Table of Contents
Sports Betting in New Orleans, LA
This is our quick New Orleans (LA) online sports betting options overview. Check the gambling sites, legal sportsbooks, mobile apps. Learn about best local casinos (BoomTown Casino New Orleans near Harvey), racetracks (Fair Grounds Race Course and Slots) and sports betting locations and promotions like Harrah’s New Orleans Sportsbook and Casino, here.
New Orleans Sports Betting Guide
New Orleans has a very interesting history which is really knitted around gambling right from the outset of the first French, and then Spanish, settlers. There have been gambling crackdowns across the last 200 years, which saw gambling move underground.
Today there are a lot of regulated options for residents, including casino, poker, horse racing and video-poker games. However, New Orleans residents have seen heavy criminality for online gambling, going after companies that flout the law in this area.
For many years the only legal form of gambling for New Orleans citizens was pari-mutuel (pooled) betting on horse races at fairs. This became legal in the 1920’s and has grown into the huge industry it is today, with popular ‘Racinos’ also offering slots games.
Check promotions for new members ($100 welcome bonus) and offers for the exitsing players at Fair Ground Race Course and Slots Casino in New Orleans.
In addition to their broad ‘game of chance’ definition of gambling, New Orleans is unusual in that poker is specifically singled out as a gambling game (specifically draw poker) and internet gambling is for some reason specifically banned. There are fairly harsh penalties for the organizers of such gambling games, although the actual players are rarely targeted under state legislation.
Here is the main definition of what constitutes gambling:
“Gambling is the intentional conducting, or directly assisting in the conducting, as a business, of any game, contest, lottery, or contrivance whereby a person risks the loss of anything of value in order to realize a profit.“ (CH14-90-1).
Legislators are expected to take up legislation in April 2019 to legalize sports wagering. However, as of yet, no bill has been introduced.
The Louisiana state legislation introduced SB 266 in 2018 to legalize sports betting Harrah’s casino in New Orleans and at each of the state’s 15 floating casinos, but the bill was opposed by the Senate Finance Committee by a vote of 6-3.