GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 27 - February 2014

Online gaming in the USA In New Jersey it’s all about location – geolocation GPWA Associate Editor Dan Podheiser was looking forward to returning to his parents’ home in New Jersey to play Internet poker in a regulated environment in late November, but ran into a lot of geolocation barriers as the state’s online gambling industry launched. By Dan Podheiser T hanksgiving was special for me this year, and not just because it was the first time that it ever fell on the first day of Hanukkah. What made it truly spe- cial was that online gaming returned to New Jersey. I made my annual November trek to my parents’ home in Haddonfield, N.J. in search of more than just turkey and stuff- ing; I wanted to test the Garden State’s newly established online casinos. On Tuesday, Nov. 26, New Jersey became the third U.S. state to offer licensed and regulated online casinos. The launch fol- lowed a five-day “soft play” period, sort of like a beta test, in which the casinos were able to offer their full suite of games to no more than 500 players at a time. The “soft play” period was intended to demonstrate to both regulators and the online casinos that Web gambling in New Jersey could operate smoothly and effec- tively. Unfortunately, the first week saw a host of blunders that needed to be fixed before New Jersey’s online casinos could gain legitimacy and build a solid market. My story begins Wednesday morning and is similar to that of many others’ I had difficulties both signing up and gaining access to the state’s online casinos. Wednesday, Nov. 27, 7:30 a.m. Coming off a seven-hour drive through torrential rain that got my wife and me to my parents’ house at 1 a.m., I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about taking my dog out into the freezing cold. But duty calls, I guess. - 7:45 a.m. - I sat down at my mom’s desktop com- puter and fire up PartyPoker, the first site on my list. I was a fan of PartyPoker in its pre-UIGEA heyday because it was easy to deposit money as a 16-year-old and it always had pretty good tourna- ment guarantees. Today in New Jersey, PartyPoker has both browser-based game play and downloadable software, and the site offers slots and table games in addition to poker. I initially opted to download the software because that is what I was used to doing when I played online poker before Black Friday. The download was quick and painless, and so was the registration pro- cess. Within a few minutes my account was set up; PartyPoker even gave me $15 in free bonus money just for signing up ($10 to play with immediately, and $5 that I had to unlock by playing slots; I’ll have more on that later). So I thought I was ready to gamble. But a minute or so into browsing the game offerings, a message popped onto my screen that read: “Sorry, you can’t play our games outside of New Jersey.” - 8 a.m. - There had been several reports of players near bordering states being unable to ac- cess online casinos in New Jersey, so this didn’t surprise me. My parents’ house is a mere nine miles from Philadelphia, Pa., which sits right across the Delaware River. At this point, I didn’t know what to do, so I tried calling PartyPoker’s cus- tomer support line. - 8:30 a.m. - I waited on hold for 30 minutes and nobody picked up. Perfect. I eventually hung up the phone because a representa- tive sent me a message in the site’s chat system, asking me if she could help me make a deposit. I wasn’t about to put money on a site that incorrectly determined my location, but I used this opportunity to ask the rep if she could help with my geolocation issues. Apparently, and not surprisingly, I wasn’t the only one having these problems. The rep told me that I needed to be on a WiFi-enabled computer. This made no sense to me, but I wasn’t about to argue. Unfortunately, my desktop was hooked up through Ethernet (and not WiFi enabled). She also said that hav- ing any open remote access programs, such as LogMeIn, could be problematic. (Regulators don’t want players being able to remotely manage a computer in New Jersey from another state in order to gamble online.) - 8:45 a.m. - Heeding the rep’s advice, I switched from the desktop to the laptop plugged in up- stairs. I immediately removed LogMeIn from the computer and made sure the WiFi was connected. Still, I had no luck “beating” the geolocation. This was get- ting to be very frustrating. NEW JERSEY Dan’s parents’ house Online gaming in the USA: In New Jersey is all about location – geolocation