If you play on WSOP.com in Nevada or New Jersey, then you’ll be interested to hear the thoughts of Bill Rini (pictured), the site’s Head of Online Poker and longtime friend of our online poker community. With word that WSOP.com will be running plenty of qualifiers for this year’s World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, hosting an on-site Grind Room at the Rio, and allowing cage deposits, we wanted to catch up with Rini to talk about the New Jersey and Nevada markets and educating the general public.

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PocketFives: Thank you for joining us. WSOP.com has been awarding a ton of WSOP seats so far via satellites and we understand a lot more will be up for grabs.

Bill Rini: The response has been good. We plan on awarding seats throughout the WSOP. We’ll have at least one qualifier every day during the WSOP for the next day’s event. Every evening, you can go on and try to take a shot at the next day’s event. We’ll start with the Casino Employees’ event and run it throughout the entire WSOP.

PocketFives: What are your overall expectations for the Nevada market in 2014?

Bill Rini: I don’t think anyone knew how to size our market correctly, so that’s why some of the revenue estimates didn’t pan out. We have seen where the market is and are trying to expand it. We’re happy with the way things are playing out, though.

The market expected everything to be a big explosion like it was in 2006, but I don’t think we ever saw it like that. Instead, we saw things as being gradual. It’s hard after everyone got scared away from the poker market in 2006 and 2011 to tell them it’s regulated now and they should come back and play. We knew there would be a ramp-up period for people to regain confidence in the industry.

PocketFives: Talk about the process of educating the general public about regulated online poker.

Bill Rini: There is going to be a ramp-up period in the US unless there’s some Chris Moneymaker-like event that happens. We plan on being here 20 years from now and are looking long-term. This industry changes way too much to set any expectations about the future. We went from one of the first regulated online poker rooms in the US to having signed compacts in less than a year here in Nevada.

PocketFives: Speaking of the compact between Delaware and Nevada, we heard it could launch this summer. What can you tell us about a timeline?

Bill Rini: The biggest obstacle for the compact is that there aren’t any poker rooms to share the liquidity. 888 is running the poker in Delaware, but has not launched one of their brands in Nevada yet. That would need to happen first. Two companies would need to share a backend system in order to work together. There are a lot of technical issues that haven’t been worked out.

PocketFives: One of the main obstacles to liquidity in Nevada and New Jersey has been geo-locating players and having successful deposits. Has that learning curve lessened?

Bill Rini: Geo-location is a technology that’s constantly improving and the regulators are becoming more comfortable with making tweaks here and there that improve the customer experience. You have regulators being overly cautions about making sure people from outside those states don’t play. I think the geo-location is fairly good, it’s improving, and there are more vendors entering the market that handle it.

You’ll have an issue with depositing until all banks get on board with processing. Some banks just don’t want to facilitate those transactions right now. Many banks have been receptive to the message, but banks don’t always move at the same pace as gaming. For them, they are accepting a level of risk. It ends up being a cash transaction and they are trying to figure out how to manage that risk.

PocketFives: Are there any software updates planned for WSOP.com?

Bill Rini: We have a few things going on, a lot of which are behind-the-scenes things like allowing for cage deposits and withdrawals and emigrating some of the features and technology we have in New Jersey that we weren’t able to update during the trial phase in Nevada. During the summer, there will be an update to the backend to bring it up to speed with what we have in New Jersey.

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