Gossip Column: Arlie Shaban Completes His First Challenge & Boston Racecourse Operator Accuses Wynn Resorts of Fostering Mob Connection
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- PG News September 21, 2018
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6 Mins Read
It’s been hectic recently, with a slew of online and live tournaments bringing on major poker action. And all this while, we had completely forgotten about our favorite live streamer Arlie Shaban who has been busy playing and proving his mettle against the challenges from ‘The Poker Gods’! Imbibing the true Herculean spirit, Shaban has successfully completed his first task and ‘skinned the Dutch Lion’!
Not all is well in Boston, though, where the Encore Boston casino is being constructed by Las Vegas-based Wynn Resorts. The casino project was well underway until recently, when a lawsuit was filed against it on Monday, charging Wynn Resorts of corruption and mob ties. The lawsuit claims that the casino site had earlier housed chemical companies and was highly unsafe for a business that serves food and beverages. High toxicity of known carcinogenic arsenic was found on the site, it states.
Has that got your mind reeling? Read on and find out the details behind the stories!
Arlie Shaban Manages to ‘Skin The Dutch Lion’!
If you haven’t heard yet, live streamer and poker pro Arlie Shaban who incidentally shot to poker fame after 50 straight days of streaming on the live streaming platform, Twitch, covering 125 days of consecutive poker streaming has been challenged lately!
It’s not a one-on-one challenge, but something that’s been happening in public eye, though the challengers remain anonymous.
Shaban who has recently joined Run It Up received an anonymous challenge on the PokerStars Blog. ‘The Poker Gods’, as they claimed to be, had challenged Shaban to ‘Skin the Dutch Lion’.
The letter titled, ‘12 Labours of Arlie’ posted by the so called Gods on September 10, referred to the ‘12 labours of Hercules’ where the Greek demi-god had been tasked to skin the Nemean Lion, and bring back its skin.
Along the same lines, Shaban was asked to complete 12 challenges, and the first was, “find the lion, challenge him. Get him alone and defeat him. Take his skin and put it on.”
Shaban sportingly decoded and took on the challenge, challenging Dutch professional player Lex Veldhuis to a heads-up match on Twitter. Soon enough, the two players faced off on the virtual felts.
Veldhius was waiting, playing $530 buy-in tournaments and then Shaban showed up. As the two got chatting and talked about the challenges, they agreed on one thing, “Nobody has any idea” of who the challengers were.
But Shaban was hell-bent on completing the challenge thrown upon him and soon took a two-to-one chip lead against Veldhius who fought back and retook the lead.
“No! That was too much pain! I was smiling so big when you shoved,” Shaban shouted on Twitch.
Sure enough, the Dutch Lion won the first match and while he was not really obliged to continue, Shaban was by no means ready to quit, which was really fine by Veldhius. The two also discussed what Shaban could expect in the challenges, next.
And finally, as they played, Shaban managed to beat Veldhius in a tournament, completing to ‘Skin the Dutch Lion!’
PokerStars compiled Shaban’s first challenge win story and here it is!
That’s just one challenge taken up Shaban, what’s coming next, we wonder!
Boston Racecourse Operator Charges Wynn Resorts of Mob Ties & Building Casino on Toxic Site
For the Wynn Resorts based in Las Vegas, Boston has been an ambitious destination. The company has already invested in a $2.5 Billion project for opening shop in the city.
But if latest news doing the rounds is anything to go by, the project may just have landed itself up in deep legal trouble. We’re talking about the Encore Boston Harbor casino that has completed 70% construction and was scheduled to open in the summer of 2019. A local racetrack has now filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Wynn Resorts for this project.
In their lawsuit filed on Monday, Sterling Suffolk Racecourse, operator of Suffolk Downs in Boston has claimed that Wynn Resorts violated the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act in its endeavor to secure state approval for the Encore project.
Wynn Resorts, the operator alleges in its lawsuit, engaged in ‘corruption of the application process’ and conspired to fix the application process. It also claimed that the company committed extortion “in order to suppress voter turnout” for a local approval of the Suffolk Downs project.
Demanding the Wynn should pay them $3 Billion in damages, the operator has also claimed that the licensed obtained by Wynn Resorts in 2014, for casino gambling in Massachusetts is invalid!
If only damages could clear the way for Wynn. The lawsuit has made another shocking allegation. The lawsuit claims that the casino site, formerly home to Monsanto Chemical Company has been been highly toxic over the past 100 years and is highly unsuitable for the casino business where food and beverages would be served to people. Suffolk says Wynn has been unable to clean up the site.
“The Wynn Defendants were granted a license to operate their casino on a toxic waste site loaded with levels of arsenic still so high that a child day care center would not be permitted to be housed there, even after the site was remediated and the regulations amended to countenance higher levels,” Suffolk alleges.
While the Wynn management has called the lawsuit frivolous, the project really, has been mired in controversy since its inception.
Following allegations of ‘decades of sexual misconduct’ against Wynn founder Steve Wynn, a report on which was published in The Wall Street Journal in January 2018, in May 2018, the company renamed its Boston project earlier called Everett Casino to the now ‘Encore Boston Harbour.
With the lawsuit claiming that, “The Wynn Defendants knew that any serious investigation would uncover shady business dealings in Macau that could create suitability concerns and wished to keep those issues as concealed as Steve Wynn’s career as a sexual predator was,” the company has many answers to give before it clears its name.
And that’s all folks! But never fear, while the poker world keeps churning the gossip mills, we too will keep bringing you all the latest news and updates, so stay tuned!
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- KeywordsTags: Skinned the Dutch Lion, Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization, RICO, Wynn Resorts, Online Poker, Arlie Shaban, Gossip Column, Live Poker
