PokerStars Celebrates New Jersey One Year Anniversary

On March 21, 2016, PokerStars officially relaunched in New Jersey having been absent for more than five years following the Black Friday indictments. While at the time its entry was expected to breathe life into the Garden State’s ailing online poker market, things haven’t turned out quite as dramatically as was initially anticipated, although its fair to say the operator’s impact has been overwhelmingly positive.
In fact, PokerStars has consistently generated more poker revenues each month than its chief rivals, which consist of the Borgata/PartyPoker and WSOP/888 partnerships. Amongst the innovations which have enabled PokerStars to top the market has been its Spin & Go product, as well as organizing an aggressive MTT schedule, and by April the operator controlled a 45.5% share of a market worth $2.6 million at the time.
Despite suffering an expected drop off in revenues over summer to below $2 million per month, PokerStars has since added the NJSCOOP and NJCOOP series to its product mix, in addition to its PokerStars Festival New Jersey held at Resorts in Atlantic City. Furthermore, Resorts certainly felt the benefit of having PokerStars as a partner, and by the end of 2016 its online gambling revenues had risen by 486.2% to $31,761,839, from the $6,783,831 it collected in 2015.
Nevertheless, there does appear to be certain limitations on the operator’s ability to impact the market, and according to gaming analyst Robert DellaFave, while PokerStars is likely to remain New Jersey’s dominant online poker site in the future, it is unlikely to secure more than a 50% share of the market. Furthermore, at least 70% of its revenues have come at the expense of the state’s other iGaming providers.
Interestingly, in March 2016, PokerStars topped the New Jersey iPoker market with 183 cash game players over a 7-day period, followed by WSOP NJ/888poker (144), and Partypoker/Borgata (100). According to the latest PokerScout report, PokerSars NJ is currently showing 140 players, followed by WSOP NJ/888poker (120), and Partypoker/Borgata (75).