New York online gambling bill returns for 2025 consideration

New York will again consider online gambling during 2025, as legislation authorizing casino-style iGaming, including online poker, has again been submitted to the state's Senate. Longtime iGaming backer State Senator Gary Pretlow is again at the helm of the 2025 effort, with his just-filed Senate Bill 2614 likely to become the leading Senate vehicle for New York's latest gambling legislation efforts.

Pretlow's S2614 has immediately received its first committee assignment, into New York's Senate Racing, Gaming And Wagering Committee, which Pretlow chairs. That likely means strong early support for the iGaming bill and a gambling-market segment that took a back seat to other forms of gambling expansion in recent years in New York, the US's second most populous state behind California.

The new S2614 is in large part a reintroduction of Pretlow's 2023-24 bill, S8185, which also started strong and passed the state Senate's full vote on a large majority, only to collapse when NY Governor Kathy Hochul omitted the iGaming topic in its entirety from her budget for the 2025 fiscal year.

Pretlow later submitted a last-chance replacement bill, S9226, but with the state's 2023-24 session due to end just weeks later, the replacement bill had no realistic chance to advance. Pretlow's new bill for 2025 has, at the least, the chance for timely consideration well beyond his own Senate committee.

Multi-state compact language omitted

While the new S2614 contains large sections of proposed legalize that have been copied forward from earlier bills, one area of direct interest to online poker has been omitted -- language to allow New York to participate in multi-jurisdictional player-pooling agreements such as MSIGA (Multi-State Internet Gaming Agreement).

The omission of player-pooling language may represent an old-fashioned political horsetrade. Though vital in the long run for the success of online poker in New York, online poker still only represents a tiny percent of the revenue available from an expansion into casino-style iGaming. For any politicians hesitant to find New York answerable in any way to other iGaming states, simply removing player-pooling provisions ends that negative argument.

New York, then, could follow the lead of states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, which both went through periods as standalone states for online poker before later opting to join MSIGA. Such an omission and later reconsideration of player pooling would likely add two to three years to a timeline for when New York's online poker players could fully and legally compete against players from other states.