NJ Online Poker: 3 Weeks In

December 22, 2013

New Jersey’s third week in iGaming proved to be quite eventful including developments, technology issues, and a great rise in new players.

Despite these headlines, there was a nominal fluctuation in poker traffic for the last week with NJ. PartyPoker.com being slightly dominant over WSOP.com in three consecutive weeks. However, week three was still a defining week for this state in which losers and winners emerged, system flows manifested and the big picture broadened.

Out of the 7 Atlantic City casinos, which took place in “soft play” roll-out of New Jersey, Only the Golden Nugget made it. The DGE cleared the casino last Friday when it is expected to carry out full-scale iGaming operations. However, it’s yet to be known when Golden Nugget intends to rollout its own self-branded poker platform.

The delayed entry of Golden Nugget into the online poker market of NJ may indicate a death blow. Two factors help to support this assertion:

Despite its plans to set up a poker platform at a land based facility this month, this casino is not known to be a premier platform for poker players.

Out of NJ’s 6 regulated sites, only WSOP and PartyPoker show signs of life. This creates the belief that the NJ poker community may not sustain many poker sites.

The other astounding yet greatest news of the week is that the DGE suspended PokerStars application for two years. The DGE stated that the reasons for the suspension were the pending indictment of Isai Scheinberg – PokerStars founder and the engagement of some PokerStars leaders in US gaming even after the UIGEA.

This is possibly a good image for the integrity of NJ’s iGaming industry. It is also a positive gesture for NJ.PartyPoker.com though it dashes the hopes of those who expected to see PokerStars’ player volume, great VIP structure and excellent software to the New Jersey market.

In other developments, WSOP.com planned a server switch, which was expected to create a temporary pause in action. However, the entire server experienced a crash for about 6 hours. Sadly, most of the evening’s major events were to wind up at the same time. Huge payouts were yet to be made and players visited the Two Plus Two – a dedicated forum for WSOP as well as Twitter hoping to get answers to their concerns and questions.

At first, Bill Rini, WSOP’s head of online poker asked players to check out the server outage policy of WSOP, which suggest a refund to all players affected but confusion loomed as to how much each player should get.

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