Despite seeing its first full year of online poker, Nevada poker revenue fell 3.23 percent to $119,904,000 in 2014. The drop ruins some optimism that was created in 2013, when Nevada land-based and online poker rooms pulled in $123,891,000. This was the first year-over-year revenue increase since 2006 to 2007 ($168 million), which was at the height of the Poker Boom.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t look to be any boom on the horizon – especially with how slow online poker is spreading throughout the United States. So what does this mean for the future of Nevada poker? Let’s take a further look at the 2014 numbers and how these figure to impact the game’s future in the desert gaming mecca.
Less Rooms and Tables
It seems like many Nevada casinos are starting to look past poker as a big source of revenue. The number of poker rooms in the state dropped from 88 to 79 rooms in 2014. In terms of overall tables, the number fell from 774 to 736 tables last year. None of these numbers look to improve this year since the Linq closed their poker room in mid-January.
Online poker not yet a savior
Nevada didn’t release overall figures on their iPoker operation from 2014. But based on the fact that only one month produced over $1 million in total revenue, we can reasonably assume that online poker isn’t even contributing 10% towards the state’s overall poker earnings. And this certainly doesn’t look to change any time soon based on how things are currently going.
First off, Ultimate Poker, which launched in April 2013, shut down in November. And Real Gaming, which opened last year, has still failed to generate any significant player traffic. This leaves WSOP.com as the state’s only legitimate site and they’re averaging 140 cash game players per hour. Given all of this, we can’t expect iPoker to truly boost overall poker revenue until more interstate pacts are signed and more states legalize the game.