Last spring, Nevada made huge waves for being the first US state to offer legalized and regulated online poker. But for all of the buzz generated last year, Nevada’s poker market has been a fairly big disappointment so far. While the Silver State has been waiting for a third poker site to come before releasing monthly revenue figures, most estimate that the market can’t be generating any more than $500,000 per month – a far cry from the $9.5 million that New Jersey poker sites turned out in January.
So now, we have South Point Casino’s Real Gaming enter the fray, which means two things:
- We’ll finally get to see how Nevada’s online poker market is doing each month.
- Nevada has a third poker site that’s capable of raising their revenue numbers.
Of course, the second point is a big ‘if.’ According to PokerScout, WSOP.com leads the Nevada market with an average of 120 cash game players per hour. Ultimate Poker is second with 70 players per hour, making for a total market average of 190 players. These numbers are roughly in line with what we were seeing from Nevada several months ago, which means that the market hasn’t really grown.
So now we come to the matter of Real Gaming, which could help expand the market and/or simply cannibalize the existing one. The first thing to consider here is that Nevada is a far different state than New Jersey. Their population is only 2.75 million and there are no major metropolitan areas near Nevada’s borders, meaning fewer people cross over just to play online poker. Contrast this to New Jersey, which boasts a population of almost 8.67 million and closely borders New York City and Philadelphia.
Moving to a positive factor, though, South Point is a pretty large casino and they help with the internet poker marketing efforts. This is key to convincing some of Las Vegas’ 37 million annual visitors to play more online poker in their hotel rooms.
Taking everything into account, we can probably expect a small increase in the Nevada player pool once Real Gaming really gets going. But we’re also looking at a situation where Real Gaming will steal some players from the WSOP and Ultimate player pools.