Last week, news broke that the Merge Gaming Network announced it would no longer accept new players or allow existing players in New Jersey and Delaware to play for real money on a number of it’s sites.

Immediately following this abrupt announcement, speculation began to mounting across the various player’s forums on the internet. Whether it was a legal issue, a specific threat, or strictly a precautionary measure, it still is unclear to exactly why Merge withdrew from these states.We reached out to an operator on the Merge network, and this is what we were told:

“To our knowledge, the network (Merge) leaving NJ and DE had nothing to do with any existing legal threats. It was more than likely done strictly out of precaution. It would also not be surprising if payment processing within those borders had been severely cut-off over the past several weeks.”

While it’s impossible to guess the exact reasons behind Merge’s departure from these states, it would be a logical assumption that payment-processing issues were one of the primary reasons. With credit card companies and banks more cognitive to gaming transactions than ever before in NJ and DE, it would make sense that perhaps Merge began experiencing additional processing issues.

As more states continue to regulate online gambling, it will be interesting to see what the short and long term effects on the unregulated markets will be.  It seems unlikely that both regulated and non-regulated poker sites would be able to work harmoniously in the same state.  It also seems unlikely that states would continue allowing non-regulated gambling, as this would obviously take away from tax revenues.