Nevada – Online Poker vs Online Gambling
While it has been widely reported that Nevada has legalised online poker, the actual bill doesn’t mention poker at all.
Nevada’s online gambling bill allows multiple types of games, however, for now the state has chosen to focus on just poker
In actual fact, the bill legalises “interactive gaming”, a term vague enough to allow all kinds of online gambling from slots to blackjack and roulette.
However, for political and competitive reasons, Nevada’s industry has chosen to focus on poker. In fact the regulations written to implement online gambling in the state are restricted to poker.
Mark Nichols, an economist with the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at UNR, said that it “certainly doesn’t make us [Nevada] more competitive.
On the one hand, it could hurt us because New Jersey is offering more options. But a state may want to wade into this more slowly.”
Nevada’s restriction of online gambling to poker is also likely to have political motivation. There has been a large push in Congress to pass a federal online gambling law allowing online poker.
Nevada’s senator Harry Reid has been leading the efforts and it is likely that he would want to be seen enacting the same at state level that he is pushing for at a federal level.
However, Nevada can easily change the regulations so more games could easily be allowed if the industry demands it.
