This Week in Gambling

New Jersey sports betting has surpassed Nevada for the first time, as more money was bet there than the sports books in Las Vegas. New Jersey took in over $318 million in action, narrowly passing the books in Nevada at $317 million. Earlier, there was potential that the celebration in the Garden State would be short-lived, with Trenton lawmakers and Gov. Phil Murphy at the brink of a government shutdown that would have impacted racetracks, sportsbooks and casinos. But Murphy later in the day said he would avoid a shutdown and sign a budget by the Sunday deadline. Sports betting was…

Michigan online gambling legislation is being opposed by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Whitmer is at odds with the bill’s sponsor over her belief that an online gaming market would cannibalize the state’s online and retail lottery revenues, draining money from school programs. “I’ve said very clearly, over and over again, that protecting the School Aid Fund, ensuring that we get every dollar back into the education of our kids is my top priority,” Whitmer told Michigan Radio this week. “So I’m going to have a hard time supporting anything that doesn’t protect that goal.” In 2018, having united Michigan’s disparate…

Despite the decision of a Federal Judge, the DOJ Wire Act plans are still moving forward. They look to enforce their opinion that the Act applies to online gambling and poker… but now some Congressmen are threatening the Justice Department ability to act upon those plans. We also have stories about sports betting in Maine, the failure of mobile betting in New York and the status of betting on sports in Colorado.     Hello friends and This Week in Gambling, I’m J Todd. You know the online gambling industry has been fighting with the US government for years… more…

The seemingly never ending battles between California cardrooms and tribal casino operators operators rages on. After years of not being able to get together for online poker, the fight over “house-banked games” has taken center state. This week, the US District Court for the Eastern District of California dismissed a lawsuit filed by three of the state’s gaming tribes who accused the state government of violating the tribes’ gaming compacts. Specifically, the tribes argued that the state violated exclusivity provisions of the compacts by allowing commercial cardrooms to offer house-banked games, in which players play against the house (blackjack) rather…

Saying that the World Series of Poker is having a record start is to seriously downplay the numbers. A record number of entries, 28,371 of them, was received for the “Big 50” no-limit hold’em tournament held earlier this month on the opening weekend. The entries, which represented 17,970 unique participants, was the most ever for a live poker tournament. The $500 buy-in event was spread over four days of starting flights and was “rake-free”. It gave participants a 50,000 starting chip stack and 50-minute playing levels. The overwhelming response generated a $13,509,435 total prize pool, far surpassing the $5-million guarantee….

Players in the Empire State will be stuck traveling to casinos upstate if they want to bet on sports as Senator Addabbo’s mobile gambling bill failed to pass the New York Assembly. The Senator tweeted that he saw no clear reason why the state could not implement mobile sports betting in 2019. The prospects of the bill passing in the Assembly were always seen as slim, with the Speaker of the chamber Carl Heastie of the opinion that a constitutional amendment was necessary to allow mobile betting. “NY will be stuck like a disabled car on the shoulder, while we…