Plenty of poker players have won more in one tournament than the state of Delaware brings in every month from online gaming, but when you rank in the bottom five in the country in terms of population, you don’t expect to be raking in billions, anyway. That said, the Blue Hen State (yes, I chose to go with that instead of “The First State” or “The Diamond State”), has been on a roll recently, as its casinos have seen their total net winnings from online gambling increase for the third consecutive month.
In March 2016, according to the latest financial report from the Delaware Lottery, the state’s racinos – Delaware Park, Dover Downs, and Harrington Raceway – experienced net proceeds of $260,539, the most they have ever brought in during a single month in the two and a half years since the Delaware launched its legal, regulated online gaming industry. The previous record was $240,762, set in April 2014.
Delaware Park is by far the most successful of the three racinos, generating $149,346 in net online gaming revenue, compared to $86,554 for Dover Downs and just $24,639 for Harrington Raceway. The bulk of that difference came from Delaware Park’s strength in the online table (also called casino) games space. $64,257 of Delaware Park’s net online gaming revenue was from table games, just $300 less than the net from online lottery sales for the location. Compare that to Dover Downs, which made almost exactly the same amount of money from lottery sales, but which had only an online table games net of $6,539. Just a few hours ago, I paid more than that to the federal government for my 2015 tax bill.
Harrington Raceway was even worse in table games. It actually LOST $2,376 to customers who played such online games as blackjack and roulette. Lottery saved the day, though, amounting to $25,665 in net revenue for Harrington.
That brings us to online poker. Total net poker rake and fees were $37,324 for the three racinos in March, up about $8,500 from February. Poker has been a rocky road for Delaware; for most of the past year, the rake figures have been in the $20-$30 thousand range, though a year ago, in March 2015, the racinos brought in $43,636, so year-over-year numbers are down quite a bit. And even the peak of $48,552 in April of last year was a far cry from the best poker numbers Delaware has done. In Delaware’s second month with legal online poker – December 2014 – the poker sites earned $106,923 in rake. For the first four months of online poker’s existence in the state, the poker figure was never lower than $74,000. Things dropped precipitously after that and here we are.
Delaware is clearly a state that needs cross-border agreements with other states for online poker, as its population is not large enough to sustain any sort of real poker traffic. It did begin sharing player pools with Nevada in late March of last year and it looks like that gave revenue a boost, but that boost didn’t last.
