Online casinos have been legal in New Jersey since the dark ages of legalized American gambling — February 2013, to be exact, which is when the state’s Internet Gaming Act was passed.

Golden Nugget was the first casino to launch that November, and now there are over 30 online casinos vying for the Garden State dollar.

One might think that this (relatively) mature market would be pretty much closed to new entries, but Jackpocket — which recently sold itself to DraftKings — is proving to be an outlier, at least in the early going after launching in January.

For instance: In February, according to estimates from Eilers & Krejcik Gaming (EKG), the company beat out a handful of established brands in the state, including Stardust, Harrahs, PokerStars, bet365, and Tipico. 

How did it do it? Well, Jackpocket is more than an online casino — it’s also a lottery courier service, and it was the first one to launch in the state in 2019. And as evidenced by the early numbers, there’s cross-sell between lottery players and casino players.

Jackpocket cross-sell

“We really started in earnest to cross-sell the database in January,” Jackpocket VP of Interactive Gaming John Worthington said on EKG’s Zero Latency podcast, noting the company soft-launched the web version of the casino back in October. “So what you’re seeing is us really starting to push into that. Traditional things like email push, we also created a casino icon in the bottom of the lottery app, everything you could pretty much think of. Overall, we’ve had really good success on the cross-sell side. The big thing for us was making sure that it was very, very easy to get from lottery to casino and vice versa.”

Another factor that helped Jackpocket’s rise was the Mega Millions and Powerball jackpots, which were in the middle of their epic climbs in February. The two lotteries ended up being the eighth- and ninth-largest in U.S. history.

EKG, in a note, believes West Virginia might be the next state next in line for Jackpocket to open an iCasino.