Online Gambling Coming to USA Thanks to Legal Loophole

The US state of New Hampshire has come up with a sneaky way to offer online gambling by taking advantage of what might be called a ‘loophole’ in American gambling laws. The current rules about online gambling in the US come from a law called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) which officially came into full effect on June 01. The UIGEA explicitly forbids American banking institutions from helping players move money to and from online gambling sites in an attempt to make it difficult to for Americans to gamble on the internet. 

In a very clever move, the state of New Hampshire has come up with a way around the problem. A new system called PlayNowNH, which is meant to launch on July 01, gets around the UIGEA payment processing ban by selling players physical lottery tickets that let them play games on the internet. 

Each PlayNowNH ticket one will contain a special code that gives the purchaser credit at a dedicated online gambling site. Winners must then return to the point of purchase to collect any prizes they win. This system avoids the problem of moving money to and from online gambling accounts since the actual purchasing and prize collection are done physically and in person.  

Tickets will come in a variety of denominations, up to a max of $100. A variety of games will be available at the time of launch, including baseball, super slots, New Hampshire Poker and speed bingo. 

Unfortunately, the new system does not work like other online gambling sites in the USA. Like other lottery style games, all prizes in PlayNowNH are determined at the point of sale. This means that some tickets are winners, and some are not. When players go online and enter the 30-digit code found on their ticket, they will be able to play the games they paid for, but they are not really playing for prizes. In fact, players don’t even need to go online to see if their tickets are winners. 

Players looking for true gambling as opposed to pre-determined lottery-style games can find what they are looking for at any of the quality casinos, sportsbooks, poker rooms and bingo sites that offer internet gambling in the United States.