West Virginia Works Towards Legalized Online Gambling

West Virginia is working through some of the questions about their new online gaming regulations that are set to go into effect shortly. The interactive online games are to be run by the West Virginia lottery, and the public has raised a lot of questions in open forums about what these regulations are going to look like.

The state has approved the passage of an emergency set of rules to go into effect for at least fifteen months until the state can get a more permanent set of rules in place. Essentially, the state wants to approve some set of emergency regulations in order to get the interactive games up and running, but they know that right now is not the time to hold big public hearings and the like given the spread of COVID-19. Therefore, they are trying to push something reasonable out in the meantime until they have the chance to look at the framework of their new interactive games more closely later down the road.

All of the states that have gone before West Virginia when it comes to releasing their online wagering games such as poker have never had to bother with putting out an emergency set of rules. At the same time, none of those states was trying to release a set of regulations in the midst of a pandemic. Nevada, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania were all able to work out their regulations over time more slowly. The good news for West Virginia is that this means that they will likely also be able to use the frameworks already set up by those other states when they return to the table at a later date to figure out the rules they want to go with on a more permanent basis.

The state is still working out the details, but they know for certain that they will work with licensing the various partners that they agree to do business with as they continue to expand out the business overall. If that does continue, then we could all see a big explosion in online gambling in the state of West Virginia.