Legal gambling in New York runs the gamut from Las Vegas-style casinos to racinos, horse race betting, and even a robust lottery.
Legalized casino-style gambling began soon after the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed in 1988. As a result, three Native American tribes now operate seven casinos in New York. These feature over 10,000 slot machines, as well as table games.
In 2013, legal provisions were made to add up to seven non-tribal casinos. To date, there are four new casinos available to New York residents.
Sports betting in New York commenced on July 17, when Rivers Casion & Resorts opened up the state’s first retail sportsbook. Thanks to the voter referendum allowing for commercial casinos in the state, those four casinos can offer sports betting. The state has adopted preliminary regulations for the commercial casinos to offer on-site sports betting, including tribal casinos.
Turning Stone Resort Casino is the first tribal casino in New York to begin taking wagers. Owned and operated by the Oneida Indian Nation, sports betting began August 2, in Verona, NY.
However, mobile and online sports betting is still off the table. Lawmakers hoped Gov. Andrew Cuomo would include mobile wagering as part of his final budget proposal. The final budget submitted on April 1 did not include mobile/online sports betting.
While online gaming has yet to pass legal hurdles, there are definitely inroads present now. It should just be a matter of time.
You can download any of the NY online casinos or betting apps listed below, create an account and deposit. The only thing you can’t do in New York is bet online. To place a bet, you’ll need to travel to New Jersey.
Chumba Casino – Best New York online casino
Chumba Casino is something of an anomaly in the world of gaming. Quite simply, it’s a sweepstakes site, rather than a pure casino.
So, Chumba is able to offer its service legally throughout most of the 50 states. New York players can play on Chumba without any concerns.
Using a unique dual-currency system, Chumba offers great slot play across the US. Check it out!
Global Poker – Best New York online poker
Global Poker, like its sister site Chumba Casino, is a sweepstakes site. Its use of dual currencies allows the site to remain in the good graces of legal standards throughout the US.
As such, Global Poker can offer New York players an opportunity for great poker action that other sites cannot. Even though the two currencies can require some acclimatization for new players, Global is an excellent option for those seeking an online poker home.
DraftKings – Best DFS site for New York players
DraftKings is one of the two big dogs when it comes to daily fantasy sports (DFS). The company is synonymous with DFS for many, and its recent foray into outright casino play has DraftKings fresh on everyone’s mind.
Thankfully, New Yorkers don’t have to miss out on the opportunity to see what the fuss is about. DraftKings is fully operational and ready to accept players from the Empire State for all their DFS needs.
Updated: September 9, 2020
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced casino can reopen at 25% capacity beginning Sept. 9. Mask mandates and social distancing will still apply while inside NY casinos. Additionally, there will be no beverage service permitted inside casinos.
The four commercial casinos, Tioga Downs (Fanduel), Rivers Casino (BetRivers), Resorts World Catskills (Bet365), and del Lago Casino (DraftKings) have been closed since March due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Just a reminder, sports betting is retail only.
Below you’ll find a list of resources that can help you learn more about the future of online casinos and online gambling in New York.
No, there are no functioning and legal online casinos in New York. Players who want to play slots online must travel across state lines to New Jersey or (soon) Pennsylvania.
The only option inside New York is for Chumba Casino, which does offer slot play to New Yorkers, thanks to its sweepstakes model. However, the game selection at Chumba is not as broad as at some of the larger operators.
They are decent. The legislative trend (dating back to 2013) has tended toward expansion of gambling activities, rather than contraction.
New York has already built four commercial casinos in the last six years. Land-based sports betting is certain to appear this year, and online sports betting should not be more than a year or two away.
So, online gambling and NY online poker would tend to make sense, particularly given the state’s size and population. It won’t happen right away, but it probably will in the next 3 to 5 years.
Surprisingly, no. Even though New York and New Jersey share a border, the online casinos in the Garden State use geolocation software to make sure that only people on the New Jersey side can play.
That may seem unbelievable for players in New York. However, understand that New Jersey’s Department of Gaming Enforcement has required that these companies err on the side of safety.
In other words, there’s a better chance that someone in New Jersey could be falsely excluded than there is someone in a different state could play.
Not really. These sites exist in what is known as the “gray market.”
The gray market is basically a vague legal area where the activities inside are neither legal nor illegal. In other words, the law doesn’t say anything about these casinos, one way or another.
You can probably play on them. However, because they are not strictly legal, you may have problems if there’s any sort of dispute with them.
So, tread carefully. Many play without incident, but there’s no safety net.
The Supreme Court voted to dismiss the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, or PASPA, in May 2018. Thus, the decades-long federal ban on sports betting in the US was no more.
The key factor is that the demise of PASPA simply meant that each state could determine its own path when it came to sports betting. That said, legal sports betting was finally made law in New York and first went live at Rivers Casino & Resort on July 17, with more venues following shortly after.
If you want to get technical, it already had, years ago. New York voters approved a referendum to legalize sports betting back in 2013.
Of course, until PASPA went away in 2018, nobody could act on the law. New York regulators did not promulgate any rules for operators because it would’ve been a waste of time.
So, now that things have changed, that’s exactly what they’ve been working on. With the recent publication of the rules, sportsbooks began to unroll in New York’s commercial and tribal casinos.
We wouldn’t recommend it. Those sportsbooks operate offshore, meaning that their company practices are not subject to any kinds of US laws, rules, or regulations.
So, in the case of any disputes with them, a US player would not be able to find the same legal protections he or she might want. It could prove quite difficult to achieve any sort of resolution with one of these companies.
Yes. All major fantasy sports operators are available in New York.
However, don’t get too comfortable with it. There is quite a bit of legal wrangling at play over DFS in the Empire State.
The New York General Assembly legalized fantasy sports play in 2016. However, a legal challenge resulted in a New York Supreme Court decision that ruled the law to be unconstitutional.
So, technically, the state of New York has no regulatory oversight for DFS. However, the state is appealing, so DFS play continues unabated for now.
Forms of gambling have been legal in New York for decades. Lottery games have been available in the Empire State since 1967. The final leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes, has run at Belmont Park for more than 150 years.
So, New York and gambling have never been strangers. More recently, however, there have been numerous new forms of gambling that have come to the state.
The first of this new wave came in 1993. A tribal casino, Turning Stone Resort Casino, opened in Verona.
Turning Stone offered a Vegas-style casino experience to an area unaccustomed to those sorts of amenities. It also began offering legal sports betting on Aug. 2. The new casino was and is owned and operated by the Oneida Indian Nation.
Ultimately, the Oneidas would open two more casino properties. Two other tribes would open four other locations, giving New Yorkers seven locations where they could find a game of chance.
These casinos are joined by eight racetrack-casino locations, or “racinos.” These racinos offer horse races and their associated wagering, but also host a multitude of video lottery terminals (VLTs) and electronic table games (ETGs).
This combination of games existed until 2013. In that year, voters approved a sweeping expansion of gaming to come to the state.
The measure allowed for the construction of seven purely commercial casino properties in the state. No tribal affiliation was required for these properties to come into existence.
So far, only four of them have been constructed. All four are located at a considerable distance from New York’s most populous city, New York City.
The same legislation also made sports betting fully legal inside the state of New York. However, until 2018, the law was rendered moot by the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, or PASPA.
Since May 2018, New York regulators have been working to promulgate a regulatory scheme to manage sports betting. Sports betting commenced at Rivers Casino & Resort on July 17. Additional commercial and/or tribal casinos have followed (or will follow) in launching retail operations.
New York does not have any legal online casinos available for play. Unlike its nearby neighbor, New Jersey, there are simply no options for players on that side of the border.
It remains to be seen if New York will become an online casino state. Given that the General Assembly just failed to vote on online sports betting, further expansion seems unlikely at this time.
However, all is not lost. There is technically one viable New York online casino option: Chumba Casino, which is in a unique situation. Because Chumba operates as a sweepstakes site, it is legal and available in most states, including New York.
There is no legal online poker available in New York right now. Similar to its situation with online casinos, there is no law on the books to permit New Yorkers to play cards interactively.
Unfortunately, online poker is probably even less likely to start up in New York than online casinos. Quite simply, interactive games are not as profitable for operators as slots or table games.
There’s only one real option for New Yorkers, and that is Global Poker. Global Poker, like its sister site Chumba Casino, is a sweepstakes site that occupies a different legal space than a typical online casino or poker room.
Fortunately, Global Poker has excellent action 24 hours a day. So until New York’s General Assembly gets its act together, there is at least one way to go in the Empire State.
The truth is that the Empire State mostly has no online lottery, but has a few games under an online subscription model. Basically, the in-state games are absolutely forbidden to sell online. Those games must be purchased, played, and redeemed in-person.
The multi-state drawings, however, are available through the New York Lottery subscription service.
Though they don’t have as much freedom as the full-service online lottery bettor, subscription players receive one set of numbers to play repeatedly during all drawings within the period. However, they can purchase and redeem these subscriptions through the New York Lottery website.
Players can play the following games online:
Almost every major daily fantasy sports operator is active in the state and will accept New York players. However, the whole affair exists under a bit of a legal cloud.
New York legalized daily fantasy sports (DFS) back in 2016. Unfortunately, the new law immediately encountered a legal challenge from opponents. Two years later, these opponents found victory when a New York Supreme Court judge declared the DFS law unconstitutional. As a result, any mention of fantasy sports in state documents disappeared. The state has pledged to appeal the decision.
Here are the four best sites to choose for DFS in New York:
In a state rich with horse racing history, it should come as no surprise that New York has embraced online horse betting. Indeed, the three top companies for online horse betting all accept New Yorkers:
The only wrinkle to this acceptance occurs at BetAmerica. New York-based players may only wager on BetAmerica races; they may not play in the site’s contests.
Still, horse racing exists in a different universe than most betting, at least in terms of public acceptance. There’s no reason to assume that the state hosting the Belmont would ever clamp down on horse bettors.
Though land-based New York sports betting is expected to begin in this summer, online sports betting is not currently moving forward. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear it’s particularly imminent, either.
In fact, New York lawmakers failed to move an online sports bill forward in the most recent legislative session. It will be at least another year until the issue can come back up again.
So, the only online sports betting option for New Yorkers right now is to cross the border into either New Jersey or Pennsylvania. Otherwise, they’re flat out of luck in the Empire State.
After decades of steady expansion, there are quite a few land-based gambling options in New York. Most residents and visitors will have relatively easy access to at least one of these facilities, if not several.
First and foremost, New York is home to several commercial casinos. By virtue of a 2013 gaming expansion, state lawmakers have the ability to award as many as seven licenses to operators.
So far, four operators have taken the state up on their opportunity. The four casinos are:
Rivers Casino & Resort and Tioga Downs were the first to launch sports betting operations. All properties are expected to begin accepting wagers when the NFL’s 2019 season arrives.
In addition, New York is also home to seven tribal casinos. These casinos are managed by one of New York’s three federally-recognized Native American tribes. They are (with the tribe in parenthesis):
All seven of these locations are, theoretically, able to open sportsbooks of their own, since other locations in New York are doing so. However, only the Oneida properties are showing signs that they are moving that direction right now. So far, only Turning Stone Resort has begun accepting wagers.
Finally, eight racinos offer various slot machines (in the form of video lottery terminals) and electronic table games in New York. They are:
A ninth location, Monticello Casino and Raceway, recently elected to cease slot play at its site. Of course, there are also numerous horse tracks scattered throughout the state that offer parimutuel betting.
