New Jersey Online Gambling Brief March 21, 2014: SCOTUS and Sports Betting?
In this week’s column we’ve got what looks to be some kind of outreach tour going on as state senators from New Jersey were talking in Atlantic City regarding sports-betting and in Las Vegas regarding online gambling in a broader sense. We also have a member of the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement speaking up in Massachusetts on payment processing issues in New Jersey.
So what gives with the US tour New Jersey lawmakers and regulators are on? Keep reading to find out!
Payment processing options improving in NJ
Slowly but surely payment processing is improving in New Jersey, but it has taken a lot of work on a lot of different fronts just to get to the point we’re at right now.
At the recent Massachusetts Internet Gambling Forum hosted by the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, Eric Weiss of the New Jersey DGE stated that regulators were working with banks to not only educate them as to the new laws governing online gambling in the Garden State but also to try to get a new coding for these legal online gambling transactions.
According to Weiss, success rates for credit card deposits have increased mightily, with MasterCard now running at a 78% success rate while Visa success rates have gone from just 10% to 44% since November’s launch.
In addition to the outreach being done, the operators have also helped ease the payment processing suffering in New Jersey, as virtually every provider now offers at least one alternative method to ACH and credit cards:
- PayNearMe (a Western Union like money sending service available at 7-11 locations) is available at Ultimate Poker and UCasino
- Online eWallet Skrill is available at Borgata and partypoker sites
- Online eWallet Neteller is available at 888 and WSOP.com
- The Golden Nugget Casino offers prepaid cards for both depositing and withdrawals
Senator Lesniak sounds off on iGaming companies
Chris Grove of www.onlinepokerreport.com is currently at the 2014 iGNA Conference in Las Vegas Nevada and has been live tweeting from the panels he is attending. One of those panels saw New Jersey State Senator and iGaming proponent Raymond Lesniak take the industry to task over their lack of marketing.
According to Grove’s tweets from the panel, Lesniak said the following during the panel discussion:
Wow. Lesniak says iGaming marketing in NJ has been “amateurish” so far. Chides operators for their wasteful efforts #iGNA2014
Lesniak says he’s been turned off from iGaming by marketing. Says casinos need to show comps, echo AC in marketing #iGNA2014
Lesniak wants to see more convergence between offline and online. Thinks casinos are dropping the marketing ball #iGNA2014
partypoker Reboots the $100k Guarantee
On March 2nd partypoker doubled the guarantee of its $50k Guaranteed Tournament that runs every Sunday evening, and New Jersey poker players flocked to the virtual tables of NJ.PartyPoker.com and BorgataPoker.com to take part in the event.
The $100k Guarantee on March 2nd didn’t just eclipse its guarantee; it utterly shattered it, with 786 players registering for the tournament. The number of players, as well as the total prize-pool of over $145,000 and the first place prize that was just under $27,000, were all records for a weekly tournament in New Jersey.
And now partypoker is going to do it again, announcing another $100k Guaranteed Tournament for Sunday March 30th.
As always the tournament will begin at 5 PM local time with late registration open until 8 PM. The buy-in for the $100k guaranteed will be $200 ($185+$15) with qualifiers running around the clock at NJ.PartyPoker.com and BorgataPoker.com where you can win your way into the $100k Guaranteed for as little as $5.
What will be interesting to see is if partypoker can do even better than the March 2nd tournament, or if there will be a slight falloff now that the novelty has worn off—ho-hum just another $100k Guaranteed Tournament at partypoker!
New Jersey traffic numbers
Stagnant.
That’s the only word that comes to mind when I look at the past several week’s online poker traffic number supplied by www.pokerscout.com.
Depending on the day of the week you check the statistics, Party / Borgata is still fluctuating between 200 and 220 players, and sometimes going up as high as 240 average cash-game players, although is becoming less of an occurrence as of late.
WSOP.com has been holding steady at 150 average cash-game players, which has to be a huge disappointment for the site considering they’ve watched traffic fall some 25% from their high point—which occurred just after their Online Championships tournament series.
888 and the All American Poker Network continue to be the steadiest of the bunch, with average cash gamed traffic right in the 110 – 120 player range.
Cash game traffic is virtually non-existent at Ultimate Poker, with an average of just 16 players sitting at their cash games tables.
We thought you should know…
SCOTUS might decide sports-betting in NJ
New Jersey wants online sports-betting and they are willing to go all the way to the highest court in land to get it. Now whether the Supreme Court of the United States will hear the case is another matter entirely.
So what are the chances?
According to the Press of Atlantic City article cited above, State Senate President Stephen Sweeney sees it as a 50/50 proposition that the SCOTUS will take the case, and then of course they would have to successfully argue their side and sway the nine-member body that sports-betting belongs in New Jersey.
This is where I think I’m supposed to say something about chickens and hatching.
