Legislation Allows Skill-Based Gambling in New Jersey

If you live in New Jersey and are tired of the old chance-based gambling machines like video poker or slots, I’ve got some news for you that are going to blow your mind! A few days ago, New Jersey issued a legislation that changed several of the state’s gambling regulations. The most important one of them is, of course, the one that finally allows skill-based games to be brought into any of the eight casinos currently present in New Jersey. That includes slot machines with skill-based elements in them (for example, a bonus game where how much you win depends on skill rather than luck) as well as completely skill-based experiences akin to videogames and arcade machines. I don’t need to be a gambling expert to tell you exactly how big of a deal this whole thing is. If this trend catches on we could be seeing a revolution in gambling in general!

While discussions about whether these regulations should be accepted have been going on for literally years (the first time I read about them was in 2014), it wasn’t until very recently that the discussion finally bore fruit. As CBS Philly reports, there are already plans to create several gambling versions of popular video games, such as a casino machine based on the extremely popular “Guitar Hero” franchise. For those of you who don’t know, “Guitar Hero” is a videogame that allows you to use a plastic guitar controller to ‘play’ hundreds of classic rock, metal and pop songs across numerous instalments. Gambling versions of games such as “Angry Birds” and “Words With Friends” are also being developed. Honestly, I have absolutely no idea how any of them are going to work, but I’m also rather anxious to see how they’ll play out! While I don’t live in New Jersey, chances are YouTube videos of the machines in action will pop up pretty much as soon as they’re installed.

There are, of course, certain rules and requirements that the casinos will need to adhere to. For example, all skill-based games would need to be clearly indicated as such, to avoid confusing gamblers who want to leave themselves in the hands of Lady Luck. My absolutely favourite rule has to be that casinos aren’t allowed to artificially make the games harder or easier, they’d need to be set to the difficulty that the developer had envisioned for them and that’s that. If arcade games from the 80s are any indication, though, these games are going to be hard as hell! Arcade games used to cost money per life, so developers intentionally made them extra hard to make sure players would keep putting quarters into that slot. Now that there’s a real chance that developers would need to pay money out, I’m guessing the difficulty will be cranked up even further!