Tom Malkasian, a director of the Commerce Casino, has responded to the Poker Players Alliance's 'Players Before Profits' campaign in which the million strong action group urged US players to voice their disapproval of the Californian card room's opposition to federal legalisation of online poker.

The one million member online poker action group Poker Players Alliance came out with all guns firing this week in a press release criticising the Commerce Casino for its opposition to the federal legalisation of online gambling.

Taking many industry observers off-guard late Thursday was a press release from the largely unknown e-gaming firm Blanca Games revealing that it has acquired the interests of the Cereus poker network formerly owned by Tokwiro Enterprises and including well established if at times controversial sites Absolute Poker and UltimateBet.

The Remote Gaming Association has been quick off the mark in commenting on this week's release of a Dutch commission's report on online gambling, criticising its findings because these exclusively recommend that online poker be regulated, but not other forms of online gambling.

A Dutch Justice Ministry commission set up by Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin to look into the pros and cons of internet gambling has recommended that the government abandons its "barely enforced" monopoly on gambling and instead licenses a small number of private online poker companies, reports the publication DutchNews.nl.

The Morongo Band of Mission Indians still appears intent on cornering the internet poker market in California, and has been joined by another 21 tribes in a consortium designed to claim exclusive rights to intrastate online poker.

Federal prosecutors continue to go after financial processors in their attempts to stifle online poker, reports Forbes Business, revealing that the authorities reached a settlement worth $13.3 million Tuesday with Ahmad Khawaja, together with his firms, Allied Wallet and Allied Systems.

Finland's government may need to batten down the hatches for an imminent media and advertising storm generated by its attempts to establish an online poker monopoly. The Finns started manoeuvring on the issue at the beginning of 2010, when the government released its plan to open a state-run internet poker room along the lines of the lucrative Svenska Spel and Danske Spil models, now the subject of EC-prompted liberalisation.

Intriguing the InfoPowa staff over the weekend was a report which appeared in online media announcing a big win for what it described as a "South Australian pub league poker player" on the 888.com poker website.

Writing in an op-ed article in the Washington DC publication Politico this week, the chairman of the Poker Players Alliance, former Senator Alphonse D'Amato reminded US lawmakers that large numbers of American poker fans have repeatedly demanded that internet poker be legalised and regulated.