Site information
US gambling law
Updated We read the operator paperwork
There is no single American answer to “is this legal”, and anybody who gives you one is selling something. Licensing is done by states, one product at a time, and a brand that is licensed for sports betting in your state may have no casino licence there at all.
Sections4 sections
21+. Play only where your state regulator allows it. We take a commission from some operators; it never moves a room up the list. Gambling problem? Call the National Problem Gambling Helpline, 1-800-MY-RESET (1-800-697-3738).
The state decides, product by product
Online casino play is licensed by a short list of states — New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, West Virginia, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Online poker is licensed by fewer still, and some of those share player pools with each other rather than running alone. Online sports betting is the widest of the three, and online lottery sales are a separate question again, decided by the state lottery rather than by the gaming regulator.
What that means in practice: the licence is held for a state, the check is made on your location at the moment you play, and an account that is legal in one state does not travel. The section for each state is under the US pages, and what is licensed where is kept there rather than repeated here.
What the federal statutes did and did not do
Three pieces of federal law are quoted at us constantly, usually wrongly. The Wire Act is about wagers transmitted across state lines, and the fight over how far it reaches is a matter of record rather than opinion — it is followed on the Wire Act pages. The 2006 UIGEA put the obligation on payment processors, not on players. The 2011 enforcement action against the offshore poker rooms, kept here as Black Friday, was brought under bank fraud and money-laundering statutes rather than under a law against playing poker.
None of the three makes an American player a criminal for placing a bet. What they shape is who may take it, and where the money may travel.
Offshore sites are the other half of the picture
In a state with no licensed market, the sites that accept players are licensed somewhere else, and the difference is not the logo — it is who you can complain to. A licensed operator in a regulated state answers to that state’s regulator, whose register is public and whose notices are published; an offshore operator answers to its own licensing body, which is reachable but not local. Where a page here lists offshore brands, it says so, and the terms it quotes are the operator’s own.
This is not legal advice
We read registers, bill texts and filings, and we write down what they say; we are not lawyers and this site is not a law firm. The law moves — a bill passes, a regulator issues a notice, a court rules — and the date at the top of a page is the day it was last read against its sources. For a question about your own position, the regulator of your state is the first address, and a lawyer in your state is the second.