Phones Fuel Great Growth Potential For Us Internet Gambling

“We’re seeing huge growth in mobile phone and tablet play,” said Luisa Woods, executive director of Internet marketing for Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. [...] we’re seeing huge cross-flows between players who visit the casino and then go home and continue to play online. Delaware brought in $1.8 million last year, and Nevada, which stopped reporting its Internet winnings publicly, is estimated at about $10 million in its poker-only market, said Eugene Johnson, senior vice president of Spectrum Gaming Group, an Atlantic City-area consulting firm. There was no mention at the conference of perhaps the greatest threat to the fledgling Internet gambling industry: the avowed opposition to it from casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who has promised to spend as much as it takes to enact a legislative ban on it in the United States. Another major challenge is getting additional states to approve Internet gambling. Because only three states now offer it, the prize pools for online poker are small, and that is holding the industry back, participants agreed. George Rover, deputy director of New Jersey’s Division of Gambling Enforcement, said unlicensed offshore sites still pose a major problem for legal Internet gambling sites by siphoning away customers and revenue to unregulated sites with no customer protections.