Australia
Cricket NSW, Wanderers and Macarthur FC continue to help fans to reclaim the game
Sports fans are set to enjoy more games free of sports betting ads with Cricket NSW and A-League football clubs Western Sydney Wanderers FC and Macarthur FC extending their partnerships under the NSW Government’s Reclaim the Game initiative.
CEO of Hospitality and Racing, Anthony Keon, said the extensions are a major boost for Reclaim the Game, which is challenging the idea that betting is a normal part of sport.
“The extended partnerships are a strong show of faith in Reclaim the Game as sporting franchises realise the importance of rejecting sports betting advertising and promoting gambling awareness among their supporters,” Mr Keon said.
“We now have fourteen teams from five codes turning down sports betting sponsorships and making gambling awareness and education an important part of their work.”
Cricket NSW’s two-year extension will see the rejection of sports betting advertising at home games of the men’s and women’s Big Bash teams, the Sydney Sixers and Sydney Thunder and also their state teams NSW Blues and NSW Breakers.
Cricket NSW CEO Lee Germon said the partnership extension would allow Cricket NSW to continue to make important inroads in helping to prevent – and reduce – the harm gambling can cause individuals, families, and society.
“Since joining forces with the Office of Responsible Gambling, Cricket NSW has made a meaningful contribution towards changing the community’s attitudes towards betting on sport,” said Mr Germon.
“We’re proud to be able to continue to play an active part in educating children that gambling is not a part of sport, and that gambling on sport is a bad bet.
“Cricket NSW will continue to do all we can to counter the constant sports betting advertising and the adverse effect it has on young people – young men, in particular – and their families.”
Western Sydney Wanderers’ partnership has been extended for a further two seasons and includes the women’s team for the first time, while Macarthur FC has signed on for an extra season. These extensions will be in place for the upcoming A-league season which kicks off on Friday 7 October.
Western Sydney Wanderers CEO Scott Hudson said he was proud to be continuing the relationship for the next two seasons.
“It is important for us to have an impact beyond the field and together with Reclaim the Game we have brought awareness of the impact that sports betting can have in professional sport,” said Mr Hudson.
“We are delighted that this partnership has now extended to our A-League Women’s team, and we look forward to continuing to build our relationship with Reclaim the Game over the next two years.”
Macarthur FC Group CEO, Sam Krslovic said “We are proud to continue our partnership with Reclaim the Game and be part of this positive initiative. Our community wellbeing is our primary focus and we feel it is important to promote a healthy connection between our game and our fans.”
Mr Keon said Reclaim the Game partners play a vital role in educating fans, players and staff about the risks associated with gambling.
“Reclaim the Game is a great way to reach young men who are most at risk of gambling harm with an estimated 41 per cent of regular sports bettors experiencing one or more gambling-related problems,” Mr Keon said.
“Online sports betting is on the rise with one in 20 adults in NSW betting on sports and growing community concern that children and young people are being exposed to too much gambling advertising.
“Research shows that almost 50 per cent of 12–17-year-olds saw gambling advertising on television during sports and racing events on a weekly basis and almost 1 in 3 young people considered betting on sports to be normal.
“Reclaim the Game is about getting back to what sport is all about – watching, enjoying and cheering on your team without intrusive sports betting ads getting in the way.
“We are so pleased that Cricket NSW, Western Sydney Wanderers and Macarthur FC will continue to reclaim the game and provide a family friendly environment for their fans to enjoy games without being bombarded by betting ads.”
If you or someone you care about needs support or advice, please call GambleAware on 1800 858 858 for free and confidential help and support 24/7.
These Reclaim the Game partnership extensions come in the leadup to GambleAware Week, an annual initiative for the NSW community to raise awareness about the risks of gambling and gambling harm. GambleAware Week will take place from Monday 17 October – Sunday 23 October 2022.
Powered by WPeMatico
Australia
Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW
Liquor & Gaming NSW is seeking feedback from industry, stakeholders and the community on how public lotteries are run in NSW.
The Public Lotteries Regulation 2016 is due to expire on 1 September 2026 and Liquor & Gaming NSW intends to renew the regulation to support the legislative framework for lottery regulation, while ensuring it remains fit for purpose.
Public consultation is a key part of the process and the draft Public Lotteries Regulation 2026 and Regulatory Impact Statement will be open for consultation until Friday 10 July.
It is proposed that the regulation will retain most of the existing provisions with some minor amendments to modernise the regulatory framework, remove outdated provisions and improve clarity, consistency and effectiveness.
Before the draft regulation can be remade, legislation requires a formal process of review be undertaken, which includes consultation with the public, interest groups and industry or businesses likely to be affected by the draft regulation.
It’s important for public lotteries to be conducted properly and in line with community interests and expectations, with appropriate harm minimisation measures.
The regulation supports the legislation by setting the standards around the conduct of public lotteries and puts in place consumer protections for people who buy lottery tickets.
The post Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Australia
Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties
The Australian Federal Court has disqualified former Star Entertainment Group Limited executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin from managing corporations for six and seven years respectively and ordered them to pay pecuniary penalties for breaching their duties by failing to properly manage serious risks at one of Australia’s major casinos.
The Court ordered:
Mr Bekier, the former Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $700,000 and disqualified him from managing corporations for six years.
Ms Martin, the former General Counsel, Company Secretary, and Chief Legal and Risk Officer, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $400,000 and disqualified her from managing corporations for seven years.
His Honour also ordered that Mr Bekier and Ms Martin pay 45% of ASIC’s costs of the proceeding.
The Court previously found that both Mr Bekier and Ms Martin breached their duties owed to Star Entertainment in relation to their handling of the risks associated with money laundering and criminal activity.
ASIC Chair Sarah Court said: “senior executives have a critical responsibility to identify, escalate and properly manage serious risks within their organisations.
“These failures occurred in a highly regulated environment and contributed to significant governance breakdowns at Star.
“Penalties of this scale reflect the seriousness of their conduct and send a strong message to other senior executives of listed companies that failures of this type are unacceptable.”
ASIC has an enduring enforcement priority focused on governance and directors’ duties failures.
In relation to Mr Bekier, His Honour Justice Lee said:
“Senior executives of casino operators, and public companies conducting enterprises pregnant with risks more broadly, must understand that failures of the kind established by the contraventions may attract substantial personal consequences.”
Further, in respect of Ms Martin he found that “the community is entitled to expect that a solicitor occupying such positions and having such responsibilities, within one of Australia’s largest casino operators, will display professional independence, accuracy and judgment of a high order. The conduct established … represented a very serious departure from those standards” and that
“Ms Martin knew of a miscellany of alarming information pertaining to [an overseas gambling junket] … She was required to report such matters to the Board but failed to do so. This is all the more concerning when considered against the backdrop of Ms Martin being the most senior solicitor employed by Star”; and that
“The more pervasive the failures of governance and culture become, the greater the obligation upon those entrusted with legal and risk responsibilities to insist upon compliance with legal obligations and proper standards of corporate conduct.”
The post Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Anthony Woods
PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, announced that PointsBet, one of Australia’s fastest-growing digital wagering operators, has selected Grafana Cloud as its unified observability platform. PointsBet is using Grafana Cloud to consolidate telemetry across its proprietary betting platform, accelerate incident resolution with AI-powered insights and give engineering teams the visibility they need to own and operate their services with confidence.
“Our platform is our product. Grafana Cloud gives us one place to see everything — and the AI tools to act on it fast,” Daniel Lucas, CTO at PointsBet.
Grafana Cloud was selected for its ability to deliver:
• Unified Observability Across Every Data Source: PointsBet’s proprietary platform spans real-time odds calculation, player account management, front-end apps and a custom-built betting engine, all generating high-volume telemetry from multiple sources. With Grafana Cloud, PointsBet can ingest and correlate metrics, logs, traces and profiles in a single open platform, ending the fragmentation that slows incident response. Built on OpenTelemetry and open source foundations including Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo and Prometheus, there’s no vendor lock-in — just a unified view of the stack. This flexibility is what enables PointsBet’s shift towards a true service ownership model: engineering teams can now observe, understand and act on what they build.
• AI That’s Actually Useful: Grafana Assistant gives PointsBet engineers a context-aware AI co-pilot for investigation and troubleshooting, letting them query telemetry in natural language, navigate dashboards and trace issues to root cause without deep expertise in PromQL, LogQL or TraceQL. Now generally available in Grafana Cloud, Grafana Assistant can run multi-step incident investigations, generate and refine queries on the fly, and surface the right data at the right moment — keeping every action inside the tools teams already use. For a business where live betting windows close in seconds, reducing time-to-resolution isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a competitive edge.
• Application Observability That Empowers Developers: Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides PointsBet’s teams with end-to-end visibility into how their services perform — surfacing service dependency maps, latency hotspots and the customer impact of every change. By connecting distributed traces, metrics and logs in a unified view, Application Observability helps teams understand not just that something broke, but why and who is affected.
“Observability used to mean drowning in dashboards, alert noise and waiting for someone else to tell you what’s on fire. We chose Grafana Cloud because it brings technology and commercial teams together on the single view building autonomous value streams — and Grafana Assistant means our engineers spend less time asking ‘what’s wrong’ and more time fixing it. It enables the shift from reactive firefighting to teams that genuinely own their services end to end and that helps us build a platform our customers can reliably bet on,” said Saurabh Vyas, Head of SRE, PointsBet.
“Real-time platforms at scale are some of the hardest systems to operate — every component has to perform under pressure, and every signal matters when something goes wrong. PointsBet’s engineering team has built a sophisticated platform, and we’re proud to give their engineers the observability foundation they need to operate it. Open, AI-powered, and built to cut through complexity — that’s exactly what Grafana Cloud is for,” said Anthony Woods, co-founder of Grafana Labs.
The post PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
-
Australia7 days agoFormer Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties
-
Alejandra Burato7 days agoRecord Attendance, Exciting New Releases, and a Resounding Success: This was Zitro Experience Peru
-
ArenaPlus7 days agoDigiPlus Wins “Digital Operator of the Year” Award at 2026 Global Gaming Awards Asia-Pacific
-
Amusnet7 days agoWeekend Reels | Week 25: Slot Drops & Trends
-
Anthony Dalla-Giacoma7 days agoElysium Studios Releases its Latest Slot Game “Hood and Loot”
-
Greece7 days agoSYNOT Games Announces New Partnership with Superbet
-
Bragg Gaming Group4 days agoMassive Gaming launches Blitzcrown titles on Superbet Brazil via Bragg Hub
-
Compliance4 days agoHIPTHER Launches HALLO: The Standard in Compliance Expertise



