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West Virginia Launches First Online Casino

The legal online casino market in the United States has officially expanded. On Wednesday, West Virginia’s first online casino launched, making it the fourth US state to offer legal online gambling. They join Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania as the other states with legal online casino games.

DraftKings was the first site to go live, launching DraftKings Casino in the Mountain State. The site will run in partnership with Hollywood Casino at Charlestown Races. For now, the site only offers table games, but other games are expected to launch in the near future.

DraftKings Casino Launches in West Virginia

On Wednesday, DraftKings issued a press release stating that they have launched its online casino product in West Virginia. The company is partnered with Hollywood Casino at Charlestown Races for online gambling and they are the first online casino to launch in the state.

The launch includes both the DraftKings Casino standalone mobile app along with adding access to the online casino to their Sportsbook mobile app. Players will be able to access DraftKings branded online casino games, including Blackjack, Keno, Roulette, and Three Card Poker. At some point soon, the app will also offer online slot games.

BREAKING NEWS: Hey, #WestVirginia, we have our first online casino! 🎰https://t.co/NfGsTkrYrB

— PlayWV (@PlayWV) July 15, 2020

According to reports, the DraftKings Casino app is presently limited to just table games. Betting limits are as low as $1 and go up to a max of $5,000. Neither online slots nor live dealer games are presently offered on the app. This is likely due to those games taking longer to approve than online table games.

What About Online Poker?

The big question now is when West Virginia online poker will launch. This is still a bit uncertain as there were no announcements pertaining to online poker. In fact, the launch of online casinos was a bit of a surprise. While we expected West Virginia to launch online casino games at some point in 2020, we expected some form of advanced warning.

At this point, it is hard to estimate when players will see online poker. Flutter Entertainment will likely try and launch PokerStars WV at some point in the near future. We are not certain as to what other products, if any, will launch beside PokerStars.

If West Virginia follows the lead of Pennsylvania, it will probably be sometime in the fall before online poker launches. They would join Nevada, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey as states offering legal online poker.

So Will Michigan Join the Party Soon

With West Virginia now at least partially live, attention starts to turn toward Michigan. They are the only legal gambling state yet to launch either online poker or online casino gambling. Michigan lawmakers are looking into accelerating the timeline for launch, but there doesn’t seem to be any progress.

Regardless of what happens, the state is expected to launch online casino gambling either in late 2020 or in early 2021. DraftKings and FanDuel are two products that are likely to launch when casinos go live. It is unclear at this point whether online poker will launch right away or if Michigan will delay online poker the same way that Pennsylvania and West Virginia have.

With states beginning another slowdown and a likely second wave of COVID-19 appearing to ramp up, it would behoove Michigan to go ahead and launch online gambling. It would give Michigan citizens a way to gamble legally while on lockdown or quarantine and give casinos a way to offset the losses they have been incurring since the beginning of the year.

We will continue to monitor the state of online poker in both Michigan and West Virginia and bring you updates when we know more.

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