Online Casino and Gambling News: 2010..

Christophe Blanchard-Dignac, the chief exective of the French state gambling monopoly Francaise des Jeux, says his company is considering entering the bidding for British lottery firm Camelot, which operates the British national lottery.

PartyGaming plc, the Gibraltar-based online gambling group, started the week off on a high note with the announcement of a major business coup. The company has signed an exclusive, five-year agreement to provide an online gaming platform for poker and casino games in Denmark for the state gambling monopoly Danske Spil A/S.

Perhaps spurred on by the efforts of other Baltic nations like Estonia, Lithuania is reportedly developing new laws to handle the contentious area of Internet gambling. The early indications are that it could follow the Estonian model, controlling licensees with strict but genuine regulations that will require local licencing and servers in-country, as well as protection for the vulnerable, and of course taxation.

The state of Pennsylvania has seriously upped the competitive ante in land gambling, legalising poker, blackjack and other table games at its casino licensees this week as it seeks to close budgetry gaps with gambling tax revenues.

InfoPowa readers will recall last week's interesting backgrounder on betting on snow in London, and the definition of a snowfall in this regard. This week the subject of betting on whether snow would fall more widely in Britain was in the headlines, but it was unfortunately in a negative sense, as a row erupted over a disputed bet.

Congressman Barney Frank will perhaps be heartened by the news that his latest carefully planned and timed attempt to legalise online gambling in the United States has the opposition worried.

The Kentucky media were marvelling this week at the tale, and extraordinary good fortune, of Rob Anderson, a 39-year-old father of two who scooped the Kentucky lottery jackpot of $128 million, thanks to a botched ticket.

The Daily Telegraph carried an interesting article over the weekend in which it examined the firmly established gambling culture of the Chinese nation, a pastime that has continued to flourish despite being largely outlawed on the Chinese mainland since the Communist Party took power in 1949.

The recognition of online gambling by the government of the Baltic state of Estonia was the subject of a review in the publication Baltic Reports over the weekend. The review describes the situation prior to January 1st 2010 as "...a free-for-all in Estonia for many years, but now regulated since the state has applied a law that requires Internet casinos to be hosted on Estonian-based servers."

Party Casino, a subsidiary of the giant Party Gaming plc online gambling group, has launched what it boasts is the largest progressive seeded jackpot in the online gaming industry in the form of The Big One and the introduction of classic slot Melon Madness.