California Sports Betting
Sports betting is not yet legal in California after two competing voter referendums failed in 2022. California sports betting efforts will likely remain stalled until at least 2024.
The latest efforts failed due to disagreements over the best approach to legalization among the state’s key stakeholders: limiting the market to retail sportsbooks or authorizing online sports betting in California.
Current legal California online betting options consist of daily fantasy sports and horse racing betting. In-person gambling options include tribal casinos, horse race tracks, card rooms, and the state lottery.
Read on to learn more about the best California betting apps and the latest developments in the state’s pursuit of legal sports betting.
Legal California Betting Sites
21+ and present in CA. T&Cs Apply. Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-522-4700.
The above betting sites are open to customers from California. Each maintains a physical presence in the US, which means they are all subject to state and federal law.
California Sports Betting Outlook
Legal sports betting will likely come to California at some point, but what form it will take remains uncertain. As the most populous state in the Union and home to an economy that would rank number five in the world if it was its own country, California is the biggest prize in the legal US sports betting industry.
Some groups wish to legalize retail sportsbooks, others seek legal sports betting apps in California, and yet others want to ban sports betting outright. That said, legal sports betting seems to be more of a matter of when rather than if.
California’s closest brush with legal sports betting occurred after four competing ballot measures emerged in 2021. Only two collected enough signatures to make it to the 2022 mid-term elections ballot, and California voters overwhelmingly rejected both.
Gaming industry insiders, including the CEOs of DraftKings and FanDuel, believe 2024 will be a better year for California sports betting efforts. However, others see it differently. Here’s how Macquarie Group analyst Chad Beynon described the situation after California voters shot down both propositions:
“I have never seen anything in my career that’s this big of a flop. If they barely managed 30 per cent [of votes] with hundreds of millions spent, how much more are they going to have to spend to get it passed? We are arguably further away from legal sports betting [in California] than we were before the campaign.”
2023-2024 California Sports Betting Proposals
The latest California online sports betting efforts emerged in October 2023 via two ballot initiatives that would authorize tribal operators to operate mobile sportsbook apps in partnership with experienced operators. The two ballot proposals would work in tandem to give tribal operators the exclusive right to offer online sports betting through a hub-and-spoke model that would require all wagers placed in California to be routed through servers located on tribal lands.
The proposals would also allow tribal casino operators to partner with experienced sportsbook brands, but it would require them to use their federally recognized tribal names exclusively for branding. In other words, if a tribal group partners with DraftKings for the California online sports betting market, the mobile app would be named after the tribe and would not be permitted to use DraftKings branding at all.
The proposal would also limit partner operators to receiving no more than 40% of revenue share from their tribal partners. Additionally, operators would 25% in total taxes and fees once licensed. The law would establish a minimum age of 21 to bet online and would allow wagers on professional and college sports.
Whether the proposals are successful in authorizing online sports betting in California is uncertain at best because they don’t even have the backing of California’s tribal casino operators. In a statement, the California Nations Indian Gaming Association said it was “deeply disappointed” in the proposals’ sponsors for not consulting with the the tribes before filing the balllot petition.
In part, the statement reads:
“Decisions driving the future of tribal government should be made by tribal governments. While the sponsors of these initiatives may believe they know what is best for tribes, we encourage them to engage with Indian Country and ask, rather than dictate.”
California Daily Fantasy Sports
Daily fantasy sports sites operate in a legal grey area in California because state law does not address their legality. Lawmakers once considered a bill to regulate fantasy sports apps and websites, but it failed before becoming law due to intense opposition from anti-gambling advocates and tribal casino operators.
However, California fantasy sports sites operate openly throughout the state and have done so for years despite the lack of legal clarity. Local regulators seem content with the current status quo, and California remains a massive DFS market. Sports fans can read more about fantasy sports in California and see BettingUSA’s recommended DFS operators below:
California Horse Racing Betting
California is home to a large horse racing and pari-mutuel wagering industry consisting of high-profile race tracks, OTB locations, and legal online betting.
Fans 18 and older can bet on horse races from anywhere within state lines via licensed horse racing betting sites or catch some of the nation’s most prestigious thoroughbred races live at storied tracks like Los Alamitos and Del Mar.
Readers can see BettingUSA’s California horse racing betting guide for recommended racebooks, race track information, OTB locations, and much more:
California Greyhound Racing Betting
California is the home of modern greyhound racing betting but never managed to formally legalize the activity. However, in 1919, the country’s first commercial greyhound track opened in Emeryville despite a lack of a legal framework for greyhound racing. Emeryville’s track was also the first to use mechanical lures, which fans generally found more palatable than live lures.
Law enforcement officials shut down California’s first greyhound track after only a short time in operation, and that effectively put an end to California’s greyhound industry for good. Proponents initiated referendums to regulate greyhound betting in 1946 and 1976, but voters rejected both.
Live greyhound betting remains prohibited in California, but fans of the sport may wager on greyhounds through licensed ADWs that cover greyhound tracks elsewhere.
California Online Gambling Sites
CA Penal Code § 330 outlaws all gambling that is not explicitly authorized by the state and conducted by licensed operators. Organizers and participants caught participating in unlawful gambling face a fine of $100 to $1,000 and imprisonment in a county jail for up to six months.
Additional gambling laws and regulations in California specifically state it is illegal to participate in online gambling under current state law.
California Online Casinos
Although California would potentially be a highly profitable online gambling market, state lawmakers have made no attempts to pass legislation that would authorize online casinos. The odds of legal online casinos coming to California any time soon appear low at this time.
Some informational websites promote “legal” online casinos that accept players from California, but the information provided by such websites does not align with the various statutes that expressly prohibit all forms of unregulated gambling. Online casinos that claim to offer internet gambling to CA residents operate contrary to state law and are entirely unregulated.
The best alternatives for readers today are to stick with the other forms of legal online betting in California. Horse racing and daily fantasy sports provide online betting that is regulated, legal and safe.
California Online Poker Sites
The demand for online poker in California is high, but legalization efforts face many of the same obstacles faced by sports betting. Tribal groups, California’s card rooms, casino operators, lawmakers, and other stakeholders all have competing visions of how online poker should be regulated and have so far failed to find a palatable middle ground.
Lawmakers have introduced bills to legalize online poker in California nearly every year since 2007, but every single effort has been derailed somewhere along the process.
The difficulties are unfortunate because California has excellent potential as an online poker state due to its large population and a pro-poker culture courtesy of its many tribal casinos and poker rooms.
Legalizing online poker in California would benefit the rest of the country if the state joins interstate gaming compacts. In that case, operators in California and other states would share tables across state lines, thereby increasing liquidity for everyone and giving states with smaller populations a much-needed boost in player numbers.
The only problem is that California online poker sites still look like a long shot. The state’s many attempts to legalize online poker to date have all fizzled relatively early in the lawmaking process due to conflicting interests among stakeholders with different visions of how to regulate online poker in California and who should have a seat at the table.
California Online Lottery
The California Lottery does not directly sell tickets online or by mail. Third-party lottery courier app Jackpocket operated in California for a while, but it has since stopped serving the CA market. Jackpocket only operates in states where it has the explicit approval of local regulators, so it will not reenter the California market until the lottery gives it the green light.
Until the Jackpocket app returns, players may only buy California Lottery tickets in-person at authorized retailers.