New Jersey has never been a focus point when it comes to talk about online poker revenue. Every month when the numbers come out and the stats are revealed per vertical in NJ, somehow online poker always seems to fall short.
This has been the case for the past 18 – 19 months and the recent figures are highlighting the side effects of the signing of the game changing multi-state agreement. The multi-state agreement was set up to allow online poker operators to share online poker player pools with others in Nevada and Delaware.
To put it as simple as possible, online poker players in Nevada, New Jersey, and Delaware were able to play against each other legally for the first time when they logged on to the WSOP.com and 888poker network on May 1, 2018.
Before the shared liquidity was allowed in New Jersey, the market was in a perpetual decline with only a few months of annual increases posted by individual operators scattered across the entire history of the market.
As mentioned earlier, the agreement beseem to be a booster for the online poker industry in NJ, but it proved to be deficient in raising the scores when it comes to income from online poker. We must mention the fact that 888poker NJ, who are currently the only New Jersey online poker network that is able to share player liquidity with other states, reported a 19.5% annual increase last month.
The combining of player pools is a huge step forward for the online gambling industry in the US and even if it came with some technical glitches at first, technology has managed to resolve most of the reported errors.
If there are signs that are pointing toward a rise in revenues, we certainly must mention that larger player pools will have a ripple effect on online poker and shared liquidity may also have a positive impact on potential legislation in other states. This could be in the mind of the Pennsylvanian legislators, who are flirting with the idea of launching online poker.
Pennsylvania is the sixth largest state in the US (population of nearly 13 million people) and rumors say that the process of launching online poker already begun with the likely case of joining the Multi-State Internet Gaming Association when it goes live.
We can already say that if the plan goes through, it would double the number of those currently exposed to online poker in the three states, mentioning the fact that when the current shared liquidity begun, it brought an additional exposure to 4 million people for the All American Poker Network (AAPN).
Thus, in my opinion, we can set an additional news alert, next to the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) notifications of course, for online poker in Pennsylvania.
