11-CASINO

Will they say “yay” or will they say “nay” has been massive online casino news in the last couple of weeks; with the US state of New Jersey poised to possibly pass a bill legalizing online gambling. The reason for this state even considering the move is due to the fact that much of their economy is based on gambling activities. For those of you who don’t know it, Atlantic City is in New Jersey, and gambling activities in many spheres of this industry have been falling off pretty sharply. To cut a long story short, the Senator Lesnaik bill went up for the vote last Monday and the answer was a resounding “YAY”!

This bill will legalise all forms of gambling online in New Jersey State and the vote was a unanimous 29 to 5. This ultimately means that residents of the state and foreigners will be allowed to legally gamble at online casinos, as long as the servers of those casinos are located in Atlantic City, NJ. This creates a whole new set of possibilities; Atlantic City has a ton of land based casinos, and so far the only land operator who has dared to venture into online gambling has been the gambling giant Harrah’s. However their efforts have obviously still been hampered by UIGEA!

As one can probably imagine, NJ will now become the first US online gambling licensing jurisdiction and one can also safely assume that Atlantic City casinos will get the first pick of the online licenses granted. Heck they just need to park a server in their hotel/casino basement, lock it up good and sound, and translate what they are doing on the casino floor, to an online situation. They don’t even need to do that, one can also assume that these businesses already have central server facilities, so, they just partition off a section of their hardware server and create virtual server space for their online casinos and clients. The possibilities and options are endless, but the point is that these operations are already well-positioned to enter this market quite inexpensively and with very little fuss.

What is also interesting to contemplate, is the fact that online casino software companies must be punting like mad for this business; there are Wynn resorts, Trumps, Hiltons, Bally’s, Tropicana’s and other casino resort operators situated in this city as well as Harrah’s. One would certainly think that judging by the popularity of online casino operations, all of these casino brands and any others not mentioned, will want to get in on the action. The same applies to software companies such as Microgaming, Real Time Gaming and Playtech brands. These plus others already offer land casino games, the same as they offer online casino games, in particular for electronic games such as slots and video poker.

According to the bill, the term “Online Gambling” includes activities such as “poker, roulette, baccarat, blackjack, craps, big six wheel, slot machines, mini baccarat, Red Dog, Pai Gow, and Sic Bo, or any variations or composites of these games. Online casino software operators, have already got hundreds of electronic options of these game to offer to Atlantic City operators.