New Jersey’s regulated online gambling market posted its eighth straight month of +$20m revenue despite online poker’s returns tumbling nearly one-fifth.
Figures released Wednesday by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) show state-licensed online gambling sites generated revenue of $20.5m in October, an improvement of 23.4% from the $16.7m earned in the same month last year, while roughly flat from September 2017’s $20.4m.
The gains were entirely due to the casino vertical, which shot up 30.5% to $18.63m, while online poker tumbled 19% to $1.93m. The poker figure was roughly flat on a sequential basis, and still better than the June 2017 low-water mark of $1.73m, but still…
For the year-to-date, the market’s total online gambling revenue is up 26.7% to $204.2m, with the casino vertical rising nearly one-third to $183.7m while poker was down more than 8% to $20.5m. The overall YTD online revenue figure is almost exactly 10% of the brick-and-mortar gaming revenue generated in the same period by Atlantic City’s seven surviving casino operators.
In what has become an all-too-familiar pattern, the Golden Nugget casino’s online operations – which include Betfaircasino.com and Playsugarhouse.com – topped all comers with revenue of $6.14m in October, within spitting distance of the Nugget’s market record performance of $6.2m set this July.
The Borgata casino’s family of sites – which now includes PlayMGM-branded casino and poker sites along with NJ.PartyPoker.com and PalaCasino.com – was a strong revenue runner-up with $4.18m, of which $627k came via poker operations.
Resorts Digital Gaming – whose partner sites include PokerStarsNJ.com and MoheganSunCasino.com – won the dogfight for third place with revenue of $3.47m ($2.7m casino, $782k poker), just beating out the $3.46m generated by the Tropicana’s casino-only offering.
That left poor Caesars Interactive Entertainment New Jersey – under whose umbrella the 888.com and WSOP.com brands take shelter – as cellar-dweller with $3.31m, of which $525k came via poker.