Las Vegas Review Journal – Early projections of a massive swell of cash from legalized online gaming may have been overly optimistic, but regulation launched a breakthrough in the gambling world, Ultimate Gaming’s top executives told a crowd of about 200 on Thursday at the iGaming North America 2014 conference.
In a joint keynote speech at Planet Hollywood, the company’s chairman Tom Breitling and CEO Tobin Prior pushed for extended legislation across the country.
While creating new jobs, the sites can be trusted and taxed, they said.
“Regulation now means victory,” Prior said.
The two highlighted lessons the company learned in a year of operation since launching the first regulated online real-money poker site in Nevada on April 30. Caesars-owned WSOP.com followed Ultimate Poker in the Nevada and New Jersey markets before South Point’s Real Gaming started taking bets from online players in the Silver State last month.
In that time, Ultimate Poker dealt more than 27 million virtual hands of poker and organized more than 200,000 online tournaments.
Analysts overestimated the profitability of a market primarily driven by players in Nevada and New Jersey, Breitling admitted. Before anyone ever clicked “raise” on a legal online poker site, some predicted upward of $80 million in revenue in Nevada and anywhere between $250 million to $1.2 billion in New Jersey in the first year alone. Though Breitling declined to disclose the actual figures, he acknowledged that the numbers would fall decidedly short. Ultimate Gaming is expected to reveal its data within the next few months.
Gov. Brian Sandoval is scheduled to address the first year of online poker in Nevada as the conference concludes Friday.
Because the states with legalized poker set strict standards for verifying a player’s age and location, gamblers must navigate a much more detailed registration than they did when unregulated sites dominated the market.
“We had incorporated way too many clicks in this process, and so people who had played online poker in the past never had to go through this detailed process filled with all these extra clicks,” Breitling said. “Some people are taking a wait-and-see attitude about playing online games.”
Still, Prior touted the site’s software, and said the company has “no issue” with underage gamblers. Before launching, Ultimate Gaming spent three months in labs tweaking its software, followed by three months of field tests during which they generated the equivalent of 700,000 pages of documents.
He also addressed “huge challenges” in technology, such as payment processing and ensuring that players are located within the state where online gaming is legal.
