Recent content by bill_collins

Since the tax argument keeps surfacing in pieces, the actual position as it stands today: Machine Games Duty - 5% on the low-stake machines, 20% on most of them where a play costs up to £5, 25% where a single play can cost more than £5. Those bands haven't moved since 2015. Nothing has been...

Those aren't in conflict, though I understand why it reads that way. Like-for-like conventionally strips out closures. It compares the same venues against the same period last year, so on the usual basis the three they shut wouldn't be in the 5% at all. I haven't seen Rank spell out their basis...

Or a registry received a complaint about a site publishing eight hundred people's due diligence files and acted on it without knowing the context. That's the duller explanation and it fits the same facts. I don't know which it was and neither do you.

It's a fair question and it has a partial legal answer as of last Friday. A Berlin court ruled on the 25th in her favour against the Malta Gaming Authority, which had injuncted her over an earlier breach. The judge treated her characterisations of that regulator as expressions of opinion rather...

Operators have recorded every deposit you've ever made since the day accounts existed. That's not a new capability and it isn't created by this. Where you have a point is the second half. The Commission has asked operators for data on the effect of the lowered spending threshold and given them...

Must admit that advice is more important than it sounds. The measure explicitly permits the transactions needed to close operations and refund bettors. So an operator refusing to pay out isn't shielded by the ban - the ban carves out exactly the payment they're refusing to make. @Luciana.29 if...

That's a reasonable reading and it may also just be procedure. En banc is the normal next step and skipping it can count against you. New Jersey has already petitioned the Supreme Court from the other direction, and Justice Alito extended their filing deadline back in July. So the question is...

Legally it turns on one word: swap. A prediction market sells you a contract that settles at $1 if an event happens and $0 if it doesn't, and you trade that contract with other users on an exchange. The exchange takes a fee rather than a margin. Kalshi's position is that these are swaps under...

A £50 test proves the site can pay £50. It tells you nothing about £5,000, because the thresholds that trigger enhanced verification sit well above test amounts. That's not an argument against doing it. It's an argument against concluding much from it passing.

The second study is the uncomfortable one and it's had the least coverage. 29,724 students aged 15 and over were surveyed. 28% of the 15 to 17 year olds had gambled in the previous twelve months, in a country where it's illegal for them to do so at all. For the over-18s it was 39%. The...

The number's real but it's been mangled in the retelling, and the actual figures are worth having straight. The Dutch regulator looked at 15,761 newly opened online accounts that had betting activity in May 2025 and tracked them for three months. Of those, 5,244 belonged to people aged 18 to...

Gross means every deposit counts, with net winnings taken out of the calculation entirely. Say your limit is £100 a month. You deposit £100, win £60, withdraw it, then deposit that £60 back. Under a net calculation some operators treated you as having deposited £100 overall, so you could keep...

Well it matters more than you'd think and the Commission put out a warning about this three weeks ago. More than a quarter of all complaints to its Contact Centre are about identity verification. It's also one of the most common things going to ADR. The finding was that a number of licensees...

The bonuses shrank because remote gaming duty went from 21% to 40% in April. Promotional spend is the first line anyone cuts when the tax on the margin nearly doubles. Disclosure rules cost a developer a fortnight.

One correction to something up-thread, because it matters if anyone acts on it. The five material terms now have to be visible at the point you claim, not buried behind a link. Wagering requirement, maximum bet while the bonus is live, eligible games and their weighting, the time window, and the...