WILL NYC FOLLOW THEIR NEIGHBOURS EXAMPLES AND LEGALISE ONLINE GAMBLING?
Over the past ten years the global gambling landscape has shifted dramatically and finally some American states are started to catch up with the air of change.
Online sports gambling is now legal in over half of American states whilst New Jersey and Pennsylvania have gone one step further in legalising online casino gambling. Will New York City follow suit any time soon and most importantly, should they?
Read on to find out.
New York City Gambling Landscape
Traditionally New York has taken a tough stance against gambling, only legalising land-based casino gambling in 1988. Since then land-based casinos have thrived in New York but despite increased calls for online legalisation, lawmakers have stood firm in their opposition.
Casino gambling and sports betting seem to have been painful concessions for lawmakers to have made and they appear in no mood to make further concessions.
Earlier this year when efforts were made to legalise online sports gambling in the city, Andrew Cuomo rejected it, saying that it violated New York’s constitution. In betting terms that sent online gambling’s hopes of legalisation from a 100-1 longshot to a 1,000,000-1 improbability.
Should New York Legalise Online Gambling?
Whilst it is abundantly clear that there is no chance of legalisation in the near to midterm future, let’s take a look at whether or not New York should actually bother legalising online gambling.
Economically the argument is clear – online gambling is good for the local economy and the public purse. In New Jersey just under $420 million was made in revenue by the iGaming sector. What that meant in terms of tax revenues was a 21.6% increase from the previous year with gaming taxes totalling $79.2 million.
Online gambling has had a huge impact on individuals too, adding 6,552 jobs and paying $401 million in wages to employees since its inception in 2013. All in all, the economic arguments in favour of legalising online gambling are hard to ignore.
Anecdotal evidence tells us as well that gambling fans in New York City are not simply ignoring the lure of online gambling sites because of the city’s tight legislature. In fact, many New Yorkers are regularly gambling online, with companies based out of New Jersey and even Canada taking gambling dollars out of New York.
Therefore, it’s quite clear that New York’s tough stance on online gambling is not achieving anything, it is simply not enough of a deterrent to some gamblers. In criminalising online gambling, New York is effectively cutting its nose off to spite its face.
What Would Legalised Online Gambling Look Like?
Now that we know what legalised online gambling would look like from an economic perspective, what would it look like from a player’s point of view? To answer that question, we looked at Canada, a country that has had a legalised online gambling market for much longer than even the most progressive of American states.
What we found is that Canadian online gambling is based on slots, slots and more slots. Almost every online gambling site in the country is flooded with hundreds, if not thousands of slot machine games like the phenomenal book of dead.
This isn’t because Canadians have an insatiable love of slots, rather it is evidence of a wider trend in gambling in general. In Las Vegas for example, there are 39,680 slots in the city’s casinos which generate an average profit of $219 a day.
Extrapolate that out and you find that slot machines in Las Vegas generate annual revenues of $3,172,890,000 which dwarfs the revenues of all of the other casino games available in Sin City.
Online casinos are well aware of that trend and as such appear to focus heavily on slots selections to entice customers to play with them. So, you might think that online gambling in NYC would be all about classic games like poker, roulette and blackjack, but in reality, it would be all about slots, slots and more slots.
In Summary
Should New York City fall in line with nearby states and legalise online gambling? From an economic and libertarian point of view, absolutely. Will it do that in reality though? Probably not.
Andrew Cuomo’s decision to veto online gambling a couple of months ago is an indicator of the city’s steadfast resolution to limit the powers of the gambling industry. Whilst the rising tide of support for online gambling appears to be swamping the country, in New York there is no such will from lawmakers to change their outlook.
New Yorkers will therefore have to wait for legalised online gambling, just like they were made to wait for legalised land-based gambling for much of the 20th century.