Seminole Tribe to begin in-person sports betting at all Florida casinos in December

The Seminole Tribe of Florida will begin in-person sports betting, craps and roulette at all six of its casinos in December, the tribe announced Wednesday, and South Florida’s gamblers will get to experience it first.

But the tribe has still not announced when or if it will launch online sports betting, the question on the minds of South Florida’s gamblers and gambling experts.

The announcement comes a week after the U.S Supreme Court lifted a stay to allow sports betting in the state to move forward, a milestone in a series of legal challenges to a gaming compact between the tribe and the state of Florida that gave it a monopoly on sports betting.

“The Seminole Tribe thanks the State of Florida, the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Justice for defending our Compact. By working together, the Tribe, the State and the federal government achieved a historic legal victory,” Marcellus Osceola Jr., chairman of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, said in a statement.

Daniel Wallach, a sports gambling attorney based in Hallandale Beach, said the announcement was “inevitable.”

“It was only a question of when the tribe would make this announcement” following the lifting of the stay, he said.

Described as “A New Era in Florida Gaming,” celebrations of the launch of sports betting, craps and roulette will take place throughout the month of December, a Wednesday news release said. The official launch date is Dec. 7 for South Florida’s locations: Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, Seminole Classic Casino in Hollywood and Seminole Casino Coconut Creek.

The next day, the games will launch at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tampa, and on Dec. 11, they will launch at Seminole Casino Immokalee and Seminole Brighton Casino on the northwest side of Lake Okeechobee.

“The Seminole Tribe of Florida’s new initiative will create jobs, increase tourism, and provide billions in added revenue for our state,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said in the news release. “I was proud to work with the Tribe on our historic Gaming Compact and I look forward to its full implementation.”

Some think that the announcement means that the tribe could launch online sports betting in the coming weeks or months; others say it could take years.

The tribe had no update Wednesday on online sports betting plans, said Gary Bitner, a Seminole Tribe spokesman. In 2021, the Seminoles briefly launched a sports betting app but stopped accepting wagers after a court ruling blocked the deal.

Their decision will depend heavily on whether they think the U.S and Florida Supreme Courts are on their side. The Seminoles are currently facing two legal challenges brought to those courts by Florida pari-mutuel companies against the gaming compact and sports betting in the state.

But the longer they wait to launch online sports betting, the longer they miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each month, Wallach said.

The case before the U.S Supreme Court focuses specifically on the issue of online sports betting, though both cases present challenges to it.

In the U.S Supreme Court case, filed in 2021, the companies, represented by West Flagler Associates, argue that the gambling compact violates federal law by allowing gamblers to place mobile sports bets anywhere in the state, not only on tribal lands.

Meanwhile, the case West Flagler recently brought before the Florida Supreme Court argues that the compact violates a 2018 state amendment that requires voters to approve any further expansion of gambling in a statewide referendum.

By launching in-person only sports betting, the Seminole Tribe is likely hoping to avoid another stay, this time from the Florida Supreme Court, that would halt or delay sports betting again, according to Bob Jarvis, a law professor and gambling expert at Nova Southeastern University. It is unlikely that the U.S Supreme Court will issue a second one.

“If the Seminoles had started mobile sports betting, I’d say there’s a fifty-fifty chance of the court granting a stay,” Jarvis said. “By only starting what everyone agrees the Seminoles are entitled to under Florida law, the Seminoles are in a much better state.”

In court documents, West Flagler has already signaled its intent to request that the court suspend the compact until it reaches a final decision on the case.

“I’m sure they’re working on that stay application even as we speak,” Jarvis said.

The group will likely argue that even in-person sports betting violates Florida law by expanding gambling in the state without the required 60% approval from voters, he said.

That case could take between months and multiple years, depending on what the Florida Supreme Court decides to do. Experts’ opinions differ over the expected outcomes of the two cases.

The agreement between Florida and the Seminole Tribe hinges on the idea that, as long as the servers accepting the bets are located on tribal lands, the betting is still technically occurring there and allowed under the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

The state and the tribe walked a “legal tightrope” when drafting the gaming compact, Wallach said, and “the resulting product was this construct of declaring all bets made outside Indian lands are deemed to be made on Indian lands where the server is located.”

He thinks that argument could present problems in both cases, and that the U.S Supreme Court may decide to take up the case and rule against the tribe. Some justices have already hinted at their own skepticism over the argument that the location of the servers makes the compact compliant with federal law.

“Wordsmithing where the bet takes place doesn’t change where the customer is located,” Wallach said.

Jarvis thinks the U.S Supreme Court will likely not take up the case, while the state case could take a while, but result in a victory for the Seminoles.

The amendment that the case hinges on has an exception for Indian gambling and was written and funded by the Seminoles, he said. And the Florida Supreme Court has rarely decided against DeSantis, who supports the gambling compact and likely want to see it implemented as soon as possible.

Still, West Flagler brought the case directly to the court, which has a precedent of asking lower courts to review cases before they accept them. If the Florida Supreme Court sends the case to a lower court and the challenge goes through the appeals process all the way back up to the Supreme Court again, Jarvis said, it could easily take until 2026 or 2027 for online sports betting to return.

Ultimately, though Wednesday’s announcement will bring in-person sports betting to those Floridians waiting for a legal route, he thinks it is just one of a series of incremental steps towards an online sports betting — and more generally, online gambling — future.

“It is the camel’s nose into the tent,” Jarvis said. ” … Let us never think this is just about mobile sports betting.”

Information from the Orlando Sentinel was used in this report.