US legalization online casinos predicted?

New online casino websites are making major advances across the United States, but it hasn’t been an easy ride. From being the most important target market for online casinos to forcing them to close down due to the 2006 law outlawing financial transactions involving online gambling; it’s fair to say the industry has had its ups and downs.

Luckily things are looking brighter now. We ourselves are long time supporters of legislation so we can’t deny we’re pretty excited to see how things are advancing. Whether the legalization of US online casinos was predicted? Not a bit! We’ll explain why.

A long way to legalization

There might be a lot of countries ahead of the US when looking at online gambling laws, but

US Federal legislation on online gambling was actually first drafted in the late ‘90s. As these bills did not pass online gambling was long considered a gray area until the first cracks started to appear. In April 2004 tech giants Google and Yahoo! publicly announced that they were removing internet gambling advertising from their websites, following up the United States Department of Justice statement that any advertising of electronic gambling “could” be deemed as aiding and abetting. The real hit, however, occurred in 2006: the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 did not specifically prohibit internet gambling; instead, it interdicted any kind of real money USA transactions related to online gambling. It then took until 2013 to online gambling being legalized on a federal level, but not with some tricky catches. From now on each state was able to decide for itself to vote to legalize online casinos, but with the condition that online operators prove that their software solution:

1. only allows online betting on games within their state;
2. guarantee that players younger than 21 years old are excluded.

With the above in mind, gambling in online casinos is currently available in merely four states: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, while Nevada only offers online poker. New Jersey is the leader here with the best USA casino sites, offering a total of 22 online casinos.

What’s next?

Many other states consider legalizing online gambling. Our attention goes out to New York and Indiana. The latter managed to surprise a lot of people by legalizing sportsbooks. With 7.8 million dollars involved in online betting in only December 2019, the Midwestern state has enough reason to reconsider legalization of online casinos as well. New York might need to reconsider its position as well as New Yorkers are getting more and more tired of handing over revenues to their neighbor New Jersey for not allowing online gambling in their own state. Another state catching our attention is West Virginia, the first southern state to most likely legalize online casinos. If this all moves forward other southern states might follow.

At the end it’s all about responsible gaming

No matter how bad we want every single state to legalize online gambling, we always underline the importance of responsible gaming. Gambling in a responsible way is all about betting within a predetermined budget. At the end it should be about the fun on the best USA casino sites, without spending more money than you can afford to lose. When visiting new online casino websites you should always:

• Consider every deposit as a possible loss.
• Avoid chasing losses.
• Consider gambling as purely entertainment, not a source of income. 
• Avoid gambling when having consumed either alcohol or drugs.
• Keep track on your gambling expenses when playing for real money in the USA.

Relevant news