New Jersey has been the home of online gambling for quite some time now and many online gambling companies in the United States started their first online gambling establishments in this state.
Gambling in New Jersey isn’t something new. In fact, New Jersey has a rich history when it comes to gambling. Apart from Nevada, which is the home of gambling in the United States, no other state apart from New Jersey has embraced legal gambling more.
Throughout history, New Jersey has made a push to legalize every section of gambling, which is why now it is one of the states where people are allowed to play on an online casino site or in land-based ones.
The battle for the legalization of gambling was not easy. In fact, in the gambling history of New Jersey, there were many bans on sports betting and casinos that prevented people from playing games of chance.
But since online casinos now take a large part of the gambling industry, let’s find out when was online gambling legalized in New Jersey.
Gambling History of New Jersey
Traces of gambling in New Jersey date back to the 1700s, when lotteries were the main attraction and provided help finance the military during the French and Indian War, as well as the American Revolution.
On top of that, the lottery system also helped the construction of Rutgers and Princeton Universities.
However, after getting all the funds they need, New Jersey decided to ban the lottery in 1844. With that said, even though New Jersey had an active ban on all forms of gambling, we can see that people played bingo in churches and nonprofit organizations during the period from 1894-1939.
On top of that, there were many slot machines and sports betting houses that operated outside the law.
After quite some time, New Jersey decided to legalize the lottery once again in 1970, and was the first and officially legalized lottery game in the United States.
When it comes to casinos, the legalization process took much longer. The first suggestion where the legalization of casinos was mentioned was in 1974, and although passing this bill was highly unlikely, due to the profits that the state will produce, government officials decided to legalize casinos but only in Atlantic City.
This was the first time where a legalized casino was opened outside of Nevada in the United States. Nowadays, nine casinos are operating in Atlantic City.
Legalization of Online Gambling
Since the world advances to other formats of gambling and transformed into digital gambling, New Jersey has pushed the legalization of online casinos a lot. The first sign of legalizing online gambling was when New Jersey the legislation of online sports betting for both college and professional sports in 2012.
After seeing the benefits that come from online gambling, government officials started to look much deeper into the legalization of online casino gambling.
Considering that New Jersey is one of the main capitals for gambling outside Nevada, they needed this push to remain the top player in the gambling industry compared to other US States.
It seems like the efforts towards online gambling paid off as New Jersey became the first state in the United States to legalize online casino gaming in 2013.
Now since online gambling is legal in New Jersey, there are plenty of different casino brands offering thousands of different casino games in their portfolio.
There is no doubt that New Jersey is one of the leading states in the gambling industry and continues to make efforts by allowing people to gamble on different things. They also legalized Daily Fantasy Sports in 2018 and New Jersey became the main attraction for people that want to enjoy online gambling without worrying about the law.
About the Author/s
The New Jersey Digest is a new jersey magazine that has chronicled daily life in the Garden State for over 10 years.
