About a week ago Delaware’s gaming chief said the state would launch real-money online gambling, including poker, on Halloween. Everything appears to be set for that to happen tomorrow, which would make the state the second in the U.S. with licensed and regulated Internet gambling.

It is worth stressing that the games are fully authorized by a U.S. jurisdiction. Several times the federal government has cracked down on offshore sites taking bets from Americans. Delaware, like Nevada and New Jersey, will not allow offshore operators to be involved.

According to the AP, the Delaware debut was just recently described as a “soft launch.”

Delaware’s progress into the online space hasn’t been easy.

“It has been a challenge,” Delaware Lottery Director Vernon Kirk told Card Player in an interview. “I think smoothly might overstate the case. It is a pretty big technological challenge and our schedule has been pretty aggressive. There are just a lot of moving pieces to this. All of the stuff that the public will never see, but stuff that is really important.”

The state legalized online gambling in mid-2012.

Delaware has been offering free-play games as a sort of trial run before the real thing. Those free games are run by online casino DoubleDown, owned by IGT. The real-money games will provided and managed, on behalf of the state’s three brick-and-mortar casinos, by 888 and Scientific Games. IGT should, eventually, again provide game content to the state.

As alluded to above, Nevada and New Jersey are the two other states with legalized web gambling. Nevada already has online poker running — games from Ultimate Poker and the WSOP — while New Jersey is putting the finishing touches on its plans to launch in less than a month.

All three states could very likely strike some sort of deal to share players in order to create greater liquidity for online poker. Delaware has less than a million people.

Going forward, online poker may be sort of an ambiguous term since states will offer Internet versions of video poker machines, for example. Like Nevada and New Jersey, Delaware will offer online poker that pits customer against customer, in games such as Texas hold’em.

The industry in each state is considered “intrastate,” which means that only those physically within the borders of the state may play. One doesn’t need to live there.

Stay tuned to CardPlayer.com for more updates on Delaware’s venture into the online space.