Stacked Deck: How Sweepstakes Poker Is Betting Against Regulation

Everything you need to know about sweepstakes poker: is it legal, how does it work, who are the main market players, and where is the sweepstakes regulation now?

“Sweepstakes” is the word we hear almost daily in the iGaming industry this year. Whether you consider it an overheated trend or a future path for development in the complex regulatory environment, avoiding discussion around this gaming business model is almost inevitable. Yet, many still don’t fully understand how this business model works and why sweepstakes casinos are not really competing with real money operators – and that is the reason why at most conference panel discussions around the topic, it is difficult to find a free spot.

Here, with the help of EvenBet experts, the company’s PR strategist Ekaterina Giganova explains the internal mechanics of sweepstakes in iGaming and poker and briefly reviews the current regulation updates.

If you are interested in the general history of sweepstakes as a coupon lottery, check our blog article published this spring.

Sweepstakes in iGaming

Back in 2023, I was at the NEXT Valletta Summit (still called iGaming NEXT back then), and there, at the Predictions Re.Visited panel, the top industry investors from Yolo Group and HappyHour suggested a sweepstakes project in the USA among the top 3 businesses worth pouring money into. Just around the same time, EvenBet Gaming started to analyse the possibilities of adapting the poker platform for sweepstakes gaming and work with our first sweepstakes poker customer.

Two years later, we see daily news updates on the subject, and no wonder. In 2023, the sweepstakes casino market’s gross revenue was estimated to be around $4bn, with $1.9bn in operators’ net revenue; these numbers, according to available data, have doubled in 2024. The 2025 growth forecast stays quite impressive, despite the latest regulatory opposition, with a CAGR of 31% and gross revenue approaching $11bn (Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, 2025). Such growth will allow sweepstakes casinos to surpass the real money online casino sector in revenue.

What Made the Sweepstakes Take Off?

The USA were probably the only market where this business model could evolve so rapidly and dramatically. There is no other market where you would see the combination of crucial factors:

• The complex state-based regulation with very limited access to real money online casinos and poker
• The audience with a high average income, ready to spend money on entertainment, including online gaming, very high internet access penetration and the share of smartphone users
• The high interest in gambling and iGaming
• The knowledge of the sweepstakes format, existing in the States for more than 50 years, and the trust created by this knowledge

The question of whether any other market can replicate this success remains open.

The State of Regulation for Online Casinos and Poker in the USA

For August 2025

Only seven states have legalized and launched real-money casino gaming: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, West Virginia, Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. In three of them, the competition is legally or otherwise limited: Delaware and Rhode Island each have a single state-run casino platform, and Connecticut has two tribal-affiliated platforms.

43 states banned or haven’t legalized online casino gaming at all.

Online poker is legal in some form in 8 states: Nevada, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Three of them don’t have any live regulated poker websites by the time we create this article (West Virginia, Connecticut, and Rhode Island), so legal online poker is available for players in only five states.

42 states banned or haven’t legalised online poker at all.

Who Plays Sweepstakes?

The sweepstakes gaming business model, as a middle ground between social and real money casino gaming, is attractive to a wider audience than classic for-money games and is available across more locations due to being unregulated or legal across most states. Many people who wouldn’t even consider playing poker or casino games for money are ready to try sweepstakes: zero payment barriers and less KYC restrictions at the start make user onboarding easier and relatively straightforward.

Gambling or No Gambling?

However optimistic the lack of regulation and wide availability might seem, the general perception of sweepstakes is shifting. One of the recent studies shows that the lion’s share of the US players sees this format as a form of gambling. Undoubtedly, the negative publicity and numerous court cases with sweepstakes casinos and betting operators have made a significant impact on the reputation of the emerging format.

According to the latest data published by the American Gaming Association (AGA), 80% of sweepstakes website users spend money on them monthly, and almost 50% do so weekly, and 68% of them consider winning money as the main motivation. The corresponding AGA representative’s remark about the industry that talks like a casino and walks like a casino, but pretends that it’s not, has already become infamous in the US iGaming industry.

At the same time, AGA isn’t absolutely unbiased: the association is a lobbyist for real money online and land-based casinos and tribal casinos and platforms and one of the major forces behind the legal action against sweepstakes. For sure, sweepstakes are subject to questions related to responsible gambling and player data protection, but there’s no denying that “classic” casino business is somewhat threatened by their rapid growth and penetration into the audiences that are not yet available to big whales in the world of gambling.

How Do Sweepstakes Work in Online Poker?

In online poker, sweepstakes are technically realized through a double-currency finance system. The main “public” currency – usually Gold Coins or similar – is play money, available for all players without conditions, spendable across cash games and tournaments and subject to refill and purchase in the internal store. Gold Coins don’t allow players to win any money or rewards. The Gold Coins games are purely for fun: this is a zero-barrier possibility to dive into the world of online poker.

The second internal currency, Sweeps Coins, allows access to the prize cash games and tournaments. They can’t be refilled or purchased, but only received as a bonus or prize and often must be wagered to be exchanged for money, a voucher, or a physical prize.

The classic model of employing double currency is simple: a player buys a refill of Gold Coins to play for fun and receives a specific amount of Sweeps Coins as a bonus. He can’t withdraw these Sweeps Coins but must use them in games and tournaments to wager the prize, typically, an Amazon or a PayPal voucher, or something similar.

In this case, no real money gambling happens – technically. There are no money deposits and withdrawals, no cash prizes, but still, the whole concept of paying to get the opportunity to win something relates sweepstakes poker to gambling.

B2B Sweepstakes Market in Poker

The sweepstakes vertical started booming in 2024, and over the last year, numerous casino game providers have included sweepstakes support in their offerings. Yet, the search for online poker with such functionality would be difficult – if there weren’t EvenBet Gaming. The general double currency system isn’t something unheard of in the world of online poker; most poker rooms and providers have multi-currency support, including different variations of play money. It is the Sweeps Coins wagering system, audience segmentation, and internal store functionality that create the most trouble for sweepstakes poker rooms: the issues that are now solved for EvenBet Poker platform.

Sweepstakes Poker: Market Landscape

One of the most well-known cases of sweepstakes poker comes not from the USA, but from Australia – Global Poker, operated by Virtual Gaming Worlds. Despite being based outside the States, the operator taps freely into the American players’ pool and, according to available data, remains the biggest global player in the sweepstakes gaming market. Global Poker’s revenue in 2024 was estimated to be about $200 million: a small share of the iGaming market, but a notable amount for the US poker vertical, with most of the real-money poker rooms experiencing difficulties due to the lack of player liquidity.

In 2025, the Global Poker and VGW domination ceased in both the sweepstakes casino and poker verticals. Strong brands continue popping up with sweepstakes poker offerings: ClubWPT, Clubs Poker, Stake.us are constantly increasing their market share and gaining traction.

Generally, the competition increase in the sweepstakes market is obvious, and if in early 2024, user acquisition in sweepstakes poker was significantly cheaper than in general in the US iGaming cutthroat landscape, now the CPA for this business model is growing very rapidly.

Sweepstakes Regulation: 2025 Update

Having become an answer to the lack of online casino and poker regulation across most of the states, sweepstakes gambling is now facing significant regulatory pressure. Real-money operators, tribal casinos, and numerous interested parties are lobbying to close the legal loophole in the sweepstakes law that allows the business model to exist and profit.

Solely from the financial point of view, sweepstakes casinos and poker rooms exist outside of the gambling taxation procedures – and logically, the authorities consider all spending on Gold Coins as lost revenue.

As a result, almost every week in 2025, we see headers stating that some state is considering banning or is actually banning sweepstakes online gaming.

Here are the most important legal developments in this market segment in 2025.

The American Gaming Association (AGA) has become the major anti-sweepstakes power, promoting every legal action against it and denouncing operators. They are pushing authorities across numerous states to ban sweepstakes gambling.

A few states had pre-existing sweepstakes laws that made it impossible for online casinos or poker rooms to function: Washington imposes a nearly blanket ban on sweepstakes; Nevada, Utah, Kentucky, and South Carolina limit operations significantly; New York and Florida cap prize values. However, in 2025, 40 states allow sweepstakes casinos and poker rooms to exist and gain revenue.

In 2025, several states passed bills to outlaw sweepstakes gambling: Montana, Connecticut, and Louisiana have closed for this business. More are discussing similar bills without a decision made yet.

Some states are acting without directly banning sweepstakes but with cease-and-desist orders against operators, mostly those with legal iGaming: Michigan, Delaware, and New York among them. This results either in a legal fight or (rarely) in the operator exiting the state (the case of VGW in New York).

Finally, the players themselves are taking legal actions against sweepstakes casinos, alleging that, as those are illegal gambling disguised as social gaming, they have the right to recover losses. Known settlements for such lawsuits vary from $1.5 million to $12 million, with even bigger state fines. So far, due to most cases being settled, there is no widely known legal precedent of the court declaring a sweepstakes casino an illegal online gambling entity.

Conclusion

The main question that surely bothers sweepstakes operators, startups, and vendors who invest in product development is: will this business model disappear soon? Will it be banned once and for all?

Most likely, sweepstakes are here to stay as long as there’s slow progress in real money gaming regulation. Like every “roundabout” gaming format, sweepstakes answer the needs of both business and players, and even occasional bans in a few more states don’t stop the sweepstakes US invasion.

At the last SBC Summit Malta, Wojtek Stellmach, CEO of Bugsy Empire, answered this question with a clear vision: the situation around sweepstakes in the USA is similar to fantasy sports. Some states will ban them, some will allow, and the businesses will adapt.

So, it’s not too late to start a sweepstakes poker project. And we at EvenBet Gaming have a great customisable poker platform to realise your boldest ideas.