With over 150,000 accounts created in two months, the New Jersey online poker market are already off to a good start. But one problem that’s plagued poker sites in the Garden State is issues with verifying players’ locations through the internet (a.k.a. geolocation).
New Jersey poker rooms adhere to strict requirements, whereby they must verify that real money players are within state boundaries. However, the geolocation technology hasn’t worked too well because it’s preventing many people who are actually in New Jersey from playing. In order to solve this problem, a few NJ poker rooms are sending free wifi adapters to players.
These small adapters strengthen wifi signals from a computer, thus allowing poker sites to better verify a player’s location. Party Poker have already shipped the adapters to customers who’ve contacted their Facebook or customer service department about connection issues. 888 and WSOP also have plans to send these out to players.
It won’t be cheap for poker rooms to buy and ship wifi adapters to everybody who complains about connection issues. The cheaper adapters still cost around $10 and there’ll also be shipping costs involved too. Plus, in the early weeks of New Jersey online poker, it was estimated that only 25% of users were successfully logging on and playing for real money. This percentage is likely much higher today, but that still leaves a lot of people who might want adapters.
In the long run, though, it definitely seems worth the cost and effort to do whatever it takes to keep players connected. Some players were being disconnected in the middle of tournaments due to the location verification issues. And there’s a good chance that some of them may be turned off from NJ online poker as a result. So the goal moving forward is to continue smoothing out the geolocation difficulties and keep current and future players happy.