From “Online Gaming Is Here To Stay” To Nevada Online Poker Site Shutdown – Ultimate Gaming

The Ultimate Gaming online poker site in Nevada was a ground breaking entity. And it never would have existed if the Department of Justice in the United States did not flip flop their age old opinion which held that online gambling should be illegal in the US. But they did just that on December 23, 2001, paving the way for states like Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey to legalize forms of online gambling. It took a while to develop a virtual and physical infrastructure, but on April 30, 2013 the first legal hand of real money online poker was dealt at the Ultimate Poker site. After some early success and support, the short 19 month existence of the historic virtual poker offering has now officially come to an end. The state regulated poker sites don’t seem to be generating near the amount of revenue that the offshore legal online poker sites bring in.

Tom Breitling is the Chairman of Ultimate Gaming, and he announced the official closure on Friday, November 14. Ultimate Gaming also owned a virtual presence in Atlantic City, New Jersey. And while their Internet casino and gaming operation in the Garden State consistently took in $500,000 dollars in monthly profits, the company’s NJ Internet poker operation was not profitable. They officially backed out of the cyber gambling market in New Jersey in September of this year, in what we now know should have been an early warning sign indicating last Friday’s Nevada online poker announcement.

New Jersey online gambling and brick-and-mortar casino revenue has been slack the last couple of years. Caesars Entertainment Corporation, with a significant New Jersey presence, is contemplating bankruptcy. And the Taj Mahal in NJ owes millions of dollars to Ultimate Gaming from their virtual poker agreement, another sign of the downturn in physical and cyber casino gambling in the United States. Unable to pay many of its creditors, the Taj Mahal is closing its New Jersey operation as early as December 12 of this year. While the money owed to Ultimate Gaming would have helped the company, Breitling said that the Ultimate Poker Nevada operation had not been profitable for some time, and there was not enough good news on the horizon to merit pumping more revenue into an effort towards profitability.

No less than 2 dozen states currently have some type of Internet gambling law being proposed, and in many cases awaiting votes from state lawmakers. California, Pennsylvania, New York and Mississippi are probably the most likely candidates to deliver some type of Internet gambling reality in the United States next, as early as 2015. If states like New York and California, 2 of the most populous in the US, can launch Internet gambling operations, the potentially massive player pools which would result could guarantee a more profitable and lasting operation than than Ultimate Poker, which was dealing with limited player account potential.

As co-founder and chairman of Fertitta Interactive and Ultimate Gaming, Breitling announced in June of 2012 that, “online gaming is here to stay” as a viable industry in the United States. The announcement came in a blog post which can be found on the Ultimate Gaming website at http://www.ultimategaming.com/ultimate-gaming-news/online-gaming-here-to-stay/, less than one week after Nevada issued its first online gaming licenses to Bally Technologies and IGT. Unfortunately he also stated that “there is no going back in time”, referring to his belief that regulated online gaming, beginning with online poker in 2013, is here to stay in the United States. Let us hope that the future does allow Ultimate Gaming to go back in time, and once again experience the early success they had delivering Nevada Internet poker. To learn more about legal online poker sites that are still available to Nevada players, you can visit our page covering online poker site reviews.