Casino City's iGaming Pocket Directory - 2016 Edition

94 Sponsored by Casino City’s iGaming Pocket Directory UNITED STATES At the end of 2014, three U.S. states (New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware) had intrastate online gambling operations running within their borders. One year later, not much had changed — at least not in terms of the number of states with sites offering regulated online gambling. But there was significant movement in an industry that had existed for years but got mainstream media attention thanks to a multimillion- dollar ad blitz: daily fantasy sports (DFS). DFS sites DraftKings and FanDuel garnered the bulk of the public’s attention in 2015, as the sites grew exponentially and offered seven-figure prizes to winners of NFL fantasy contests with hundreds of thousands of entries. DFS sites have claimed that DFS is a skill game, and as a fantasy sports product, exempt from the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). Nevada Gaming Control Board Chairman A.G. Burnett ruled that DFS is in fact gambling, and outlawed sites from operating within the state without first obtaining a gaming license. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman followed suit, and as of press time, the sites are still entangled in a legal battle to determine whether or not they can operate in the Empire State. Other states, such as Texas, Florida and Georgia, are working toward possible bans on DFS, while Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey has put forward consumer protection measures that would allow the sites to continue to operate in the Bay State. Despite all the talk about DFS, the truth of the matter is that while the three states that offer regulated online gambling represent just 4% of the U.S. population, the online gaming revenues in those markets isn’t far behind what the entire DFS market — which operates in all but a handful of U.S. states — generates. UNITED STATES