Tennessee Casinos and Gambling

Short Summary: This page looks at the different forms of gambling in the State of Tennessee, discusses the legality of online gambling and gives a detailed listing of all of the casinos in the state.

Top 4 United States: Tennessee Casinos

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Tennessee is definitely one of the more restrictive states when it comes to gambling and gamblers will find themselves with very little to do.

Tennessee borders Missouri, for the majority of Tennessee resident’s gambling. A study by a pro-gambling Tennessee lobbying group found that 10% of all Mississippi gambling income comes directly from Tennessee residents.

Online Gambling

Update: The State of Tennessee would eventually a law allowing for online sports betting to take place, which is interesting, because the state still has no land casinos whatsoever. In any event, mobile sports wagering became a reality in 2020 and went live in the late part of 2021.

The operators licensed by the state are the usual suspects, with online sportsbook clients, such as BetMGM available in the state and governed through the state’s lottery department.

The next logical step would either be legislation to allow online casino-style gambling or, I don’t know, to actually have land casinos in the state, but the former of those things is extremely unlikely with Republican Governor Bill Lee in charge.

Governor Lee just won reelection by a huge margin in 2022, so he’s going to be there for at least another four years. For his part, he refused to sign the sports betting bill into law, according to Rocky Top Insider. Even if an online casino or poker bill could make its way to the Governor’s desk, it would only be narrowly, and Governor Lee would be almost certain to veto it. Quoting, in part:

The growth and success of Tennessee sports betting make it easy to forget legislation almost didn’t back in 2019. Gov. Bill Lee let House Bill 1 without his signature while saying he didn’t believe online sports betting was in the best interest of the state. That was after the bill narrowly ed in the Senate 19 to 12.

Considering Gov. Lee referred to casino gambling as “the most harmful form of gambling”, those hoping to see online gambling expanded in Tennessee will likely be waiting for some time.

With that, Governor Lee did not want to veto the online sports betting bill, but was clearly no great fan of it. One almost has to believe that any bills related to either land casinos, or online casino-style games, would be struck down by him immediately.

However, residents of the state wanting to play online casino games have a wide variety of options at their disposal, please check out some of our top picks above!

The first thing that you’ll find is that there are no state-licensed and regulated online casinos in the state. Furthermore, it’s one of the few states that would make online gambling illegal, according to the language of the law that predated the existence of online gambling:

Gambling in any fashion other than those specifically legalized by the State constitutes illegal gambling, and using any device for gambling for any reason causes it to be Possession of an Illegal Gambling Device.

Basically, your computer would legally become an illegal gambling device. Of course, we could find no instance of the State of Tennessee actually pursuing charges for someone acting as a mere online player.

While gambling is a Class C Misdemeanor, the state obviously has more stringent penalties for those who are actually operating a gambling enterprise. Fortunately, for those of you who wish to do casino gambling without leaving the state (or home) overseas online casinos are out of the state’s jurisdictional reach, so simply put, there’s nothing they can do about it.

There are a few online casinos that we recommend for those inclined to gamble from home, and you can find our Top 4 picks in the next section.

Top 4 Sportsbooks in United States: Tennessee


1	20% up to CA$500	Play Players Accepted
2	50% up to $1,000	Play Players Accepted
3	50% up to $1,000	Play Players Accepted
4	100% up to $500	Play Players Accepted

Charitable Gambling

The State of Tennessee technically allows for Charitable Gambling, but the laws related to such are ridiculously restrictive. For one thing, a charity couldn’t even conduct bingo if it wanted to, charitable gambling is limited to raffles and a few other things (Cakewalks) that I’ve never even heard of before.

Perhaps worse is the fact that a charitable organization has to get approval from the state and is limited to ONE such event per year. Yikes. And we thought Texas was bad, at least they have Bingo and allow for TWO raffles per year.

Absurdly enough, there are fees associated with this ONE event per year. The fee is called a, “Filing fee,” and is based upon the gross proceeds (read: sales) for the event. The fee can range from $100-$550 and depends on the proceeds of the event, the table can be found here.

Anyway, have fun with that.

The language of the law is so simple, yet so all-encoming, that you’d basically have to have a separate law that would authorize private social gambling. From what I can tell, no such law exists, which would effectively make something like a home poker game (no rake) technically illegal…not that we would expect that to be strictly enforced across the entire state.

Pari-Mutuel Wagering

Okay, this would refer to horse racing as well as simulcast betting. Interestingly, this form of gambling is actually legal, with the small caveat that there’s no physical location to do it at. There’s not a horse track that operates on a full-time, or even a part-time basis, anywhere in the state, at present.

When we say, “Legal,” there’s actually a bit of a question as to whether or not live wagering at a live event conducted within the state would strictly be legal, but it appears that simulcast wagering would be. Anyway, we’re not going to quote all of the applicable law in this regard because it’s kind of all over the place throughout the code. Advance deposit wagering for online horse betting (simulcast) is stated as legal by some sources, but even so, it probably doesn’t matter because it’s not like the state would actually enforce a law to the contrary.

Tennessee Lottery

Because even states that hate gambling love having a lottery, except Hawaii, of course. Let’s see how well the lottery does by looking at the most recently available Annual Report, which can be found here.

Fiscal Year 2019, awesome, and the size of the report means that everything is going to be pretty simply presented without a lot of nonsense. Although, we do hope they offer certain specifics (returns-to-player by ticket type and denomination) that some states don’t. Let’s find out:

The first thing we notice from pages 5 & 6 is that Instant Ticket sales blow drawing tickets out of the water completely, so we expect (as long as the instants are at least average returning) that this lottery will have a better overall return-to-player than most others.

The first thing we will notice is that they actually hand us the percentages:

Instant games prize expense is managed through the number of tickets printed for each game and the value of prizes as determined prior to ticket production. Prize expense is recorded based on an established prize structure and a related percentage of sales for each game introduced and is recognized when products are made available for sale to the public. The aggregated prize payout for all instant games was 67.6%, 67.6%, and 67.4% of instant game sales, net of free tickets, for 2019, 2018, and 2017, respectively.

Gross prize expense for drawing-style games generally increases or decreases in direct proportion to ticket sales of the related game and is recorded at the time of the related draw. The aggregated prize payout for all drawing-style games was 51.1%, 51.1%, and 50.5% for 2019, 2018, and 2017, respectively.

This works well-enough for our purposes because we can just subtract the percentages from the revenues in order to arrive at a total loss (from the buyers) for each of the different game types. That’s kind of the opposite of how we usually do it, but it’s basically the same thing.

We are able to establish that the, “Free tickets,” are counted in these returns, so with that, we see that total instant ticket sales were $1,448,878,000 of which buyers lost 32.4%, so:

1448878000*.324 = $469,436,472

Drawing tickets had total sales of $363,726,000 of which players lost 48.9%, so:

363726000*.489 = $177,862,014

These lottery returns are pretty average, across-the-board, for those types of games. Of course, the returns-to-player are just awful, but that’s typical.

Lottery players lost a total of $647,298,486 to the Tennessee Lottery in 2019, which represents a loss per resident of roughly $94.79/resident, based on a population of 6.829 million.

Believe it or not, in a state with no other meaningful forms of gambling, this is actually a bit below average.

Land Casinos In Tennessee

Dare to dream, but your dreams probably won’t become reality anytime soon.

The last real effort was in 2017 with proposed Legislation to amend the simple anti-gambling law to create room for something more concrete, but even that bill died a Legislative death. The State of Tennessee (at least, the Government) simply isn’t interested in much related to gambling at this time.

Which is particularly odd because the state was one of the first to legalize and regulate Daily Fantasy Sports, which we can only assume they see as more of a contest of skill than a gambling event. We’re not sure why because, under the interpretation of the law cited in the first section, DFS should have been an easy no.

Also, why does the state hate money so much? I guess they do well-enough on tourism with or without gambling, but a casino certainly couldn’t hurt the cause. Are there really any major Country Music/Bluegrass themed casinos anywhere? I’m pretty sure not, so that would be a niche that some folks might be interested in.

Top 20 Online Casinos in Tennessee


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Conclusion

Tennessee is pretty hardcore anti-gambling, except when it comes to (oddly enough) Daily Fantasy Sports and the Lottery. Some people don’t even consider Bingo to truly be gambling, and yet, that’s not even allowed at the ONE charitable gambling event that non-profit organizations are permitted to conduct per year.

If you’re a gambler and you live in Tennessee, I guess our question is: Why haven’t you moved yet?