Foxwoods Resort Casino in Ledyard, Connecticut recently hosted the Indian Gaming Association Mid-Year Conference, and the topic of online poker was discussed and summarily dismissed as a non-starter at least for the time being.
Folding on Poker
Retail and online sports betting, as well as retail and online casino gambling, are legal in Connecticut and the two Native American tribes controlling most of the gaming in the Constitution State are the Mashantucket Pequots, owners of Foxwoods and partnered with DraftKings, and the Mohegans owners of Mohegan Sun and partnered with FanDuel.
PlaySugarHouse has a deal with the Connecticut Lottery to offer sports betting but that’s only a small piece of the gaming pie in Connecticut, aside from the state lottery itself. Therefore, if online poker is to make an appearance, then the tribes would have to be unified in how to do it and get the blessing of state regulators.
Mashantucket Pequot Chairman Rodney Butler commented on the possibility of bringing online poker to the masses in Connecticut and said, “It’s coming eventually. The issue with online poker in every market is liquidity. If you don’t have a large enough pool, it’s not as successful. And so, we haven’t gone down the path of trying to identify how we do those multistate agreements and the like that would build enough liquidity for it to be worthwhile for the players and for us.”
Cooperation Needed
Connecticut ranks 29th in population with just over 3.6 million people. And that’s critical because if online poker is to work, there must be enough participants to make it worthwhile to the players and those running the online games. The rake poker sites receive is driven by volume and if there aren’t enough hands per hour then the financial incentive is lost.
That pretty much sums up why there is no online poker in Connecticut but that doesn’t mean it will never arrive. However, some legislative changes would have to be made and that may ultimately be in the offing but it’s not of great importance at this time.
“We want to make sure that we’re maximizing iGaming and sports betting, and if we need any fixes there then that’s what we’ll go back to the legislature for,” Chairman Butler said. “If there’s an opportunity to add a multistate access on the liquidity side for poker, we’d do that then too.”
Multistate access is the key and it is the reason why Michigan, New Jersey, Nevada, and Delaware are members of the Multi-State Internet Gaming Agreement. This allows those four states to pool their poker customers together so that there is enough action to make it all worthwhile.
Unfortunately, the Connecticut online casino law did not approve multistate agreements which is the chief stumbling block in getting online poker on the gambling menu.
But at some juncture, the tribes will likely address a tweak to the iCasino or digital sports betting market, and at that time it could be worth their while to also request a multistate agreement in the interests of creating a regulated online poker market which would add another revenue stream for both the tribes and the state.
“We’re so early in the sports gaming and iGaming world that we’re still learning how to emphasize that,” Chairman Butler said. “We will get there eventually, I’m certain of that. But the priority right now is iCasino and sports betting.”
Calculators
