New Jersey’s Online Poker in Dire Straits

The newest New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement statistics on the final revenue numbers from August 2019 indicate that online poker in New Jersey is on the decline.

The numbers weren’t looking up this time last year either when the New Jersey online poker scene was faced with same problems. And now figures from the previous month and year are even lower.

For instance, the revenue for online poker between the months of June and July 2019 was up by 6.6%, and also a year-on-year 2.1% increase was detected. However, this rise has been short-lived, since most recently, there has been a 9.5% decrease in revenue when compared with July’s takings, and a year-on-year comparison also exhibits 5.9% decline.

In total, online poker revenue $1.7 million for the month of August was the second lowest amount in a month in 2019 as well as one of the six lowest that have been recorded since the market first launched.

On the other hand, online casino games and sports betting are flourishing, despite the poker’s downward slope.

Online casino games yet again reached record revenue numbers last month and all the operators combined collected $39.4 million, surpassing the previous July one that amounted to $37.4 million, while online sports betting generated $19.2 million, having become the second highest monthly level since the market opened in late 2018.

Along with Nevada and Delaware, New Jersey set up its own online poker industry.

The former two countries have agreed to share players among the states for a couple of years, and the addition of NJ resulted in producing bigger tournaments and more cash games, making poker more interesting for players in all these three states.

Perhaps the gradually decreasing New Jersey online poker numbers are causing the operators to delay the launch dates of potential online poker sites in the states such as Pennsylvania and West Virginia which legalized online poker in 2017 and 2018.