The newspaper reports that added impetus to the game was given by Czech Jan Skampa’s victory at the European Poker Tour in Prague last December. Skampa, a 23-year-old student of economics, won the Euro 682 000 main prize.

The best Czech poker professionals earn hundreds of thousands of crowns a month, the newspaper claims, whilst others satisfy themselves with several tens of thousands, which is enough to live on comfortably.

More than 160 poker clubs have been registered in the Czech Republic, and in the urban centre of Prague some have up to 2 000 members. They have their own rooms to host poker tournaments, whilst casinos offer facilities and the Internet attracts many players.

The first new game at AllSlotsCasino.com is the Kings Of Cash video slot, which features the kings of spades, clubs, diamonds and hearts on its slot reels for large payouts. The new game has a scatter symbol that triggers a second-screen bonus feature that could see players win up to 1,000 times their total bet. There is also a second scatter symbol that kicks off a round of 25 free spins featuring doubled payouts plus a bonus prize of up to ten times the bet amount.

Alaskan Fishing is the second new video slot on offer at Kahnawake-licensed AllSlotsCasino.com and it comes complete with a top payout of 1.215 million coins. There is a Fly Fishing bonus feature that could award between double and 15 times the triggering bet while players can also hook 15 free spins with doubled payouts.

The final new title this month is the Dance Of The Masai video slot, which offers generous bonuses and free spins. The title’s Warrior symbol expands to fill all three reels and can award up to eight times a player’s total bet.

“This month’s game release brings the total number of slot games at AllSlotsCasino.com to 300,” said David Brickman, Vice-President Of Player Affairs for parent firm Jackpot Factory.

“Variety is the spice of life and we’re excited about these new additions to our casino.”

* Sale a part of efforts to boost financial strength

* Shares up 2.6 percent (Adds analyst comment, share price, CEO quote)

NEW YORK, Sept 2 (Reuters) – Las Vegas Sands Corp (LVS.N), the world’s largest casino company, has secured commitments to raise up to $600 million through the sale of exchangeable bonds, the company said on Wednesday.

The bonds will be “mandatorily exchangeable” into common shares of the company’s Macau unit pending the unit’s successful initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

In a statement, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Sheldon Adelson said the company expected the financing to be completed within “a matter of days.”

The sale is part of Las Vegas Sands’ efforts to boost its financial strength, the company said. It recently amended its $3.3 billion Macau credit facility and plans to take one of its subsidiaries public.

The financing would “enhance our current liquidity position and further our efforts toward reaching long-term financial stability,” Adelson said in a statement.

The company’s shares rose 35 cents, or 2.6 percent, to $13.80 in midday trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

The financing will prevent looming U.S. debt covenant breaks in the third and fourth quarter, Bernstein Research analyst Janet Brashear said in a research note.

She added that the $600 million figure exceeded the $500 million the brokerage expected.

“Without this stop-gap measure, we had projected that LVS would have approximately $100 million too much debt at September 30 and approximately $400 million too much debt at December 31,” she wrote.

Brashear, who has an “outperform” rating on the stock, also said the financing indicates confidence in a strong IPO, “assuming the financing is fully subscribed.”

“We’re anxious to see The Greenbrier get started,” Musgrave said. “That is a very aggressive schedule for an October opening.”

That’s based on start-up times for table games at Mountaineer, Wheeling Island and Tri-State racetracks, which didn’t have their gambling facilities fully up and running until up to six months after their table game licenses were issued.

Mountaineer and Wheeling Island both obtained their gaming licenses on July 3, 2007. Both tracks began operating poker tables in late October.

Mountaineer opened its full variety of table games in late November, while full table game operations didn’t come on line at Wheeling Island until January 2008.

Tri-State had a quicker turn-around. It received its table games license on July 1, 2008, and opened its poker tables in late August, with full table games operations beginning in mid-October.

Musgrave hopes the temporary facility at The Greenbrier can have a quicker start-up time, since it will be a relatively small operation.

However, under state law, the Lottery cannot begin any preparations for gaming at the resort until the license is issued. That includes everything from approving the floor plan for the gaming area to licensing individual dealers and other gaming area staffers.

“We cannot do anything until they get their license,” Musgrave said of the resort. “After we issue the license Thursday, we’ll see how far along they are.”

Greenbrier spokeswoman Lynn Swann said Monday that Todd Fishon, vice president for casino operations at the resort, is confident gaming will be up and running within a month. Fishon has 23 years’ experience operating casinos in Atlantic City, Connecticut and Arizona.

“We are on pace for an Oct. 1 opening,” Swann said. The temporary, 3,700-square-foot facility in the resort’s Virginia Wing will be limited to 10 gaming tables, offering blackjack, poker and roulette, and about 40 video lottery machines, Swann said.

“We will be working very closely with the state so we can get approval of our gaming staff and procedures,” she said.

The permanent casino, now under construction and expected to open in April, will have 38 gaming tables and about 320 slot machines.

Musgrave said that while The Greenbrier casino will have a comparatively limited impact on state Lottery revenues, he believes it will be a valuable resource in attracting conferences and conventions to the state.

“It adds a dimension that competing resorts won’t have,” he said.

The initial license fee of $65,000 will go to the Bureau of Senior Services for its community-based services fund.

In the second year, the license renewal fee will jump to $250,000, and increase to $500,000 in the third year. In subsequent years, the license fee will be calculated based on the previous year’s adjusted gross casino receipts, for an amount of not less than $500,000 nor more than $2.5 million.

Cyberspace wagering on Sunday’s Super Bowl was expected to more than double this year, compared to last, to as much as $50 million, said Jonathan Ader, who monitors the gaming industry for Bear, Stearns & Co.

That’s a pittance compared to the total amount of legal and illegal bets on Sunday’s contest, which is predicted to come in at between $50 billion and $100 billion.

The number of companies offering Internet betting sites has tripled in the past year from about 30 to close to 100. According to Frost & Sullivan, a marketing consulting firm, these new ventures will gather an estimated $640 million from sports wagers this year in an industry that began only five years.

Super Bowl Sunday “is absolutely our biggest day of the year,” said Mike Edwards, a spokesman for Betmaker.com, a Costa Rica-based online casino.

But the growing popularity of placing online bets is bringing together opponents with widely differing agendas, from casino lobbyists to gambling opponents, the NFL, politicians and credit card companies who are worried about the unregulated nature of the industry.

“As a professor at Harvard said, this is the crack cocaine of gambling,” said Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., a vocal critic of online sports gambling.

Kyl has sponsored legislation that would outlaw Internet betting and wants to force Internet service providers to terminate services to online casinos and bookmakers.

Sports gambling in the United States is legal only in Nevada,

“The fact is, sportsbooks are a minimal part of the Nevada bottom line on Super Bowl weekend,” said Frank Fahrenkopf, president and CEO of the American Gaming Association, which represents U.S. casinos. “We do think that it’s imperative that gambling is appropriately regulated to maintain its integrity, and with the Internet we just don’t think that’s possible.”

Most of the virtual gaming industry operates out of places such as Curacao, Costa Rica and Antigua, which are beyond the reach of U.S. government regulators.

Easy access to online gambling makes it a dangerous industry, said Kevin O’Neill of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey.

“For people who are not part of the underworld or the mob, they just go on line and in five minutes, they’re up and running,” O’Neill said. “So the upshot is that more and more young people will have access to sports gambling that never would have had it before.”

Credit card companies object to the online gaming industry because it isn’t regulated.

American Express and Discover Financial Services, which offer the Discover card, explicitly forbid customers from using their cards for online wagers because of the unregulated nature of the industry. Mastercard International and Visa USA recently began using a coding system allowing financial institutions that issue credit cards to decide whether to authorize bets.

Despite this opposition, officials with online casinos still expected a large draw for the Super Bowl. Betmaker.com expected about 25,000 gamblers alone, Edwards said.