In July 2025, barely a year into the launch of DraftKings’ new regulated US online poker game Electric Poker, I wrote an article on Poker Industry PRO titled Novelty Wears Off for DraftKings’ Electric Poker. In March of this year, I wrote another article. DraftKings’ Electric Poker Is Failing. Here’s What Can Fix It.
This has not aged well.
To be fair, DraftKings’ poker game — a standalone, three-handed jackpot sit and go game with its divisive Electric Mode that sits in the regulated online casino in Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania — was indeed falling precipitously.
By connecting player pools across these states, we’re delivering faster tournament starts and more games running daily … This is a meaningful step forward as we continue to expand Electric Poker
But now it’s going through a rather unexpected revival.
A Dramatic Fall
Electric Poker first launched in Michigan two years ago, but how well it did in those first months is unknown. The regulator does not report revenue generated from online poker (it is combined with casino), and because there is no good independent tracking on Electric Poker’s traffic, there was no real way of gauging its success.
It launched in Pennsylvania in mid-October that year, giving the first glimpse of its performance. Its first full month of revenue certainly made its mark: An estimated $160k. However, DraftKings shares an online gaming license with another poker operator; over time, its PA revenue became opaque as well.
The first real clarity came in March 2025 when it launched in its third state, New Jersey. There, revenue is reported for each poker site, so precise figures can be observed each month.
$36k was reported that first month, much less than the Pennsylvania launch and a market share in NJ of just 1.4%. But it didn’t launch until partway through the month, and, considering it was a single game buried in the casino, it can be seen as a successful debut.
Yet in April 2025, its first full month, revenue actually halved, to $17k. It then fell every month through to August 2025, when revenue dropped below $5k. There was a brief bump in September before the downward trend continued: April 2026 was just $1,919. Revenue had fallen 89% year-over-year.
You can see why we wrote that Electric Poker was failing.
But then something strange happened. Revenue in May 2026 was $5,946: Its best in eight months, still down 59% on the same month a year ago, but a reversal of its fortunes. It wasn’t a one-off. June 2026 was $8,664, the best in 12 months and almost flat year-over-year.
Finally, July 2026: Revenue of $9,942. The best report in over a year, the fourth best on record, and up 58% year-over-year.
Player Pooling
The next obvious question is, why the resurgence?
One of the three changes we suggested DraftKings should make to revive Electric Poker was multi-state liquidity. Electric Poker hinges on games running near-instantly: It competes against other casino games in the portfolio, which are entirely on-demand.
The jackpot sit and go format is well suited to this: Ultra-fast, three-handed games and a blind lobby system that makes match-making fast. As soon as three people want to play, it begins.
But the game could still suffer if liquidity dips. If games take minutes rather than seconds to fire off, players will lose interest, drop out of the pool, and play something else. It can create something of a death spiral, where low liquidity makes for a less attractive game that further discourages players.
When your state revenue is barely $2,000, it means only about 20,000 games fire each month across four buy-in tiers (it’s 7 cents on rake on the $1 game, 25 cents on the $5 game). That’s about 650 a day, or one every 2 minutes. That’s just about okay if evenly distributed across the day, but of course there will be a much higher density during peak times.
In effect, Electric Poker got to a point where the $1 and $5 games fired with some regularity at peak times, and high stakes games rarely fired off. That’s not a great user experience when casino games are available 24/7 with zero wait, and certainly explains the revenue starting with a $36k launch month and falling 16-fold in a year.
And indeed — DraftKings did pool liquidity. In July 2026, the Electric Poker player pools of Michigan, New Jersey and Pennsylvania joined together to form a single, three-state network.
“We’re thrilled to bring shared liquidity for Electric Poker to customers,” Christian Bogstrand, DraftKings Executive Vice President and General Manager of iGaming, recently told PRO when we asked about the development. (At the time, the company issued no press release; we only heard about it because the Michigan regulator actually promoted it.)
“By connecting player pools across these states, we’re delivering faster tournament starts and more games running daily, giving DraftKings customers additional opportunities to get in on the action while maintaining the same tournament formats and prize structures they enjoy,” he added. “This is a meaningful step forward as we continue to expand Electric Poker and deliver new ways for customers to engage with the platform.”
A Surprise Resurrection
But as much as we’d like to crow about how our three things list is the DK playbook for getting Electric Poker out of the gutter, the dates don’t align. As you can see in the graph above, the growth started in May — the three-state pool didn’t kick in until July. And neither of our other two recommendations (scrap Electric Mode and give it higher prominence in the casino) have been followed.
The player pool will certainly benefit from three-state pooling. It also opens up Electric Poker launching in smaller states. But that’s not what caused the May bump — and what did remains unclear.
There has been nothing obvious in DraftKings’ approach to online poker. The rules of the game remain the same, the buy-ins haven’t changed, and — at least as far as we can tell — the positioning of the product within the DraftKings Casino is the same. We’ve seen no particular spike in media coverage or social media discussions of the game.
We reached out to DraftKings to see if they wanted to discuss the change in fortunes with Electric Poker, but they declined to comment.
All we can assume is there has been some form of internal promotion, like a leaderboard, or customer outreach, possibly in-app or direct-to-customer communication, that caused a spike in traffic. This, along with the shared liquidity, looks like it has led to a sustained increase in traffic.
To keep things in perspective, revenue of $10k in a month is still tiny. Total revenue in New Jersey in July 2026 was $2.6 million. DraftKings’ share of this was less than half a percentage point.
But it also looks like Electric Poker is going nowhere for now. The expansion into shared liquidity shows that DraftKings still has an appetite for developing its poker product and growing its reach.
We still have our criticisms of DraftKings’ poker positioning. Putting poker into its own category in the casino would be warranted; discovery still seems poor. And a change to the rules — in particular, removing Electric Mode — would be prudent to maintain the skill element of the game.
But whatever direction the company takes, it looks like Electric Poker has been given a new lease on life.
