Pop

What is Pop?

Operators must maintain permanent mechanisms for age verification, self-exclusion, voluntary time and wagering limits, and information on the user’s own gambling behaviour. Self-exclusion must be effective with all authorised operators. 

The text also prohibits bets placed using credit cards, the use of predictive models to identify moments of greater vulnerability, and platform design mechanisms that hinder a conscious decision to stop betting, leave the service, or activate limits and blocks. Operators must maintain permanent alerts about compulsive gambling, indebtedness and asset loss, and adopt verifiable protocols for identifying risky behaviour.  

The proposal establishes criteria for classifying products according to their potential for harm. Among the characteristics considered are instantaneous or short-lived results, continuous repetition at short intervals, use of random mechanisms to determine the outcome, intermittent rewards, near-miss incentives, incentives to recover losses and features that make it difficult to stop betting or induce successive, impulsive, or increasingly valuable bets. 

How to play Pop

Humor is inherently subjective, but the only plausible reason to dismiss Carrot Top after seeing his show live isn’t a distaste for kitsch—it’s being easily offended.

Carrot Top deserves credit not only for his sharp punchlines, but for never growing bitter about becoming a punchline himself. He has always leaned into the jokes made at his expense. That self-awareness is precisely why his cameo in the end-credits photo collage of The Hangover landed so brilliantly.

If you dismiss Carrot Top, it almost certainly means one thing: Like us, you judged his act before seeing it. Giving the show a chance proves his stagecraft vastly funnier than any punchline ever used to dismiss it.

How to play Pop

The state-backed Nederlandse Loterij has ordered the operators of the unauthorised gambling site Skyhills to cease serving Dutch players.

This action came in the wake of a recent court ruling in a separate case involving Lalabet.

On Tuesday, Nederlandse Loterij announced it had sent a cease-and-desist notice to companies and directors connected with Skyhills across several jurisdictions, including Costa Rica, North Macedonia, the United Kingdom, Curaçao, Malta and the Marshall Islands.