The past couple of years have been filled with stunning shifts in the Keystone State especially with regards to gambling which officially went live in 2006 and has since to be one of the biggest gambling economies in the United States. Over the past year, the state’s gaming market has grown immensely thanks to the launch of sports betting and the legalization of online betting as part of the gaming expansion plans that were signed into law back in October 2017.
The Commonwealth’s first retail sportsbooks went live in late 2018 and since then, a total of 8 sports betting facilities have gone live and more are expected to join in very soon. In addition to that, the state’s gaming control board has granted interactive gaming licenses to a good number of these gaming operators and they are set to go live in the near future. If this goes through, and hopefully it will, the state would become the only state besides New Jersey to have a truly formidable land-based and interactive sports betting market.
What to Expect?
While we await the launch of the online gaming industry it might be a great time to explore the possibilities of how the industry will turn out when it finally goes live especially with regards to how safe and secure it will be.
First and foremost, there will, of course, need to be some form of age verification mechanisms to ensure that minors do not have any access to the gaming services. As with land-based sports betting, only adults aged 21 and above will be allowed to place bets online. This is a standard requirement for all gaming industries and it is, therefore, a vital component of gaming regulations that the PGCB is drawing up. Measures will have to be put in place to ensure that these age limits are adhered to.
Age limits aside, Pennsylvania will also be obliged to put in place measures to mitigate against and counter issues related to gambling-related harm, that is, gambling addiction or problem gambling. A great of going about this would be the introduction of exclusion schemes where problem gamblers can either be added or sign up themselves onto.
In addition to the age limits and exclusion schemes, the state will also be employing the same geolocation technology used in other online gaming markets in the United States. In essence, this implies that whichever electronic device you will be using to access the online sportsbook will need to run a tiny piece of software to verify that you indeed physically within the state’s boundaries.
Forthcoming Online Sportsbooks
- Penn National
- Parx
- Harrah’s
- SugarHouse
- Rivers
- FanDuel at Valley Forge Casino
- BetAmerica at Presque Isle Downs
