The Name Game

Glad to be back home where I’ll be settled over the next stretch, at least until December when that very last European Poker Tour stop in Prague arrives.

Got to talking with a couple of different people last week about the EPT (and LAPT and other tours) all coming to conclusions here with the end of the calendar year. Well, nominally coming to conclusions, as for the most part a lot of the same stops are still going to be featured among the new “PokerStars Championships” and “PokerStars Festivals.”

I was writing about back in September not long after the announcment was made in Barcelona about the new branding and tours.

This New Jersey festival was interesting in part because there were many folks from different tours all there, kind of like happens in the Bahamas each January (at the no-longer-named PCA).

Kind of got the sense everyone is a little sorry to see the specific tours go away, which’ll mean the records and stats associated with them will be somewhat frozen right where they are going forward. But folks also seem intrigued to see the beginning of this new schedule and the unifying of all the tours (and the start of new records and stats).

The PokerStars Festival New Jersey ultimately played out like a kind of “preseason” event, I think -- not quite what the Festivals are going to be going forward, even if sharing the same name.

Will be interesting to see, say, six months or a year from now what the thoughts are regarding it all, and whether the new names change the games or not.

Image: PokerStars Live.

Traveling Domestic

Made it back to the farm in decent shape on Saturday. Took the quick one from Malta to Munich, then only the most aggressive armrest bully I’ve ever faced in airline travel battle made the long flight back from Germany to the states less than ideal.

Was very glad to get home to the farm and be with Vera Valmore and our four-legged friends. I hated being away that long, and am not crazy about picking up again right away for another trip this week. But I’ll being staying put for a while after that.

I did follow the start of the World Series of Poker Main Event final table last night for a short while, although to be honest I didn’t want to spend my brief time at home between poker trips watching still more poker, so I only dipped in briefly to keep tabs on who was still in the sucker.

Today I’m heading back out to Atlantic City where I’ll be on hand to help cover the first PokerStars Festival, the newly-named tournament series that along with the PokerStars Championships will be replacing the regional tours starting next year. I’m actually writing from the airport, and since it is Halloween there are people wandering about dressed like Oompa Loompas among other things (see above).

It’s also the first time PokerStars has hosted a tournament in the United States since pre-Black Friday -- like just before Black Friday as the last North American Poker Tour event ended at the Mohegan Sun on April 14, 2011.

Am looking forward to this one both for the sake of curiosity and to be able to reunite with a lot of friends and colleagues, some of whom I haven’t seen in a while. Was realizing getting ready for the trip that I haven’t covered a tournament inside the U.S. or taken a domestic flight in about two years -- other than as a first leg of a trip out of the country, that is. Meanwhile I’ve gone on more than a dozen trips since then all over Central and South America and Europe.

No passport needed, then. Or adapters. Weird. Am I able to check a bag for free or what?

Talk more tomorrow from the Boardwalk.

Spring in the Garden State for PokerStars

At long last, PokerStars is returning to the United States. Or at least to part of the United States. One of the states. It’s a start.

We first started hearing about New Jersey as a possible initial post-Black Friday reentry point into the U.S. for the world’s largest poker site way, way back in late 2012, even before New Jersey finally had an online gambling bill get signed into law in late February 2013.

You might remember how Governor Chris Christie kind of surprised us with his non-veto of the bill back then, deciding at last to change his tune on the issue. (Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise to see Christie abruptly changing his mind regarding another subject earlier today.)

It was a couple of months before that PokerStars had been talking to the Atlantic Club in Atlantic City, negotiating to buy the failing casino as a prelude to getting an NJ license to offer online games. That deal fell through, and the Atlantic Club stopped just failing and failed altogether in January 2014.

In mid-2013 PokerStars partnered up with the Resorts Casino Hotel, and after New Jersey held up their application for a license later that year the Amaya purchase in July 2014 helped change things in a positive way for Stars’ prospects in the Garden State. After many months of back-and-forthing including tentative launch dates being frequently bandied about, the NJ license finally got preliminary approval last September.

Then yesterday came the news of a concrete date for PokerStars NJ to go online -- March 21, 2016, the first day of spring. PokerNews summarizes the announcement, while the Online Poker Report offers a comprehensive discussion of what happens next, including some speculative thoughts about both the near-term and long-term.

From the latter, I’m most intrigued by the prospect of a PokerStars-branded live poker room being constructed at the Resorts (the plan for which was announced some time back), as well as the possibility of live PS-sponsored festivals happening there down the road. In the meantime it’ll be interesting to see how the NJ-only site fares, knowing of course that in relative terms it’ll be super-small change like every other U.S. regulated site has necessarily been.

Image: PokerStarsNJ.

PS Gets the OK from NJ

My first thought last night upon hearing the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement had authorized Amaya to begin operating both PokerStars and Full Tilt in the Garden State was “finally.”

That such an announcement would be coming is something we began hearing not that long after New Jersey governor Chris Christie signed the state’s online gambling bill in late February 2013. Since then the likelihood of PokerStars’ return to the U.S. via Jersey has swung back and forth between just-around-the-corner to not-bloody-likely a few times before several hints over the summer punctuated by the phrase “end of the 3Q” made late September seem a real possibility again.

My second thought was that when news finally did arrive it coincidentally did so on the anniversary of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 being passed by the House and Senate (as noted in yesterday’s post). Something oddly symmetrical there, I suppose, given how the UIGEA’s history and that of PokerStars (and Full Tilt) have been intertwined over the last nine years.

After that I found myself less specifically thinking in generally positive terms about the news, not necessarily because of what will immediately come of it but rather how longer term the story of “U.S. Online Poker 2.0” will surely be a lot more interesting than it would have been otherwise. Felt like there was very little to look forward to before; now, perhaps, there are at least more possibilities, including more good ones for U.S. players wanting to play online.

That said, it’s been so long since U.S. Online Poker 1.0 -- an era that ended mid-April 2011 -- it is hard to think all that concretely about how last night’s news might conceivably lead to the reintroduction of the game online in more than just a few states here and there.

But it does feel a little like after enduring several orbits of garbage cards while sitting behind a dwindling stack, a hand with some potential has finally arrived. The attention is newly engaged, but the hand still has to be played skillfully. And luck still matters, too, going forward.

NJ Sports Betting: Leagues Throw Out the Challenge Flag

Was curious this afternoon to see what might happen up in New Jersey regarding its efforts to legalize sports betting.

You might have heard the legislature in the Garden State rushed a bill through both houses last week and a day later Governor Chris Christie signed it, and all was in place at Monmouth Park to start taking bets on the NFL games this Sunday.

Earlier this week came the complaints from the NCAA and the four major professional leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL) who took the position that the New Jersey law which would allow casinos and horse tracks to take sports bet was “in clear and flagrant violation of federal law” (the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992).

The leagues sought an injunction to keep New Jersey from going forward with sports betting, New Jersey filed a response to the complaint, then all waited to see what U.S. District Court Judge Michael A. Shipp might do. Without any sort of ruling, bets could be taken, but Shipp could step in to issue a temporary restraining order so more time could be taken to decide on the case.

And that’s what Shipp did just before the end of the business day today, although it sounds like the order only prevents bets involving the NCAA or the four major leagues, meaning they actually could take sports bets at Monmouth on golf, tennis, NASCAR, and other sports, or so points out an advisor to Monmouth. (Not sure that’s actually the case, though.)

Here’s an article in The Press of Atlantic City detailing Shipp’s late afternoon decision. For a good and quick overview of what’s happening regarding these efforts to get sports betting in New Jersey and Shipp’s decision, check out this radio interview with John Brennan of the Bergan Record. (Thanks to Grange95 for tweeting that one out, and check his blog for more good commentary on this topic.) [EDIT (added 10/25/14]: And for another interesting read, here’s Brennan delivering a blow-by-blow account the scene in Shipp’s courtroom when he gave the decision.]

In the interview, Brennan spells out how it was a little extraordinary for such a restraining order to be granted, but Shipp had a history of ruling in that direction on this issue and so his decision wasn’t a surprise. So they’re on hold a little longer in New Jersey on the sports betting front. Meanwhile they’re still playing online poker and gambling in other ways there, and of course fantasy sports continues to be enjoyed all over the nation.

Allowing sports betting in the ailing Atlantic City casinos (those that remain, anyhow) and at the horse tracks doesn’t seem terribly out of place from afar, and the leagues’ complaints against it seem disingenuous when sports betting already happens legally in Nevada (and illegally everywhere) and the leagues have continued to survive. Will remain curious to see if it ever comes about.

Ultimate Poker NJ Busts Out

The Atlantic City story this year has been something else, with four of the 12 casinos on the Boardwalk having already closed and a fifth one -- the Trump Taj Mahal -- having announced that it will likely follow suit in November.

When first hearing about the Taj possibly closing it did cross my mind that Ultimate Poker’s New Jersey site would have to find itself a new casino with which to align in order to continue in the Garden State. In New Jersey the land-based casinos get “online gambling permits” and can then partner up with technology providers who also are licensed to operate in the state. UP was the platform for Trump Taj Mahal Associates, meaning that without them Ultimate would need to partner with another casino in order to continue.

That ain’t happenin’, obviously. Late Friday the news arrived that Ultimate Gaming was both terminating its agreement with Trump Taj Mahal Associates and ceasing operations in the state (while continuing in Nevada). Their press release cited “multiple breaches” by the Trump group precipitating the break-up, the declaration of bankruptcy by TTMA a couple of weeks ago and listing of Fertitta Acquisitions (parent company of Ultimate Gaming) as a creditor owed nearly $1.5 million suggesting an obvious one.

Just two days later -- at 11:59 p.m. ET last night -- it was all over for Ultimate Poker as the New Jersey site stopped dealing hands. Players are now being told to cash out their funds, which represents one small silver lining when compared to the shutdowns of other, non-regulated sites in the past and subsequent troubles players have had retrieving their funds from them.

Of course, there wasn’t a heckuva lot happening at the Ultimate Poker New Jersey site, anyway. A week ago I was writing here about the Party Borgata site and the snafu it had during the Garden State Super Series. That got me curious about how the NJ sites were doing, and so I visited PokerScout last week and saw that while the Party site and WSOP.com’s NJ site both had 300-400 cash players (or thereabouts), Ultimate Poker had practically no one playing at all -- like just a table or two, if I recall.

Ultimate’s NJ casino site was apparently doing fairly well, earning half a milly per month in revenue. But nothing much was happening on the poker side, which makes the site’s swift closure decidedly less dramatic.

UP is doing better in Nevada, although has been behind WSOP.com’s Nevada site since shortly after the latter went online almost exactly one year ago. And the traffic in Nevada is only a fraction of what’s happening in New Jersey at the moment, making all of the numbers there very modest all around.

I have never played a hand on Ultimate Poker, having looked into it last summer while in Nevada but deciding not to bother with the hassles involved with getting up and running on the site. The fact that they still have no Mac-based client is kind of amazing, really, and has to be an obstacle that virtually ensures the site will never become more than a very minor player versus any competition whatsoever. (That screenshot is from the page that says -- just as it has for the last year-and-a-half -- that the Mac client is “in the works.”)

Speaking of, as I mentioned last week PokerStars is poised to enter New Jersey via the Amaya Gaming Group who hold a license in the state -- possibly within the next couple of weeks. And expectations are the site should easily outstrip all others immediately in terms of traffic, and in fact will become an interesting test case to see just how well a single-state site might be able to thrive.

In any case, the slow-moving start to “online poker 2.0” in the U.S. continues, moving much like a very slow-structured tournament with the stakes being almost trivial (relatively speaking). And, of course, the occasional bustouts.

West No Longer Best for WPT World Championship

Last month I was making reference to all of the new tours getting cranked up once again, with the World Poker Tour -- now in its 12th season -- among them. Only the first half of this year’s WPT schedule (which will ultimately run from August 2012 through May 2013) has been announced as yet, although I imagine the second half is more or less fully in place already.

Already announced for the final months of 2013 are events in Paris, South Africa, South Korea, Prague, and a few in the U.S. including in Jacksonville and Las Vegas. The WPT will be going back to the Playground Poker club in Kahnawake, Quebec, too, in a few months, one of the Canadian poker sites that has now found its way into the regular tourney tour schedule along with other tours’ stops.

There was some news yesterday, though, regarding the season-ending WPT World Championship which has traditionally taken place at the Bellagio ever since the tour debuted. This year that event will instead take place at the Borgata Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, which is where the WPT not coincidentally happens to be at the moment for the WPT Borgata Open.

The move made me think of a post I wrote last May about the WPT World Championship, “The Shifting Place of the WPT World Championship,” the title of which today sounds like it has a different meaning than the one I had intended.

I was speaking figuratively, of course, referring to how the once prestigious tournament had receded in significance over recent years. In that post I noted in particular how the turnouts had declined dramatically since peaking in 2007 with 639 entries. Last year there were just 146 entries in the event, with 26 of those coming from players re-entering, thus meaning there were only 120 players involved. Meanwhile, the fields for many other big buy-in events have been growing over that same period.

Those shrinking numbers were no doubt a big part of the reason for the WPT making this move. In the announcement yesterday, WPT President Adam Pliska referred to the Borgata having been “home to four of the five biggest tournaments in WPT history,” and indeed it does seem relatively certain the event will have a better chance of thriving in its new location.

Initial response to the decision to move the season-ending eastward was met with what sounded like a lot of positive buzz from players over Twitter. Part of that positivity being expressed the Borgata was inspired by criticisms of the Bellagio, which has certainly fallen from favor over the last several years as a destination for both tourney types and cash game players.

Thinking beyond the relative merits of particular casinos and poker rooms, though, I wonder if the WPT moving its championship might prove a significant moment in the larger Nevada-versus-New Jersey discussion already ongoing thanks to online poker legislation and the concomitant launching of casino-affiliated sites. In other words, will there be more “shifting” to talk about occurring in the poker landscape, perhaps sooner than later?

New Jersey! (Is It True?)

I’ll admit it. Until early yesterday, I continued to imagine the possibility that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie could execute some sort of massive slowroll. That's right... to imagine (crazily) that somehow Christie might not go along with the newly-submitted online gambling bill incorporating the recommended changes he’d made when conditionally vetoing an earlier version a few weeks back.

Was an absurd prospect to ponder, really. Most legislators in the state had already made clear that they were comfortable with the changes suggested by Christie. And in fact when it came to voting on the revised bill yesterday, both houses passed it by wide margins (68-5 in the Assembly and 35-1 in the Senate). Then Christie signed it immediately, unlike the previous two times he’d had a similar bill before him to sign and took a full 45 days before deciding how to play his hand.

So New Jersey follows Nevada and Delaware into the new, exciting but uncertain world of online gambling. Regulators in NJ will soon start to work sorting out the details of licensing and ultimately paving the way for sites to get up and running, a process that likely is going to take at least a year, perhaps even a couple.

Right now only the dozen casinos in Atlantic City will be able to go for licenses. Those who do will be able to offer all of the same games online that they have in their casinos. Thus like Delaware, New Jersey’s law covers a variety of online gambling games, while Nevada’s law is sticking with poker only.

New Jersey is also giving itself that option of entering into interstate compacts with other legally willing states, which obviously will mean a lot when it comes to poker and building big enough player pools to achieve liquidity.

Also of interest is the Rational Group’s bid to acquire the Atlantic Club casino which will be decided upon by NJ’s Casino Control Commission sometime this spring. The Rational Group, of course, is a collection of companies that includes PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, and thus should their application to purchase the Atlantic Club be approved, that’ll be a step toward PokerStars and Full Tilt essentially finding a way back into the U.S. via New Jersey.

(Have to say, I like the idea of an entity called the “Rational Group” coming in and helping remove all of these irrational thoughts I seem to have about online poker and its future in this country.)

There’s a lot that will need to fall in place, obviously, before anyone is playing online poker in New Jersey. Before that day we’ll probably see some games going live within the next few months in Nevada. And we’ll continue to hear more about other states considering their options for joining in as well.

Now I find myself experiencing a different sort of absurd, worst-case-type imagining. Again, I have no basis for it -- other than six-and-a-half years or so of upset expectations and disappointment, I suppose -- but I find myself dreading some unforeseen, federal-level swooping in to stop everything from going forward.

Unfounded applesauce, I know. Like a weak-tight player crazily fearing that his opponent is holding some huge hand, sitting there slow playing while holding the nuts. But I feel like I’ve been conditioned somehow to think this way. Gotta unlearn.

At least it will be a while before any online poker games will happen. Maybe by the time they do I’ll have gotten over such instinctive feelings of dread when it comes to legislation and the online poker in the U.S.

Maybe by then I’ll be thinking more about what it means actually to play poker.

More from New Jersey

I remain in blog-on-the-go mode this morning as Vera and I are planning a quick day trip over to New York City. By the way, that to the left is a little house-of-cards art piece found in one of the buildings we visited yesterday at Princeton.

As I was talking about yesterday, this week we’ve been visiting New Jersey, the place where some in the poker world -- at least here in the U.S. -- have been directing their attention of late in anticipation of Governor Chris Christie’s decision regarding that online gambling bill.

Wrote some last week about the bill (A2578) and how it had been passed by both the NJ State Assembly and Senate and for a while now has been sitting on the governor’s desk awaiting either a signature to make it law, a veto, or no action at all (which would make it law by default). The deadline for Christie is a week from today, so soon we’ll know whether or not New Jersey will be following Nevada and Delaware into the world of intrastate online gambling.

Then again, we might not. Was reading around on a couple of local sites up here to see what the latest scuttlebutt might be, and saw some talk regarding the possibility that Christie could actually respond with a “conditional veto” of the bill. That suggestion comes primarily from Richard Gros who publishes Global Gambling Business magazine and who has some behind-the-scenes sources in Atlantic City feeding him info.

Gros tweeted about the “conditional veto” possibility yesterday, and John Brennan elaborated further on the idea for his “Meadowlands Matters” column. There Brennan explains how a conditional veto is just what it sounds like -- a veto of a bill that isn’t quite final, but rather objects to part of a bill and might also propose amendments, then gives it back to the legislators to perhaps pass it again and give the governor another opportunity to sign the bill into law.

In other words, a conditional veto wouldn’t quite mean starting over from scratch for the bill, but it would still probably add at least a few more months here to the process (maybe more) before any sort of bill might become law.

Brennan’s speculation goes on to consider the possibility that Christie might in fact want to pare the sucker down to just online poker. Taking those reservations about problem gambling he expressed during that “Ask the Governor” program last week, Brennan thinks maybe Christie might “prefer to tip just one toe in the water at first” with online gambling and allow an online poker-only bill before committing to anything more significant.

Then again, the delay could also just allow Christie to “tank” a little longer on this one -- or perhaps to continue pretending to tank -- which might also be in his interest as he’s up for re-election this fall.

In any case, I wonder how much the bill’s proponents would be excited by a poker-only bill, given how the revenue created by such would necessarily amount to only a small percentage of what a broader law permitting other casino games to go online would draw. A2578’s proponents -- including State Senator Raymond Lesniak -- are all about job creation and the economic benefits of the bill (as Lesniak talked about with PokerNews last week). Having online poker in the state might amount to something, but like the poker rooms in the casinos it ain’t gonna be that much of a cash creator on it’s own.

Will continue to stay tuned on this one. Meanwhile like I say Vera and I will probably end up in a museum or two today over in NYC, looking at paintings and sculptures and thinking about the past. Not the recent past in which online poker was part of the picture, that is, but earlier.

Tankers Always Fold; or, Gov. Christie and the NJ Bill

One sorta-truism a person comes to recognize after years of observing poker tournaments is how players who tank for a long time very often will fold their hands. I’m pretty sure F-Train was the one who long ago first articulated the maxim to me as we both were watching a player take several minutes to decide on his action...

“Tankers always fold.”

I’ve been to Atlantic City on a couple of occasions over the last two years to cover poker tournaments. The first was in March 2011 when I helped report on a WSOP Circuit event at Caesars. Then I went back last month to Harrah’s Resort AC for another WSOP-C event. Both times there was a lot of buzz going around concerning possible online gambling legislation in New Jersey and its prospects for being signed into law.

Actually, the first time I was there the conversations were all centered on the fact that Governor Chris Christie had just a few days before vetoed an online gambling bill, having waited until the last possible moment to do so before it would have become law by default. Both the NJ State Assembly and Senate had passed the bill by wide margins, with more than 85% of legislators voting in favor in both cases. But Christie was not ready to make New Jersey the first state to pass its own online gambling bill, and so all the talk was of the what-might-have-been variety.

At the time the governor -- a former U.S. attorney -- cited several reasons for his reticence regarding the bill, including questions about its constitutionality within his state. Many commentators additionally believed Christie was unwilling to sign the bill without some assurance that doing so would not conflict with federal laws concerning online gambling, including the Wire Act.

Months passed, and in December 2011 that memo emanating from the offices of the U.S. Department of Justice surfaced, a memo that revised an opinion regarding the Wire Act. The memo indicated that it was the DOJ’s position that the half-century old law only applied to sports betting, and thus when 2012 began efforts were redoubled by legislators in many states to try to forward online gambling legislation, including in New Jersey.

Nevada had already by then become the first state to get a bill signed into law (in mid-2011), and so when the DOJ memo arrived that state was already in position to begin fielding applications to grant licenses. Delaware followed suit in June 2012, and a few other states have been considering various kinds of online gambling legislation as well.

Meanwhile, at the end of the year New Jersey was again considering another online gambling bill during my visit early last month. Soon afterwards legislators again passed a bill, the vote being nearly unanimous this time, and as 2012 concluded most of the reports regarding the bill were suggesting that without the Wire Act obstacle, Christie was “likely” to sign the bill into law in short order.

But three weeks into January that likelihood has begun to dim, and now Christie has but a couple of weeks left in the 45-day period within which he is to act on the bill (i.e., sign or veto it) or not act and see it become law by default. He gave a state of the state speech a little over a week ago without mentioning the issue, prompting consternation by NJ state senator Ray Lesniak, the bill’s leading sponsor. Lesniak then told Card Player a couple of days ago that while he doesn’t know what Christie will do with regard to the bill -- other than likely wait until the last minute again -- he isn’t terribly hopeful.

Last night Christie did finally opine publicly about the bill and online gambling, and his comments added further reason not to be optimistic about the governor’s signing A2578 into law.

Each month, Christie appears on a Trenton FM station to field questions for an hour on a show called “Ask the Governor.” Not too surprisingly, a lot of the questions during last night’s show concerned rebuilding efforts in the state following Hurricane Sandy. But toward the end of the hour, a caller named Joseph did manage to get through to ask about Christie’s intentions regarding the bill.

Christie said he was still tanking on that one, adding that when it came to online gambling, there are “two things I’m concerned about.”

The governor’s first concern is that legalizing online gambling “may drive traffic away from Atlantic City” brick-and-mortar casinos. “If people can gamble in their own homes on their laptops, why are they going to Atlantic City?” That’s an idea we’ve heard brought up before (and roundly refuted by the bill’s proponents).

His second concern had to do with “setting up a whole new generation of addicted gamblers.” Echoing a sentiment voiced by the ultra-conservative wing of his party with whom he’s been more than willing to butt heads in recent weeks, Christie suggested that “if you can sit on the edge of your bed on your laptop and gamble away the paycheck, that’s a lot different than making the decision to go down to Atlantic City to gamble in a casino.” We’ve heard that one many times before, too. (I’m remembering Jay Leno follow a similar line of argument on his show back in the fall of 2010 when Barney Frank was his guest.)

Christie noted that these two concerns were “in part the reasons that I vetoed the bill before, in addition to some ways that it was constructed that made no sense, either.” He then concluded his response by saying that he’ll probably be making a decision regarding A2578 “in the next couple of days.”

Christie didn’t say whether or not he had problems with the bill’s construction this time around, nor did he mention anything about its constitutionality or any potential conflicts with the feds. Rather Christie’s concerns have more to do with less specific, hard-to-prove notions about the bill’s possible effects on the New Jersey economy as well as what would happen to a certain percentage of its citizens whose problem gambling may lead them to self-inflicted ruin.

Christie is up for re-election this coming November. He also has become a national figure and potential Republican candidate for president in 2016. He’s a popular figure both locally and nationwide. Whereas the two concerns he raised last night regarding online gambling were somewhat vague, the potential political consequences of his supporting an online gambling bill perhaps seem more clear. Signing A2578 would become something he’d have to answer for on the campaign trail. In other words, the former lawyer would not only have to change his apparent position on the issue, but he’d have to become much more convincing when arguing against the very objections he’s currently raising regarding it.

All of which is to say, I’d be more than surprised if a veto weren’t coming, perhaps even sooner than just before the Feb. 7 deadline. Thus New Jersey will not be challenging Nevada’s leading status when it comes to online gambling in the near future, or perhaps for many years to come, either.

I suppose we might step back from this story and remark on how the idea of gambling online has perhaps reached a stage of cultural acceptance, just like doing other things online (communicating, banking, shopping, receiving news/entertainment, etc.) has become customary and even second nature to many. Thus might high numbers of legislators be willing to vote in favor of bills that would allow for the activity (within the highly circumscribed parameters of government-imposed licensing and regulation, of course).

But are we at a point where a would-be presidential candidate -- one who is legitimately positioned within one of the two major parties to be forwarded as their representative on a national scale -- might gamble his future on online gambling? I don’t think so.

No, if Christie was going to do something other than fold this hand again, he would’ve acted already.

2013 and the Fall and Rise of Online Poker in the U.S.

So Hero Poker did indeed step aside yesterday. I played a little more on the site during the late afternoon just for kicks, but signed off before dinner time. Following advice delivered by Hero CEO David Jung in that 2+2 “player relations” thread, I converted my remaining VIP points to cash before I did as it sounded as though that probably wouldn’t be a possibility later on.

It was at some point a little after 6 p.m. Eastern time yesterday that the shutdown of Hero occurred, after which one was greeted with a software update and message when one tried to log in. The message gave a web address to visit for instructions regarding what to do next in order to have one’s balance transferred to one of three other Merge skins.

That page offers little more than a list of the three sites -- Carbon, Sportsbook.com, and Players Only -- and an email address (support@mergegaming.eu) to send a message with one’s choice. It isn’t at all clear what details are needed other than one’s usernames, although I believe one needs to send the message via the email addy associated with one’s account.

I went ahead and sent an email, choosing Carbon simply because I already have an account there. I vaguely recall Sportsbook.com having redirected its U.S. players to a different skin late last year, so that didn’t seem like a good choice. And I’d never even heard of Players Only. I’m guessing it will probably take several days, perhaps even longer, for my funds to surface over on Carbon.

On a day when jokes about the apocalypse and the “end of days” are reaching a crescendo, it is starting to feel a lot like the end has finally arrived as far as the Merge network and these last vestiges of the pre-Black Friday variety of sorta-legal-sorta-not online poker in the U.S. are concerned. Or at least the beginning of the end, anyway, as I suppose these last few Merge skins and other sites will limp along like short stacks for a while until they are finally all blinded out.

Coincidentally, yesterday saw other major developments occur as far as the resurrection of online poker in the U.S. is concerned, one of which was the New Jersey State Senate passing by a wide margin that long-discussed online gambling bill (A2578). Thirty-three NJ senators voted in favor of the bill while only three opposed, and now all that is needed is Governor Chris Christie's signature for the bill to become law.

The state reached a similar point back in the spring of 2011, with Christie actually vetoing the bill rather than sign it. But following that revised opinion from the Department of Justice regarding the Wire Act only applying to sports betting that surfaced almost exactly one year ago, Christie has been suggesting a different attitude toward the possibility of his state following the lead of both Nevada and Delaware and also getting involved with online gambling.

Should Christie sign the NJ bill into law, we’ll no doubt begin hearing more regarding that story from a couple of weeks ago concerning PokerStars’ interest in buying the Atlantic Club Casino Hotel in Atlantic City.

Meanwhile, Nevada continues to approve licenses to online poker businesses, and in fact yesterday saw Caesars Interactive Entertainment to the list of licensees. It sounds like Caesars will be partnering with 888 to launch a WSOP-branded online site early next year (once 888 gets their NV license approval). All of which means as these last “rogue” sites (or whatever you want to call them) fade into oblivion, a new world of online poker in the U.S. will likely be emerging in their wake.

I’m remembering writing a typically cynical post back in February of this year commenting on all of the speculation swirling regarding 2013 as a target date for online poker’s return to America. But as this year comes to a close, it certainly appears next year will be an especially interesting one with regard to online poker in the U.S., even if it doesn’t exactly bring a full-fledged reprise of the game so many of us enjoyed for so many years before.

Speaking of still enjoying online poker, the last two events of Season 2 of the Hard-Boiled Poker Home Games series will happen this Sunday night at 20:00 & 21:00 ET. I’m making Event No. 19 a regular no-limit hold’em event with a little bit deeper starting stack than usual (5,000 instead of 3,000), and Event No. 20 will be a H.O.R.S.E. event.

Through 18 tournaments, our buddy Kevmath leads the Season 2 standings followed by Nasal Drip and Season 1 winner thejim2020. The top three finishers win books, with the first-place winner getting to choose between Roll the Bones by David Schwartz, Reading Poker Tells by Zach Elwood, and Think Like a Pro by Byron Jacobs. (See this post for more about the books.) The second-place finisher will then get to choose from the remaining two titles, with the third-place finisher getting the last book.

For those playing on Sunday, see you there, as I expect that’ll be the only place I’ll be playing any online poker (for play chips) over the next few days at least. Perhaps, though, next year will be offering at least some of us more opportunities.

(And meanwhile, if you’re looking for something else to do while waiting for the apocalypse not to happen, you can go vote in BLUFF Magazine’s 2013 Reader's Choice Awards where Hard-Boiled Poker is among the nominees for “Favorite Poker Blog.”)

New Jersey to Join the Online Gambling Race?

I remember arriving in Atlantic City last spring to help cover the WSOP-Circuit event there. Just a few days before I got there, New Jersey governor Chris Christie had vetoed a bill that would have allowed for instrastate online gambling via websites run by AC casinos, and there was still a bit of buzz going around about the news.

Had the bill made it past Christie’s desk, New Jersey would have been the first state to pass such a bill. As it happened, Nevada would gain that distinction a few months later when it passed A.B. 258.

At the time, Christie had said he had “significant concerns” with the proposed bill, including uncertainty about whether it satisfied certain requirements in the state’s constitution. Christie also noted at the time that many New Jersey residents were in fact opposed to the state offering online gambling -- polls then indicated they were about 2-to-1 against -- and thus wasn’t sure if the bill reflected “the public’s sentiment.”

There were no references to federal laws in the message accompanying Christie’s veto. That is to say, he mentioned nothing then about the Wire Act, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, or other federal laws that might have raised concern for a state wishing to pass a bill such as the one he’d chosen to veto.

There was talk even then about the value of getting out ahead of this issue -- i.e., for New Jersey to be first in line when it came to passing such legislation and thus getting the infrastructure together to start offering online gambling before other states could. But Christie weighed the risk against the potential reward and decided folding the better option.

Cut to the first week of 2012. As the previous year was coming to a close, a revised opinion from the Department of Justice regarding the Wire Act and its applicability to non-sports betting was made public, seemingly removing a possible obstacle to states setting up their own online gambling sites.

Nevada, having passed its online gambling bill six months before, has approved regulations for licensing companies to offer online gambling, and many have already applied. Approvals of those applications are expected to come in April.

And now, after playing it safe for several months, New Jersey appears ready to play.

State senator Raymond Lesniak had reintroduced the a new version of the bill in August with revisions responding to some of Christie's concerns about it opening the door for more than just AC casino-run websites. As the new year began, Lesniak again attempted to get the bill (S-3019) considered before the current legislative session ends next Monday, although it doesn’t appear that is going to happen.

However, it does look like the bill could well come up for a vote and could possibly be passed during the first part of the next session (i.e., within a couple of weeks). This week Lesniak met with the governor and came away confident that Christie is likely on board with the new bill. “I expect that we can get it through the Legislature and signed by the Governor within the first few weeks of the new session,” said Lesniak in a statement issued on Wednesday.

I haven’t examined the previous New Jersey bill (that Christie vetoed), nor the revised one that sounds like it may pass, so I don’t know the specifics of how it was changed to assuage the governor’s concerns. In any case, it seems clear that the DOJ’s new stance has ignited something here, even if Christie hadn’t mentioned anything about federal laws regarding online gambling last spring when vetoing the earlier bill.

Meanwhile, several other states are starting to talk in similarly serious ways about offering online gambling in the wake of that revised DOJ opinion. As Mike Sexton would say, it looks like we have ourselves a race situation, Vince.