New Jersey Online Gambling Brief December 19, 2013
It’s been yet another busy week in the world of New Jersey iGaming. Most notable among the headlines was the Golden Nugget finally getting the green light from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, so the Nugget is now fully cleared to offer online gambling in the Garden State.
But that’s not all that happened. We’ll also fill you in on the latest news on the Atlantic Club Casino auction, a few technical difficulties experienced by WSOP.com this week, and a whole lot more in this installment of the New Jersey Online Gambling Brief.
Atlantic Club auction update
As we first reported last week, On December 17th the Atlantic Club Casino would be going up for auction, but so far (two days in) there has not been a qualifying bid made on the property according to several reports.
Jennifer Bogdan of the PressofAtlanticCity.com (who is a must follow on Twitter for New Jersey iGaming news) is reporting that despite the lack of an official buyer, “A hearing to confirm the sale is scheduled for Thursday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Camden in front of Chief Judge Gloria Burns.”
The Atlantic Club is an important property on the Boardwalk and in Atlantic City, as it employs 1,600 people and has some $30 million in pension liabilities, so the sale of the casino is not just a gaming issue. For the Atlantic Clubs past and present employees it’s a matter of their financial welfare.
The latest rumors regarding the auction indicate that there has not been a qualifying offer made, and that the 30+ year old casino could soon be turned into nothing more than a hotel, with gambling removed.
We’ll keep you posted on the Atlantic Club’s fate as this story develops.
Golden Nugget gets the nod from the DGE
Next week will mark the one month anniversary for iGaming in New Jersey, on Christmas Day no less (I believe the appropriate gift for a one-month iGaming anniversary is a new mouse btw) and while we are seeing some consistency start to take shape in the market, there is also plenty of exciting breakthroughs and news to report, such as the Golden Nugget receiving the approval of the New Jersey DGE. This final approval means the casino’s online gambling sites can go forward with a full launch in the New Jersey market.
Of all the companies that participated in the soft launch, the Golden Nugget was the only one that was unable to secure the DGE’s blessing, and while their competitors moved forward and were allowed to fully launch, the Golden Nugget remained in a perpetual state of testing, operating in what the DGE called a “limited” capacity.
The Golden Nugget’s four online gaming sites (all powered by Bally Technologies) finally went live on December 15th, with the company citing an issue with their online slots as the reason for the delay. For a complete breakdown of the Golden Nuggets early struggles you can check out this article at NJPokerOnline.net.
“WSOP.com… We have a problem”
Everyone expected the launch of online gaming in New Jersey to go through some growing pains, from geo-location and player verification issues, to depositing issues. But for the most part these issues have been minimal, and the sites and DGE have been working hard to iron out any problems players might be facing.
Another potential fly in the ointment that just hasn’t been as insidious as most people expected were technical glitches at the sites themselves. Other than the Golden Nugget’s troubles (see above) the online operators have been running games fairly smoothly with few notable incidents; that was until this past week, when the WSOP.com website crashed for some six hours.
The cause was apparently a scheduled server change — expected to last just a few minutes — that ended up crashing the site during the running of the $10k guaranteed tournament, and as poker players are known to do, Twitter and the 2+2 poker forum blew up.
The WSOP.com tried to rectify the situation by issuing refunds, but the initial manner in which they chose to do so, relayed by WSOP.com’s Head of Online Poker Bill Rini, which was to refund buy-ins and rebuys, only incensed players even more.
In the end WSOP.com bent over backwards to make things right, as Robert DellaFave explains here, but poker players and outrage tend to go hand in hand, so no matter what solution they came up with it would have been impossible to please everyone.
Personally, I think the WSOP.com did a good job of handling such a lousy situation.
*EDIT: WSOP.com’s Bill Rini has informed me that the original payout for the cancelled tournament was per their cancellation policy for “In the Money” tournaments, and not based on the buy-in as reported above. WSOP.com found this to be undoable, and created an alternative method that was equal to if not better than their original cancellation policy would have paid.
We thought you should know…
Apparently a sequel is in the works for some movie called Rounders, which currently bears the imaginative title Rounders 2… based on the buzz I’m guessing the original had something to do with poker. And please realize the previous statement is dripping with sarcasm.
The NCGLS is looking for input from the poker community, along with the general public, as they attempt to create a framework for online gambling regulations. So if you are a highly opinionated well thought out person, you can offer up your thoughts here.
