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The National Football League announced on Friday that Arizona Cardinals cornerback Josh Shaw has been suspended indefinitely for betting on NFL games. The suspension will go through at least next season. On Monday, ESPN reported that not only had Shaw bet on NFL games, but he actually bet on his own team’s games, as well.

According to ESPN’s sources, Shaw, who has been out of action all season with an injury, placed a parlay bet on November 10th. The bet involved the second halves of three games that weekend, including the game between the Cardinals and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Shaw bet on the Bucs, who were 1-point favorites for the second half. Despite losing the game, Arizona won the second half by a point, resulting in Shaw’s parlay to lose.

Shaw was placed on injured reserve in August and has not been around the team much this season. He was in Las Vegas with friends when he placed bets at local sportsbooks. When filling out information for an account, he was honest and listed his occupation as “professional football player.” Caesars reported Shaw’s wager to the Nevada Gaming Control Board and the NFL as soon as it was noticed.

The NFL said that it found no evidence of anything associated with Shaw’s betting that would affect the integrity of the game. No inside information was used. It would be unusual for someone trying to compromise a game to utilize a parlay bet, as winning requires other bets to come through. Plus, Shaw was not playing and therefore could not directly affect the game.

The NFL did find that Shaw bet on NFL games on more than one occasion this year.

In a statement on Friday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said:

The continued success of the NFL depends directly on each of us doing everything necessary to safeguard the integrity of the game and the reputations of all who participate in the league. At the core of this responsibility is the longstanding principle that betting on NFL games, or on any element of a game, puts at risk the integrity of the game, damages public confidence in the NFL and is forbidden under all circumstances. If you work in the NFL in any capacity, you may not bet on NFL football.

Shaw is not eligible for reinstatement until February 2021.

This is not Shaw’s first encounter with controversy. While in college at USC, he suffered a high ankle sprain, which he said was the result of jumping out of a second-story window to save his 7-year old nephew from drowning. He later admitted that he lied – he did not divulge how he actually hurt himself – and was suspended indefinitely.

The most famous instance of NFL players being suspended for gambling was when the Green Bay Packers’ Paul Hornung and the Detroit Lions’ Alex Karras were suspended for the season in 1963. Hornung, one of the best players of Vince Lombardi’s dynasty, went on to be inducted in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Alex Karras made the Pro Bowl multiple times and later gained fame in retirement as an actor, playing Mongo in the movie Blazing Saddles and George Papadopolis on the TV show “Webster.”

The post NFL Player Suspended for Betting on His Team’s Games appeared first on Poker News Daily.

Garbage in, garbage out

US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) are examining how federal agencies and healthcare companies are tackling algorithmic biases, after a recent study found that black patients were less likely to be referred to care programs by AI systems than white patients, despite being sicker.…

Fired four threaten to file complaint with National Labor Relations Board

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A French court ruled against professional poker player Rick Salomon, who sued wealthy Saudi Arabian Raad al-Khereiji for $2.8 million in unpaid poker debt. The poker game in question took place at the Tiara Miramar Beach hotel in Théoule-sur-Mer, France in 2014.

Gambling law goes back to start of Napoleon’s reign

The court made its decision based on an antiquated law that dates back more than 200 years. The law states that only debts incurred in games “involving weapons, foot or horse racing, chariot races, tennis and other games of the sort which involves physical skill and exercise” enforceable.

As such, the court found that poker was a game of “chance” and did not require any “physical skill and exercise.”

Salomon’s attorney, Ronald Sokol, said that it was easy to prove that poker was a game of skill, but it was much more difficult to convince the court that poker “involved the exercise of the body.”

Those of us who play poker certainly understand that while poker does not take the sort of physical skill that traditional sports do, it does require stamina. Sitting for long sessions, especially in poker tournaments, can be exhausting. This is one reason why bots are such a threat in online poker. They never get tired. People do and thus see their decision making skills fade over time.

Silver lining for Salomon?

According to the UK newspaper, The Telegraph, it was not a totally lost cause for Salomon and his legal team. The court did agree to see Khereiji’s gambling records, obtained via court order.

Sokol said that they “show he spent $34 million in 29 months in the Ivey Room (at the Aria Resort and Casino and since renamed Table 1) where the minimum bet is $100,000.”

This is likely important because of the story of the poker game presented during the trial. A number of players who participated in the game testified that Kherejii was on a massive downswing and promised Salomon that his lawyer would be in touch to arrange payment of his poker losses. Seven months later, that lawyer told Salomon that he would not see the money, as Kherejii thought the game was a “friendly part with no financial stake.”

While I am not a lawyer, it seems to me that by showing that Kherejii was no stranger to the world of high stakes poker, Salomon’s legal team aimed to shoot down the defense that Kherejii thought they were just playing for shits and giggles. An avid poker player, especially one who played for millions upon millions at Ivey’s Room, would know better.

Kherejii’s lawyers may have figured out that the 1804 gambling law would work in his favor, thus his changed story on payment.

Salomon’s attorney said they are considering appealing all the way to the French Supreme Court, if necessary.

Rick Salomon has a short live tournament resume, but nearly $10 million in cashes. He has been married four times: to voice actor Elizabeth Daily (Rugrats, The Powerpuff Girls), actor Shannen Doherty, and twice to actor and model Pamela Anderson. He also gained fame for a 2003 sex tape in which he appeared with then-girlfriend Paris Hilton.

The post French Court Rules Poker is Game of Chance, Denies Rick Salomon $2.8 Million Lawsuit appeared first on Poker News Daily.

We sat through a three-hour AWS lecture so that you didn't have to

re:Invent In a three-hour keynote at the re:Invent conference under way in Las Vegas, AWS CEO Andy Jassy took pops at competitors (especially Microsoft) and announced a wide range of new services, spanning compute, database, storage and machine learning.…

Coral Poker surprised the online poker world over the weekend, announcing a sudden jump from the iPoker Network to the partypoker Network. In fact, there was no formal announcement on its website, just an e-mail sent to customers. Coral Poker will shut down its iPoker operations tomorrow.

The e-mail reads as follows:

Hi ….

We’re making big changes: Coral Poker are joining the GVC PartyPoker network, the safest and most established poker network in the world.

These changes won’t affect your cash balance, but unfortunately they will reset your Poker Points and Bonus balances.

Points, Bonuses, Golden Chips & Free Spins will remain in your account until 23:59 on 3rd December, 2019.

Coral Poker Team

Naturally, even if players are not bothered by the move, they are perturbed about losing all of their loyalty perks. Online poker rooms often make some arrangement to have benefits carry over in some form to a new site/network, but they do not have to. Many, if not most, Coral Poker players will not even see the e-mail before finding out that their points, bonuses, etc. are gone. I know I had a separate poker e-mail back in the day and did not check it very frequently.

It does seem that Coral might have had at least a partial change of heart, as one poster on 2+2 received a message from the site saying that “Points, Bonuses, Free Spins & Golden Chips will remain in your account for now – we’ll be sure to give you another heads up when we’re all set..

It was not immediately clear what that exactly means. Perhaps the site is at least giving people a bit longer to do something with their loyalty benefits, but there is no indication that they will carry over to partypoker.

Coral’s re-opening on the partypoker Network is not expected until later this month.

While the move is quite sudden – especially announcing it on a Saturday when the iPoker version of Coral will close on Wednesday – it really shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. GVC Holdings, the parent company of partypoker, acquired Ladbrokes Coral in 2018. It is only natural that the company would want to have its poker brands under the same roof.

Ladbrokes, which has a separate skin, is expected follow Coral in the first quarter of next year.

Don’t cry too much for Playtech’s iPoker Network, though. While it is losing Coral and Ladbrokes, it is gaining Russia-based Red Star Poker. Red Star announced its exit from the Microgaming Poker Network (MPN) just a couple weeks ago. MPN is shutting down completely in May 2020; expect more migrations in the coming months. The iPoker Network believes it will be bringing over additional MPN skins.

The post Coral Poker Leaving iPoker Network for partypoker appeared first on Poker News Daily.

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Got a phone for The Reg to stroke a claw across, Roberto?

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The 2019 World Poker Tour (WPT) Seminole Rock ‘N’ Roll Poker Open Main Event (I’ll admit, having to type that out bothers me, for some reason) heads into Day 4 today with Fabian Gumz leading the 17 remaining players. This is Gumz’s first trip to Florida and so far, it’s going swimmingly; Gumz takes 6.620 million chips into Tuesday’s action.

Of course, anything can change in poker, but right now, the race for the Champion’s Cup is not particularly close. Cesar Fuentes is in second place, way behind with 4.075 million chips. And he is the only player above the 4 million chip mark. Only three other players have more than 3 million. It is Gumz’s tournament for the taking at the moment, but again, a single hand can flip things in a hurry.

“It’s pretty amazing,” Gumz told WPT.com of his day afterward. “This is a huge tournament and 90 minutes ago before the last level I was below the average chip stack. I was on a heater the last 90 minutes.”

The hand that got him going came during Level 25 with blinds at 20,000/40,000 and a 40,000 chip ante. Jonathan Jaffe limped from the small blind pre-flop, Gumz raised to 140,000 from the big blind, and Jaffe re-raised to 400,000. Gumz made the call and the flop came down 8-J-J. Jaffe bet 350,000, Gumz called. With another Jack on the turn, Jaffe bet 500,000 and after using a time extension chip, Gumz again made the call. A 5 came on the river and Jaffe led out with a 300,000 chip bet. Gumz then moved all-in for 400,000 and Jaffe called, showing pocket Queens for a full house. Gumz, though, had Q-J and quads to double-up to 3.340 million.

Gumz soon increased his stack to about 4 million and then made another huge jump. With community cards of A-T-7-K and a pot of half a million chips, Jerry Wong made a bet and Gumz raised to 505,000. Wong shoved for 1.785 million chips and Gumz called with pocket Tens. Wong had T-5 of clubs, giving him a flush draw and he would need that flush to beat Gumz’s set. The river did not help Wong and he was eliminated in 20th place, while Gumz took his chip stack up to nearly 6 million.

Every player remaining in the tournament is guaranteed at least a $22,975 payday, but most are gunning for the $545,070 first prize.

Though the action tends to slow the further you get in a major poker tournament, it should be a relatively short day today, as play will stop once the six-handed final table is reached.

2019 World Poker Tour Seminole Rock ‘N’ Roll Poker Open Main Event – Day 3 Chip Leaders

1. Fabian Gumz – 6,620,000
2. Cesar Fuentes – 4,075,000
3. Danny Fuhs – 3,715,000
4. Milen Stefanov – 3,115,000
5. David Novosel – 3,055,000
6. Jeffrey Colpitts – 2,570,000
7. Jeff Blenkarn – 2,215,000
8. Bin Weng – 2,185,000
9. Aaron Mermelstein – 1,950,000
10. Antonio Mallol – 1,585,000
11. Francis Anderson – 1,500,000
12. Roman Korenev – 1,425,000
13. Arkadiy Tsinis – 1,375,000
14. Mitchell Smith – 1,375,000
15. Toby Joyce – 1,345,000
16. Jonathan Jaffe – 790,000
17. Hiroaki Harada – 635,000

The post WPT Seminole Rock ‘N’ Roll Poker Open Main Event Day 3: Fabian Gumz Opens Wide Gap on Field appeared first on Poker News Daily.

It has been a little over six months since I visited the traditional rural village of Geraizeiros in the state of Bahia, Brazil. I was taking a group of journalists to interview people in the community, who have been under enormous pressure to leave their native lands. When I got out of bed that morning, I thought I understood the mortal danger facing this community. But I was still not prepared to find myself staring down the barrel of an assault rifle, in a room full of people praying for our lives.

This has become the reality in the Brazilian Cerrado, a region where small farmers are surrounded by never-ending industrial farms of soya beans and corn and they are never sure if they will make it home at the end of the day. For over 200 years, the Geraizeiros and their ancestors have lived in an area of economic interest in Brazil, where agribusiness has been expanding aggressively, sparing nothing and no one in its way.

In the late 1970s, a large agricultural enterprise called Agronegócio Estrondo was established in the region, destroying an area of forest almost four times the size of New York City to make way for soya farming. And almost 20 years ago, the company started to expand into the villagers’ lands, turning their lives into hell on Earth.

The soya produced by Estrondo at the cost of the lives and livelihoods of the Geraizeiros community is sold to traders like Cargill and Bunge and then shipped all over the world to become food for cows, chickens and pigs. Fast food companies like McDonald’s, KFC and Burger King all buy soya from those traders.

Threatened with guns

On 28 May 2019, we were visiting the community, our plan was to take a German TV news team to see the devastation caused by Estrondo up close. As well as the security around the clock to the illegal watch house built by the company, what struck me the most was the gigantic ditch, three metres deep, which Estrondo built around the land they invaded. Not only are the community residents unable to cross it, neither can the wildlife that lives in the region. Many animals die trying.

Things started to go wrong when we were at the village and a white pickup truck pulled up. Four men in khaki clothes emerged, assault rifles in their hands. “They’ve got guns!” said a woman from the community. “Ladies, go to my house.” I could see it was not the first time she had been through this.

We skirted around the manioc fields and met in one of the rooms in the village, hoping it was all a misunderstanding. While some of us were sobbing and others praying, it occurred to me how sad it would be if I died without being able to make some calls, say “thank you” to my parents. These are the things we think of when faced with imminent danger.

Then we heard fists pounding on the door and a man yelling, “Come out with your hands up, this is the police.” They broke into the room and ordered us to lift up our shirts, to show we weren’t armed. When we had to leave the room, the woman from the village fainted from the stress.

Outside, the rest of the men had gathered and the intimidation began. “We came here because we received a complaint and we need to enter your house to investigate.”

‘We’ve been through this many times before’

Many things about their story didn’t add up. They had no warrant to enter the house, the men did not wear police uniforms, nor did they have any identification on their vests. Their weapons, however, were very much real. Rifles as big as those used in war. I had never seen anything like it before.

The men pressured the residents for around two hours. But when the sun started to set on the horizon, and knowing that the press had recorded the entire episode, the men decided to leave. They told us it was not over, that they would be back.

We were all terrified, not just for ourselves, but for those who would remain behind. When were they going to come back? Would they come during the night? What will happen when they return?

If I was in a state of shock, I couldn’t imagine what the Geraizeiros were feeling. I couldn’t conceive this being part of their lives. But unfortunately, this is the harsh reality the community has had to deal with.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Edvaldo Lopes, one of the community members, “this has been happening for a long time. We’ve been through this many times before. But at least now you are here to tell our story.”

And it was then that we all died a little inside. Is that it? Is telling their story all we can do?

Human and environmental rights are deeply connected. Indigenous Peoples, traditional communities and those on the frontlines are the ones affected the most by the greed of corporations, often being tortured and even murdered.

We cannot allow these companies to continue looking the other way and making millions while people are living under constant threat of violence, fearing for their lives, and their rights are being abused. The world needs to know that there are people who risk their own lives, to protect the land, the planet.

Demand change now, before it is too late not only for the Geraizeiros, but for all of us.

The author is anonymous to ensure their safety.

The post ‘They’ve got guns!’: how the soya industry is linked to violence and intimidation appeared first on Greenpeace UK.

China is so last year. America (tech giants) first

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