At nine in the morning on Monday, April 28, 2025, a player logging into BetMGM Poker from Pittsburgh or Philadelphia could, for the first time, be seated against someone in Detroit or Atlantic City. Pennsylvania had been running regulated online poker since November 2019, but always behind a state line.
That morning the line came down.
The change followed Governor Josh Shapiro’s signature on the Multi-State Internet Gaming Agreement, known as MSIGA. The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board announced the signing on April 23 and told operators they could begin integrating their platforms from April 28. With that, Pennsylvania became the sixth member of the compact, and the largest by population.
A compact built one state at a time
MSIGA did not start as a national framework. It began as a two-state arrangement between Nevada and Delaware, which pooled their small online poker populations from 2015. New Jersey joined in 2017, and WSOP.com began dealing shared tables across all three states the following year. Michigan signed in 2022 and became the first new state in years to make the network meaningfully bigger. West Virginia also signed, although it has had little or no online poker of its own to connect.
Each step followed the same pattern. A governor signs the agreement, the state regulator approves operators to connect their software across the line, and only then do shared tables appear. Signing alone moves no players. That is why the operators’ timing mattered as much as Shapiro’s pen.
The structure also explains why online poker in the U.S. has grown so slowly since New Jersey and Nevada went live in 2013. Poker, unlike online slots or blackjack, needs other players. A single state with a modest population can support only a handful of stakes and a thin tournament schedule. Pennsylvania, with its population of roughly 13 million, was the largest isolated market left, and its absence had capped every network that wanted to grow.
Who went live on April 28
BetMGM Poker and its sister brand Borgata Poker were first through the door. Their Pennsylvania player bases were pooled with their existing Michigan and New Jersey networks from the morning of April 28. WSOP’s Pennsylvania site connected to its own network covering Nevada, New Jersey and Michigan in the same opening phase, creating the largest regulated online poker player pool the country had seen.
PokerStars, which had launched Pennsylvania’s first regulated poker site in 2019 and already shared players between Michigan and New Jersey, was described at the time as expected to follow. The regulator did not publish a date for it, and the brand’s Pennsylvania tables remained ring-fenced through the initial launch period.
If you played on more than one of these sites, you would have noticed the difference quickly in the evenings, when the busiest sessions overlap across the Eastern time zone. Pennsylvania and New Jersey share a clock, and Michigan sits in the same hours, so peak traffic in all three markets lines up.
What a bigger pool changes at the table
The arithmetic behind shared liquidity is simple. More players logged in at the same time means more tables running at each stake, and more stakes running at all. A $1/$2 No-Limit Hold’em game that struggled to fill in one state can run several tables across three. Higher stakes, which depend on a small number of regulars being online together, benefit even more.
Tournaments feel it first. Guarantees on Sunday events depend on the size of the field an operator can expect, and an operator who misjudges the field pays the overlay out of pocket. With Pennsylvania’s players added, operators could set larger guarantees without raising buy-ins, and series run during the summer months had a far larger base to draw from.
Game variety follows. Pot-Limit Omaha, mixed games and short-handed formats need a critical mass that a single mid-sized state rarely supports at every hour. Combined pools make those games viable more often. For the basics of what beats what in these formats, the site’s guide to poker hand rankings covers both Hold’em and Omaha.
Rake does not automatically fall when pools combine. Each operator sets its own structure, and those structures differ between networks. A side-by-side look at how sites charge for play is in the rake comparison.
The political case and the limits
Shapiro framed the move as a revenue and competitiveness question. Three of Pennsylvania’s neighbors were already members, he said when the signing was announced, and staying outside the compact left the state’s operators at a disadvantage. Pennsylvania is already one of the largest regulated gaming markets in the country, with land-based casinos and online casino products feeding a substantial tax base.
The limits are just as clear. Only players physically inside a member state can play, and geolocation software enforces that every session. A player in New York, Ohio or Maryland gains nothing from Pennsylvania’s move, since none of those states had regulated online poker at the time. California and Texas, the two biggest card-playing populations in the country, were not part of the conversation.
There is also the question of federal law. The compact operates under the reading that the Wire Act applies to sports betting, and that reading has been the subject of litigation and shifting Department of Justice opinions since 2011. Operators and regulators treated the matter as settled enough to proceed in 2025, but the legal footing for interstate online gaming has never been written into a single federal statute.
Where the network stands
With Pennsylvania inside, MSIGA covered six states: Delaware, Nevada, New Jersey, Michigan, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. The member states together represented a population of more than 38 million, though not every operator was licensed or connected in every one of them. Each brand still runs its own network, so a BetMGM player and a WSOP player in the same state do not meet at the same table.
That separation is the next frontier. A shared pool across states is one thing; a shared pool across operators is something no U.S. regulator has proposed. For now, the practical effect of April 28 is that Pennsylvania’s players stopped being a closed market.