At first blush, not much has changed in California.
Sports betting and online casino gambling are still illegal. All roads toward changing that run through the Golden State’s Native American tribes.
However, looking back over the past year, a lot has happened within the status quo in California. A proposed ballot measure crashed and burned, and a conversation about what to do about sweepstakes operators was started. It also sounds like the groundwork is being laid for a seismic shift to legal gambling in the state, albeit on the terms of the tribes.
California Sports Betting: 2024 Highlights
January: There’s nothing like a New Year’s hangover, which is arguably what we had in California to start 2024. The end of 2023 saw two ballot measures proposed that would put tribes in control of legal sports betting — and yet, somehow, those initiatives were developed without any actual input from most California gaming tribes. This arguably doomed those measures from the start, and in January the effort was officially declared dead.
March: Perhaps the most glaring reminder of sports betting’s illegality in California came from an unexpected source: MLB superstar Shohei Ohtani. It was in March it came to light that Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, was fired by the Los Angeles Dodgers after siphoning millions from Ohtani’s bank account to pay off debts to an Orange County bookmaker. The scandal sent shockwaves through the world of baseball, and none of the activity took place with regulated operators.
May 9: The fact any legalization of sports betting in California must involve the say-so of the tribes was reiterated during a panel discussion at the SBC conference in New Jersey. That lesson was learned from the stinging loss dealt to online sportsbook operators in the 2022 ballot initiative wars. “If and when the crowd decides to legalize sports wagering, it'll be a tribally led initiative,” said Frank Sizemore, FanDuel’s VP of Strategic Partnerships. “We have no interest in running another initiative.”
Sept. 28: California’s gaming tribes have another bête noire in the state: cardrooms. In the fall, a bill was signed into law that will allow the tribes to use the courts to settle whether certain games offered by the cardrooms violate state law and cross over into the exclusive gambling territory of Native American operators. While these games do not include sports betting, legal clarity on the cardroom issue could give the tribes more certainty about the status quo in the state as they ponder what sort of wagering, if any, they’d like to see.
October: Victor Rocha, the Indian Gaming Association’s conference chairman, returned home from the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas as a man on a mission. That mission was to alert the rest of the gaming world to the “threat” to tribal operators posed by sweepstakes and DFS 2.0 products. Rocha and the IGA hosted a series of webinars in the fall digging into the subject and putting it on everyone’s radar. California’s tribes have allies in this fight, too, namely, the same regulated sportsbook operators they once fought with over legalization in the state. It will be interesting to see what this conversation leads to, as California’s tribes have shown in the past they are a force to be reckoned with.
"We never stop talking about sports betting," California tribal gaming leader James Siva said during today's G2E conference; he said tribes have re-engaged internal talks and are formulating a plan that would bring sportsbook to the state; Siva said timeline could be '26 or' 28
— Ryan Butler (@ButlerBets) October 8, 2024
Oct. 8: The tribes are looking at 2026 or 2028 for a legal sports betting push, California Nations Indian Gaming Association Chairman James Siva said at G2E.
Nov. 13: In a Covers exclusive (!), former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (!!), arguably one of the godfathers of legal sports betting in the U.S., poured some cold water on California’s potential to legalize and regulate event wagering (!!!). However, Christie’s comments suggest he was looking to the state legislature, when history indicates the real legalization push, if and when it comes, will stem from California’s gaming tribes.
California Sports Betting: Where Things Stand
The future of legal gambling in California rests with the tribes. When they are ready, the process can move forward. That could be a ballot measure for 2026 or 2028. Until then, we wait. In the meantime, the tribes could get clarity on the legality of DFS and sweepstakes in their backyard, which could inform their next steps.
California Sports Betting: What's Next?
Again, we await word from the tribes. We could get a ruling from California’s attorney general on the legal status of DFS in 2025, which, again, could factor into what the tribes want to do.
California Sports Betting: Notes and Quotes
“I was in a vampire party,” Victor Rocha, IGA conference chairman.
