Cirsa’s IPO a success, Super Group bails on the US, Germany wants to hurry gambling amendments

The week has seen multiple developments take place in the gambling industry, and quite a few of them were notable. Today, Casino Guru News recaps all the hottest updates from the past days and brings them in one neat package for your convenience.

To begin with, debates surrounding Donald Trump’s "Big BeautifulBill," which has raised concerns over how gamblers in the United States would tax their gambling winnings – and possibly losses – are ongoing.

Democrat Rep. Dina Titus has introduced legislation of her own in Nevada, hoping to ensure that gamblers are still allowed to exempt 100% of their losses instead of the proposed 90% exemption rate by the POTUS’ draft law.

If passed in its current form, the bill could have serious implications for gambling in the United States, with poker players arguing that it would kill professional gambling and affect consumers by slamming them with out-of-the-blue tax bills they didn’t know they owed.

The American Gaming Association, a trade group, has backed the counter-proposal by Rep. Titus, arguing that gamblers ought to be allowed to deduct 100% of their losses from their taxable income.

The trade group also worries that because of this new proposal, many players might opt for offshore gambling, hurting the industry in the process.

Business and finance

Blackstone’s Cirsa’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) has hit its intended target, pushing the company’s valuation to €2.5bn as expected, and bringing in €400m in fresh capital. While the company’s stock briefly surged to €16, up from the targeted €15, corrections in the aftermath of the IPO pared the value back slightly.

Regardless, Cirsa’s public listing is hailed as a major success, and this is the second-largest IPO to ever have been hosted by a Spanish stock exchange.

In other news, Super Group, the parent company behind the Betway and Spin gambling brands, has announced that it will be fully withdrawing from the US market, arguing that there could be associated costs with the move to the tune of $30m or $40m.

This has not been an easy decision, but Super Group believes that its resources and efforts are better spent in other markets that can help the company achieve better ROI. At the same time, the Alcohol and Gaming Association of Ontario has greenlit the PointsBet acquisition by MIXI.

However, it is not yet clear if MIXI will be able to bring the deal to a close, following a voided shareholder vote which saw MIXI originally win, but it later transpired that the registry provider, Computershare, had excluded Betr’s bid from the voting process. Betr has been opposing the sale to MIXI, looking to buy up PointsBet’s assets itself.

Bally’s has cautioned that its support for the beleaguered Star Entertainment Group is not indefinite nor unquestionable. Should Star face a penalty similar to the one issued against Crown Resorts, a rival bought out by Blackstone recently, Bally’s may consider withdrawing from the deal as well.

Bally’s Chairman Soo Kim has said that the firm had no immediate intent to withdraw, and it acknowledged that it had the necessary know-how to turn Star Entertainment Group’s fortune around, but on one condition – that the company remained solvent.

Laws and regulations

California has been moving forward with a proposal of its own. AB 831, a new bill that wants to further clamp down on sweepstakes social casinos, arrives at a time when the state’s Attorney General, Rob Bonta, has said that he would want to see daily fantasy sports outlawed, calling them an illegal form of gambling.

Naturally, the advancement of AB 831 has stirred a strong reaction from the Social and Promotional Games Association (SPGA), which has argued that the bill seeks to solve a problem that it hasn’t demonstrated exists in the first place.

The SPGA has remained highly critical of this proposal, arguing that it creates a new form of crime that is counterintuitive and tries to destroy an entire entertainment segment that is legitimate and based on legal precedent.

Germany is in a hurry to overhaul some aspects of its gambling industry. During the June Conference of Interior Ministers, a pitch for a Second State Treaty was made, with state ministers seeking to pass amendments to the 2021 Interstate Treaty on Gambling(GlüStV)in a bid to address some of the remaining challenges in the market.

The German gambling regulator, the GGL, wants to have stronger IP blocking powers so that it can cut access to rogue websites in the market, among other things.

Offshore gambling operators in the Philippines may be dominating as much as 50% or more of the total market, argues PAGCOR boss Alejandro Tengco, who was speaking during an interview earlier this week, and opposed a complete ban on online gambling in the country, calling it counterintuitive.

Meanwhile, Macau is eyeing a complete shutdown of all gambling advertisements in the Special Administrative Region. The SAR is trying to pull away from its dependency on gambling for its local economy while, at the same time, negating the social impact of gambling.

The voice of the industry

Casino Guru News published several in-depth pieces this week, including an opinion piece by Alex Baliukonis, Game Design Team Lead at BGaming, who went into detail about what constitutes a good player retention strategy and how to achieve it as a company.

On a similar note, Andy Booth, Chief Product Officer at Games Global, andArmen Tatarevic, VP Gaming at White Hat Studios, discussed the importance of IP and branded slot games and how they can reach more players. You can read the full roundtable here.

Image credit: Casino Guru News