POLICE smashed a soccer bookmaking syndicate and arrested 24 people, seizing betting slips worth $6 million on Sunday night.

Police attached to the Organised Crime and Triad Bureau joined a special duty unit from Kowloon West Headquarters to stage the series of raids dubbed Crow Beak.

Swoops on 22 premises resulted in the arrests of 22 men and two women, aged between 21 and 65, for bookmaking activities. Those arrested were later released on bail ranging from $5,000 to $50,000.

Police allege the syndicate has been active since the European football competitions, including the English Premier League, the Italian Serie A and the Spanish league, kicked-off last week.

The latest crackdown follows a similar Pengeluaran HK  operation on May 24 when police raided 87 venues and visited 804 entertainment premises, mostly pubs, across the territory, seizing betting slips worth $4.15 million and $146,000 in cash.

Meanwhile police said a 33-year-old man surnamed Lo, arrested at his Sham Shui Po flat in another operation, was believed to be the mastermind of a gambling syndicate. As well as betting slips, calculators and television sets were found at his apartment.

Under the Gambling Ordinance, the maximum penalty for those engaged in illegal bookmaking is a $5 million fine and seven years’ jail.

The SAR government insists it has kept a “neutral stance” on the legalisation of soccer gambling.

The Home Affairs Bureau began a public consultation on gambling on June 23, revealing that the annual turnover of illegal football …

Last time I discussed how I think the pot should be split in a high-low declare game when the player who declares both ways (that is, the swing hand) loses. I said that the pot should be split between the remaining highest and lowest hand. I feel that this rewards players for cleverly being aware of situations in which a player who ought not to be declaring high-low does so anyway. I feel also that a player should not walk into the whole pot just because he happens to hold the hand that beats the high-low hand for one way only; there’s no skill in that: it’s just luck. The skill is being aware of situations that might not otherwise come up.

An example makes this clearer. I was playing in a small-limit home game of dealer’s choice in which the rule was as I have described: If you declared both ways, you must clearly win both ways, otherwise you lost all claim to any part of the pot. If the high-low hand lost or tied either high or low, that was it; that hand was then out of contention for any portion of the pot. If the high-low hand was so eliminated, the pot was then split between the remaining highest and lowest hand. On rare occasions, a situation arose permitting a player to take advantage of the rule, and win part or even all of a pot with a hand that was not the …