Six New Jersey Casinos Approved for Full Internet Gambling
On Monday, six casinos in New Jersey were approved to offer full internet gambling to the general public following a five-day soft launch. According to the Associated Press and other outlets, “The six casinos approved are the BorgataHotel Casino and Spa, the TropicanaCasino and Resort, Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort, Bally’s Atlantic City, and CaesarsAtlantic City.”
Borgata has partnered with bwin.party in New Jersey as its software provider, while Tropicana has teamed with Gamesys. Betfair and Ultimate Gaming have partnered with the two Trump properties, while Bally’s and Caesars are both using software from 888. A variety of geo-location issues plagued the state’s soft launch period, but gaming officials have apparently approved a full launch for the half-dozen properties.
Full wagering is permitted as of 12:01am Eastern Time on Tuesday. According to the Washington Post, the number of players who had logged in during the soft launch period topped 10,000 “fairly early during the test.” Each site was constrained to a maximum of 500 players at any one time.
BorgataPoker.com was offering a free $20 during sign-up, but had not updated its website to reflect its post-soft launch status as of the time of writing. WSOP.com announced a special Online Championship series scheduled for January and February for New Jersey players that begins with a $250,000 invitational freeroll on January 19. There’s a separate $250,000 freeroll on the docket for February 2. PartyPoker’s New Jersey site rolled out a high-stakes promotion called New Jersey’s Next Poker Millionaire.
On PocketFives’ New Jersey poker community page, players were discussing how to deal with the geo-location issues that have cropped up, which seemed to involve disabling any software that connected to another computer or server. As one New Jersey user put it, “I’m not tech savvy at all and have gotten on both Borgata/Party and WSOP. Only thing I had to do was disable GoToMeeting, which was running on the background on my machine.”
One other New Jersey player advised, “They locate you by what WiFi signals are around you. If you are in the middle of a farm with no WiFi signals for miles, you just won’t be able to play online.”
We’ll keep you posted with the latest New Jersey news right here on PocketFives.
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