Rio Stars

What is Rio Stars?

Rapper 50 Cent will unveil a casino version of an underground New York street dice game at this year’s G2E, held at the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas from Sept. 29–Oct. 1, 2026.

The Queens-born mogul (real name: Curtis Jackson) has partnered with U.K.-based gaming manufacturer TCSJOHNHUXLEY to develop 50 Cent Headcrack, a licensed casino table game built on the mechanics of Cee-lo.

50 Cent previewed the project on Instagram on Sept. 17, 2026, framing the venture as the long-overdue legitimization of a game that always played by its own rules.

About Rio Stars

Richards tells iGB the deal is expected to be completed around the end of September and provides GiG with a “profitable, cash-generative B2C operator” and a footprint in some of Africa’s fastest-growing regulated markets.

Additionally, it gives GiG a “strategic bridgehead” for its core B2B business, the CFO says.

“That dual value is really the point of the deal,” he explains. “Owning a leading local operator gives us direct, ground-level insight into regulatory developments, player behaviour and payment infrastructure across several African markets, insight that is very difficult to build from the outside.

What is Rio Stars?

Three months later, Judge Denise Cote ordered Papaya to pay Skillz $719 million in damages for poaching players from its skill gaming platform on the belief that Papaya had more players and therefore facilitated considerably faster peer-to-peer pairing times.

Papaya, headquartered in Israel, quickly secured a temporary stay of proceedings from the Tel Aviv District Court and filed a Chapter 15 petition with Delaware’s U.S. Bankruptcy Court. The Chapter 15 petition seeks to prevent Skillz from initiating collection efforts until its appeals play out.

Papaya concedes that it cannot immediately pay the $719 million judgment, arguing that allowing the company to pay the penalty over multiple years would “preserve … the rights of all parties.”