Every summer, poker fans flock to Las Vegas, Nevada to take part in the most prestigious poker series on Earth, the World Series of Poker. For the past few years, the series has include online events, with players in Nevada as well as New Jersey taking part. Now only one online event remains on the schedule, set to take place this weekend.
Summer Saver
On Sunday, the final online bracelet event for the 2019 World Series of Poker will take place starting at 6:30 pm EST. The event is titled Summer Saver and has a $500 buy-in. The tournament will be played in no-limit hold’em format. The event is open to players in New Jersey as well as Nevada and will have a three hour and forty-five minute time frame where registration and re-entry can take place.
Players will be given 20,000 in starting chips and blind levels will increase every 15 minutes. The event is only a one day affair, but players do have the option to re-enter as many as three times.
Nine Total Online Events
This year, the World Series of Poker decided to offer the most online events ever, with a total of nine tournaments on the schedule. Players from New Jersey as well as Nevada were expected to have access since the two regions share online poker liquidity via the WSOP sites.
However, originally, it was believed that players in New Jersey would only be able to compete in the first two events. A change by the Trump Administration regarding the Wire Act was expected to be enforced, which would put a stop to interstate online gaming after a certain date. Only two events were set to take place before the enforcement date.
Earlier this year, the Department of Justice had decided that the Wire Act was not limited to interstate sports betting and applied to all interstate online gambling. The change was set to be enforced by June 14th which meant that any online WSOP events after that could not be played in New Jersey.
However, the enforcement deadline was moved by the DOJ to 2020. This allowed all nine events to be opened up to players in both states! Poker fans in New Jersey did not have to sit out after all and have been able to compete in every online event this year.
In total, the WSOP online events thus far have seen around $9 million in total prize money generated through player buy-ins. This is a huge amount of cash and shows that there is a want by players to take part in such events online. After the weekend event, we could see that number blossom over the $10 million mark.
Due to the success of online poker gaming at this year’s WSOP, hopefully the trend will continue in 2020. The only difference might be that players from New Jersey will not be able to take part. The Department of Justice’s Wire Act ruling may come in to play which would shut down the potential for other states to take part in WSOP gaming based in Nevada.
However, efforts are being made to shut down the Wire Act change, so hopefully the act will go back to its 2011 stance where only interstate sports betting is shutdown online, leaving other industries, such as online poker in the US open to interstate activity.
