New Jersey is one of the three states in the US that currently allows their residents to gamble online for real money, along with Nevada and Delaware. What’s more, the Garden State even publishes monthly revenue reports for their land casinos as well as the online gambling sites that operate in the state. There’s a few things we can take away from those reports.
1) Poker is the far less profitable for the house than casino games, especially slot machines. This holds true across all the casinos, land or online.
The Borgata Casino is Atlantic City is a highly popular destination for poker pros – this is attested by the $1.165 million poker generated for the house in revenue just in June. But it’s still just a mere 1.94% of the total revenue. That $1.1 mil, although more than poker produced for any of the other casinos in New jersey, is dwarfed by the money Borgata made on "table and other games", $17.593 million; or, even more so, by the $41.077 million they made on slot machines.
There’s not a single casino in the report where poker came even close to generate as much revenue as other casino games. This is due to the fact poker is the only game where the players don’t play against the house, but each other. The casinos solely rely on the rake, usually around 5% per pot for cash games and 10% per ticket for tournament fees to make their profit, the vast majority of the money on the table goes to the players. Meanwhile, in the case of slots and black jack for example, the house takes all the lost stakes.
As we mentioned, this observation applies to online gambling as well. In June all the online casinos in New Jersey made $1.736 million on poker combined, and $18.498 million on other casino games.
2) Land casinos still beat online casinos in terms of revenue, by a wide a margin.
Online poker has grown in popularity immensely, especially during the big "Poker Boom" between 2003 and 2006. Yet online casinos still fall far behind land-based gambling houses when it comes to money generated. The discrepancy is the smallest with poker, however. When it comes to Online Casino New Jersey offers the most action on casino.borgata.com. The website pulled in $3.887 million in June 2017, meanwhile over the same time period the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City made $59.836 million.
Please note that this sum does not include food and beverage or accommodation sold by the casino. Although online gambling is still growing in popularity, the social experience of playing in a real casino still beats it – question is, for how long.
