UK/New Jersey liquidity-sharing talks heat up

 Transatlantic operators asked for opinion on feasibility of poker liquidity compact

Liquidity-sharing talks between New Jersey and the UK have taken a step forward after New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) wrote to operators asking about the feasibility of such a plan.

The DGE last week wrote to companies including GVC/bwin.party, PokerStars and 888 and has also been in talks with Great Britain’s Gambling Commission.

The British regulator confirmed to EGR: “We’ve been having preliminary discussions with the New Jersey DGE about sharing poker liquidity and are currently exploring how that would work. It’s early on in the process and too early to be considering specific details of how it would work.”

An anonymous source from the Commission said representatives had held talks with the DGE and PokerStars on Friday, with PokerStars confident that a shared player pool was feasible.

The idea of a compact first surfaced in January last year, but appeared to stall before the DGE kick-started the process again by writing to operators last week.

Both players and operators have complained about the limited liquidity in the New Jersey poker market, with players saying there isn’t enough cash in the market for pros to make a living.

While Nevada and Delaware have agreed an interstate compact to share poker liquidity, New Jersey has not struck such a deal as state laws mandate all online gamning in the state must take place on servers located in Atlantic City.

It is unknown how the DGE, Gambling Commission and operators might get around such limitations, but the recent deal struck by Betfair to share liquidity between its UK and New Jersey exchange might provide a helpful framework.

While the Commission suggested the talks were still early stage, the DGE director David Rebuck said an agreement between the two regulators had been “reached in principle”.

He told Global Gaming Business Magazine: “We’d still have to figure out lots of issues: specific regulations, how the tax rate from each jurisdiction would be applied, player ID and geolocation issues, and other things we probably haven’t even considered yet. But you have to start somewhere.”

Operators have been asked to respond to the DGE letter by 1 August.