Nevada's iPoker Market Dims as New Jersey's Shines

Both Nevada and New Jersey both launched their respective online gambling industries back in 2013, but there could not be much more of a contrast between the fortunes of the two regulated markets.
On the one hand, New Jersey saw its online gambling revenues soar by 32% to $196.7 million in 2016, of which poker noted a 11% year-on-year increase to $26.5 million from its three operators. Nevada, on the other, offers just online poker via WSOP.com, but refuses to release its figures, although the Las Vegas Review-Journal describes the state’s iPoker business as “a mere rounding error in Nevada’s gaming revenue.”
Furthermore, while New Jersey is currently showing 300 cash game players over a 7-day period, Nevada and Delaware, who combined their poker markets in 2015 in a bid to improve liquidity, is showing just 160 players.
It therefore comes as little surprise that in the cutthroat business of gambling, Nevada stayed silent after the next U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions (photo) said he was “shocked” by the DOJ’s 2011 reinterpretation of the Wire Act, and would review the current legislation concerning online gambling in the country. After all, if Nevada isn’t profiting from online poker, then it no longer seems interested in fighting for an industry it fought so hard to regulate.
In the meantime, New Jersey politicians have signalled their intention to fight any attempts to shut down their online gambling sites, and as New Jersey State Senator Raymond Lesniak explained recently:
“That’s not going to sit well with our Atlantic City casinos, where online gaming is keeping the lights on. It hasn’t been a spectacular success, but it certainly keeps the margins going, and it’s actually the only increase in casino revenues that we’ve seen. It’s certainly critical to the state of New Jersey and we’d be very concerned if he were to mess around with it.”
In the meantime, there is at least one person speaking in favor of online gambling in Nevada, namely, A.G. Burnett, chairmen of the Gaming Control Board, who warned that IT jobs supporting the industry would be lost in the Silver State following a federal ban, particularly those providing services related to geolocation, age verification, and hosting centers.