Managing Editor
For all the success it has had in other states, BetRivers Poker still hasn’t dipped its toe in the one market that has traditionally been the starting point for US iGaming brands: New Jersey. Indications from the owner, Rush Street Interactive, are that its absence from the Garden State isn’t permanent, yet local players may be wondering what the holdup is.
BetRivers Poker has done remarkably well for a brand that missed the pandemic boom and entered the online poker space at a time when the market was looking quite stagnant. It has benefited from the fact that the former market leader, PokerStars, has evidently lost interest in the U.S. Even so, it has managed to pick up almost as much of PokerStars’ slack as the new top dog, BetMGM.
Since its launch in October 2024, BetRivers has gone from nothing to holding 8% of the U.S. online poker market, by gross revenue. During the same period, BetMGM has gone from 29% to 38%, a gain of nine percentage points.
Yet BetRivers has achieved this in part by picking its battles carefully. When it eventually launches in the New Jersey online gambling market, it will be entering the proverbial lion’s den.
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Poker players who are short-stacked in a tournament know they have to pick their spots carefully. It’s the same in business, especially when it comes to publicly traded corporations. Poker is not a big money-maker compared to other online gambling verticals, and shareholders are a fickle bunch.
Even in its strongest market, poker accounts for only about 4% of BetMGM’s revenue. It wouldn’t take much for Rush Street Interactive’s shareholders to declare poker to be a waste of time and pressure the company’s leaders to drop it.
There haven’t been many challengers to U.S. online poker, but in the sports betting space, we’ve seen plenty of examples of upstart brands getting things wrong. The classic mistake has been to rush into a booming market and fail to make any headway against the big spenders in the space.
In that light, we can probably chalk up BetRiver’s modest success to the fact that it hasn’t rushed things. Rush Street Interactive bought Phil Galfond’s Run It Once Poker in 2022, but waited more than two years to do anything with it.
When BetRivers Poker finally launched, it did so only in Pennsylvania, where there were several factors to mitigate its competition’s head start:
- Pennsylvania was not networked to other states at the time.
- PokerStars held a big market lead but had already begun its downward trajectory.
- Pennsylvania is essentially “home base” for BetRivers’ iGaming operations, with two Rivers-branded retail properties. (Rush Street itself is based in Illinois, but that state has failed to legalize iGaming.)
In other words, BetRivers could use its retail brand power to capitalize on PokerStars’ decline, and didn’t immediately have to worry about the fact that the other sites had access to larger multistate player pools.
New Jersey: Each to Enter, Hard to Compete In
When Pennsylvania finally did join the Multi-State Internet Gaming Agreement, BetRivers was quick to network with other states. Although it joined its competitors in Michigan, it forewent a New Jersey launch in order to jump into two small states where it had the chance to be the only game in town: Delaware and West Virginia.
In Delaware, it had a guaranteed monopoly, thanks to its contract with the state lottery. West Virginia, however, was an open market that the other operators had simply deemed too small to bother with.
Although each of those states is only producing five-figure monthly revenue for BetRivers, they add guaranteed players to its liquidity pool, who aren’t at risk of being poached by the competition.
During the iGaming boom years from 2018-2021, New Jersey was the preferred jumping-off point for most brands making their U.S. debut. It’s relatively easy and inexpensive to secure a license there, the tax rate is favorable, and there are ample land-based partners to work with.
By the same token, however, it’s a very crowded market. Many smaller operators that chose to focus on New Jersey were among the first to fold.
Granted, there aren’t any more poker brands in New Jersey than there are in Pennsylvania. However, BetMGM is particularly strong there. Specifically, its Borgata-branded skin does almost as well there as the eponymous BetMGM Poker, thanks to its association with the iconic Atlantic City casino.
Can Splash the Pot Move the Needle?
In Pennsylvania, BetRivers Poker was targeting dissatisfied PokerStars players. To succeed, it sufficed to have a recognizable brand, good customer service, and reliable software that had already been tested in Europe as Run It Once.
In New Jersey, PokerStars was never as dominant to begin with. Any players who aren’t loyal to the brand have probably already switched to a competitor. To have the same impact there, BetRivers will need a plan to pull customers away from BetMGM or WSOP.
If that launch comes soon, it may indicate that Rush Street believes that Splash the Pot will be the magic bullet. That new promotional feature, launched last month, is a reincarnation of the original Run It Once Poker’s unique selling point. In its BetRivers form, it only amounts to an extra 5% rakeback, but that’s on top of the existing rewards program. More importantly, it comes in a form not seen on other sites, and which serves to stimulate action.
At random intervals, BetRivers showers bonus funds into cash game pots. For recreational players, it’s an exciting way to potentially win some “free” money. Yet for stronger players, it provides an additional edge, creating a shifting preflop strategy based on the amount of added dead money in the pot.
How Splash the Pot goes over with American players remains to be seen, but it is, at least, something none of the other sites have. Its uniqueness wasn’t enough to save the original Run It Once from going out of business. However, that site was also going up against what was then a still-dominant international PokerStars and an ascendant GGPoker. By contrast, American poker players have shown signs of growing tired of the existing options, and the time could be right for something fresh.
