of any measure to prevent excessive gambling and underage gambling;
• Total absence of legal recourse in the event of a dispute with the site.

There are no known empirical data that shows the French are any more vulnerable to those risks than players in any other jurisdiction. The government relies on code enforcement on the supply side and the statements above to dissuade French gamblers from straying from the French-approved sites. Online gamblers in France are not subject to criminal penalties.

Australia Continues Crackdown on Unlicensed Sites.

As is the case in France, gamblers in Australia are not subject to criminal penalties. However, operators that offer unlicensed services to citizens can be punished civilly and criminally if they find themselves within reach of the law. All publicly traded companies have left the market, yet private companies continue to serve the market as Australians are among the most passionate and prolific gamblers in the world.

Offering online gambling services in Australia is not actually illegal as long as an operator is licensed in a state or territory. However, none have developed a framework nor issued any licenses for casino gambling.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has issued new orders for another handful of gambling sites to be blocked by Australian ISPs from allowing residents to access the websites.

As has often been the case in the past, the order affects not only illegal operators but their promoters as well. The latest batch of names includes Casino Jax, Kosmonaut Casino, Mirax Casino, N1 Bet Casino, Rolling Slots, Slotozen, and Wild Fortune Casino as well as an affiliate website that was purportedly directly marketing to Australian players.

The regulatory body has blocked well over 700 gambling websites since the Gambling Act Amendment of 2001 was strengthened in 2017.

Source: French regulator publishes gambling website blacklist, iGaming Business, March 14, 2023

The post France Reg Flexes Delisting Muscle, Australia Adds to List of Blocked Online Casinos appeared first on Casino News Daily.

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Science has proven that a good night’s sleep is fundamental for long-term health, with the National Institute of Health recommending between 7 and 9 hours per night. But how realistic is this for the average American, and is location a factor? We wanted to find out. 

To get to the bottom of things, we asked 2,000 US residents about their sleeping habits. The results revealed which cities get the most rest, and which could use an extra trip through the Starbucks’s drive-thru.

Average Hours of Sleep Per Night in 50 Major Cities

It turns out, America’s best sleepers hail from Fort Lauderdale. Respondents living in this city just north of Miami reported a healthy average of 8 hours of sleep per night. Not far behind, Portland, all the way on the other side of the country, came in second at 7.5 hours of slumber each night.

A further fifteen cities, including St. Louis, Fort Worth, San Diego, Kansas City, and Las Vegas, enjoy more than 7 or more hours of sleep nightly; placing them comfortably over the minimum recommendation from the National Institute of Health. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan be damned, Seattle residents aren’t so sleepless, averaging 7.1 hours of nightly shut-eye.

At the other end of the spectrum, America’s most sleep-deprived city is Virginia Beach, where residents report sleeping just 5.3 hours each night. Other cities suffering from  too little sleep include Jackson, Tulsa, Richmond, and Newark. 

State Overview

Looking at the average night’s sleep per state gives us a bigger picture, and a clearer indication of whether geographical location impacts rest. Some of the cities reporting the highest amounts of sleep don’t perform as well on a state-level. Despite Fort Lauderdale landing in first position in the city rankings, Florida is only in 19th for the amount of sleep on average per state. 

Oregon and Utah share the spoils at the top of the state overview, both with an average of 7.5 hours of sleep per night. Other honorable mentions include Kansas, Maine, Idaho, and Kentucky, all with over 7 hours. States falling below the recommended 7 hours of sleep per night include New Jersey, Illinois, Nevada and New York.

At the very bottom (bunk) of the state rankings is Mississippi, reporting only 5.6 hours of sleep on average per night. Iowa, West Virginia, Hawaii and Delaware all also landed among the bottom five states.

Reported Causes For Lack of Sleep

We went on to ask those who reported the lowest levels of sleep what they think the cause is. Of those asked, 54% said stress is the main reason they don’t sleep well. 

Work (12%), poor sleeping environment (11%), and children (7%) were other popular reasons for lack of sleep across survey respondents. Of all 5,000 people surveyed, 74% said they wish they got more sleep. 

Methodology

In March 2023, we surveyed 2,000 Americans across the country. We asked them which city they lived in, and how many hours of sleep they get per night. We were able to use this data to calculate sleep averages across US cities and states.

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