Pennsylvania will become the sixth member of the Multi-State Gaming Agreement (MSIGA) in 2025, the pact that allows online poker operators to share players over state borders.
The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) Communications Director Doug Harbach told pokerfuse that Pennsylvania has been invited to join MSIGA, and if everything goes as planned, it could become a member sometime in the first quarter of 2025.
“We have been invited by the compact and are awaiting paperwork from them to review,” Harbach told pokerfuse. “If we are in agreement and can sign off to formally join, the process will still take a bit more time as we work with the operators and assure that all tenets of the law and PGCB regulations are being met.”
Once that happens, the companies that own the online rooms will be able to put all their players under one virtual roof — as long as the clients are licensed in each member state. PokerStars, WSOP.com, BetMGM, and Borgata Poker will all certainly look to take advantage of what is called shared liquidity in the business.
The current members of MSIGA are Nevada, New Jersey, Delaware, Michigan, and West Virginia. And while Nevada, New Jersey and Michigan share players, West Virginia, which joined last November, has yet to see one of its many online casinos open a room.
If this process moves smoothly and quickly, there’s a chance that players in Pennsylvania will compete against those in Michigan, Nevada, and New Jersey in the 2025 World Series of Poker online bracelet events. Taking last’s year’s schedule as an example, it would increase the number of bracelet events available to players stuck in Pennsylvania from four to 33.
Of course, larger player pools means an increase in prize pools and the guarantees the sites are comfortable offering. Last year, players in Pennsylvania saw one online WSOP bracelet event with a prize pool guarantee of $100,000, while players in New Jersey, Michigan, and Nevada saw several as high as $500,000.
This also goes for satellites into live events, like the recently relaunched PokerStars’ North American Poker Tour, BetMGM’s online hybrid events, and WSOP’s Circuit and bracelet events. WSOP.com would be the first site to share players between four states, but will be soon joined by BetMGM, which will launch a site in Nevada sometimes in 2025.
Connecticut joins West Virginia as the other state that allows companies to offer online poker with no operators because of its size. Look for Connecticut to start the process to join MSIGA soon.
With a population of 13 million, Pennsylvania will be the largest member of the United State’s burgeoning online poker network that is MSIGA.
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