Is Online Gambling the Future of Casinos? | WSJ

(pensive music). (ball spinning) - This may look, like a typical casino floor but there's no gamblers, no chips changing hands or free drinks. That's because this is live dealing, a type of online gambling new to the US in which games are broadcast, to players' phones. (lion roaring) - Boom, that's what I'm talking about. - No matter where you look today, you've likely encountered these: ads for online gambling. - I put a million bucks in up to five DraftKings, sportsbook accounts. - None of these commercials would have been possible without a 2018 Supreme Court decision that struck down the federal sports gambling ban and triggered an accelerated adoption of online gambling across the US. Today, six states, mostly in the northeast, allow for online casino games like blackjack, roulette and baccarat. One of the new entrants into the market is Playtech. (card beeping). (door clicking) So the security in this building seems pretty high. Why is that? - Yeah. Security is the first priority here. - I sat down with. Playtech's managing director for Live Casino, Edo Haitin. So we're sitting here in an office building in Southfield, Michigan but all around us it looks like a casino. So where are we right now? - So we are in Michigan. We cannot say the actual address. This is one of our studios. It looks like a casino but it's not. There is no gambling activities happening here within the facility. Here basically, we operate the games, we train the dealers and make the whole full-blown product. - Playtech is a gambling. technology company that offers live dealing, where dealers flip cards and spin roulette wheels,

in front of cameras for gamblers at home on their phones. So if I'm in Michigan, I can open an app and bet on one of the games happening here. - Correct, correct. Not far away from us, there are live games being operated now. - Why develop a whole live studio? Why not just have animated games on an app that someone can gamble on? - Around 13, 14 years ago already, we started to establish sort of a side gig to our regular casino games, which were live casino games streamed. People could sit at the table and also bet with a live dealer. - You're one step closer. to that 1,000 golden pool. Okay, here we go. - Then the players started. piling up more and more into those tables because the experience that you give is as close as you can get to a land-based casino experience. Also, it takes away that. sort of loneliness element when you sit at your home and bet alone. (ball spinning) - Although Playtech is a big player in online gambling, gamblers themselves might not necessarily be familiar with the name. That's because a big part of Playtech's business is providing various, online gaming products to a variety of licensed. companies around the world. - Welcome to our Sports Bar studio. Our Sports Bar strategy. is basically bringing some of the sportsbook players, some of the sports fans and allowing them to interact with sports events while they also play our games. So here you can see cash-back blackjack. That's a scalable version, of a blackjack table that allows unlimited about of players to sit at the same, table playing blackjack. This is part of our training module to eventually get our presenters, our dealers when they go live with a certain experience to really know what is the script without having a script. - And gamblers online, they actually can create a relationship. - Yeah, that's the community aspect that is making live unique. - Online casino betting is a small but growing industry in the US that many gambling companies hope will become increasingly legalized in much the same way mobile sports betting already has been in many states. In the US, the biggest online casino market is in New Jersey. This graph charts the steady increase in revenue seen by the Garden State since 2017. I see a big red button. What's going on here? This is Buffalo Blitz Live. Buffalo Blitz is a slot concept that allows multiple players to sit and play on the same slot and allows you to interact with the dealer, allows you to interact with, other players on the chat. - Although the expansion of legal gambling generates significant. tax revenue for states, problem gambling advocates are concerned about a potential rise in addiction. So when you talk about.

24/7 availability at home, how do you address gambling addiction? - Already the websites that we work with, they are also complying with regulations that apply to them and a player cannot bet more than he can, and cannot deposit more that he's allowed. We have functions that's called hosts, gaming hosts, people that. are actually on the floor, not dealing the tables and if we see if somebody's betting over his abilities, we have a way that our system, can flag those players. This is far away from being. a hit-and-run operation. - Casinos in Las Vegas and, around the world shut down when the pandemic began, leaving gamblers searching. for options at home. In recent months, tourists have flocked back but casino operators acknowledge that online betting is here to stay. So does that mean casinos in real life are going away? - Absolutely not. First of all, we are their extension to the online, so a lot of our licensees,. clients basically are land-based casinos that want to extent their business and move to the online. And no matter how great the experience that we wanna give here, it's still an online experience. I think that the land-based experience gives a completely different value. (ball spinning) - The arrival of live dealing in the US comes amid transformation. for the gambling industry. In recent years, more and more states are embracing new forms of betting as a lucrative source of tax revenue. But with the recent surge in gambling ads and the 24/7 availability of wagering at home, questions remain about the long-term impact on Americans. (pensive music),