Ocean Resort Casino joins New Jersey internet betting market
New Jersey's thriving internet gambling market continues to grow.
The Ocean Resort casino was cleared for full internet gambling operations on Sunday.
The state Division of Gaming Enforcement completed testing and evaluating its systems and approved it to offer online gambling.
The casino's site, www.oceanonlinecasino.com , becomes New Jersey's 27th legal internet gambling site.
It comes nearly two weeks after Hard Rock, which opened the same day as Ocean Resort, on June 27, launched its own internet gambling site.
The British gambling technology company GAN is Ocean Resort's platform partner for internet gambling. Dermot Smurfit, GAN's CEO, said the online casino should be worth an additional 10 percent to 15 percent of revenue for Ocean Resort, with a younger potential customer base.
"Internet casino players are known to be largely a new customer demographic, when compared against typical casino patrons who frequent Atlantic City, skewing younger and more gender neutral versus the typical 50-years-plus gambling enthusiast found inside a typical casino," he said.
Including Ocean Resort, which is the former Revel casino, seven casino licensees operate internet gambling in New Jersey: Borgata, Golden Nugget, Hard Rock, Resorts and Tropicana, and Caesars Interactive-NJ, which includes Caesars and Harrah's. Other gambling companies that partner with Atlantic City casinos also are approved for internet gambling in the state.
Internet gambling began in New Jersey in November 2013 and has been growing steadily. Money won online by the casinos often makes the difference between an up or a down month for individual casinos.
Last year, internet gambling brought in $245 million for Atlantic City's casinos, or roughly 10 percent of their total revenue.
Combined with sports betting, which just began last month in New Jersey, the casinos have two new revenue sources they lacked during a brutal two-year stretch in which five of the city's 12 casinos shut down. Two of them, Revel and the Trump Taj Mahal, reopened last month as Ocean Resort and the Hard Rock, respectively.
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