For many years the New York Lottery has enjoyed a healthy revenue stream from the millions of players willing to take the terrible odds that they might actually win something. The revenue has been used constructively in many instances to fund education programs and government spending, but most of it has been used to pad their pockets no doubt.
It won’t be so easy in the future. The New York Lottery is preparing for competition for the gaming dollars from new casinos rising up. The biggest casino coming to New York will be the one at Aqueduct. It took a decade, but earlier this year, lawmakers were finally able, after countless failed attempts, to find a developer to run the Aqueduct casino property.
The New York casinos have bigger fish to fry as they will face intense competition from other Northeastern states including Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Maine, which will all compete directly with New York for gambling customers on the East Coast.
Perhaps in the near future, the New York Lottery will be looking past the casinos at another competitor on the rise. Given the push for new legislation, it could be online gambling that is the biggest contender for gaming dollars in the market. Already, Harry Reid and lawmakers in Washington are considering regulating online gambling and giving casinos that have been in operation for at least five years the right to obtain an Internet gaming license. It is expected that individual states would have the option of exempting themselves from the online gaming law.
