A record 31 states will allow legal sports bets on Super Bowl LX placed with mobile apps from anywhere within their state lines.
A Seattle-area resident making the roughly 800-mile, 13.5-hour drive to Santa Clara, California, for next Sunday's game would only have one legal mobile betting option during the trip’s duration - and it would only be for around 300 miles of the journey.
- West Coast bettors have far fewer legal mobile sports betting options than most states, highlighted by limited access during Super Bowl travel.
- Washington bans statewide mobile betting, Oregon operates a single lottery-backed sportsbook, and California remains stalled by tribal and political hurdles.
- Prediction markets offer an alternative to sportsbooks but may further complicate future West Coast legalization efforts.
That lone option wouldn’t come in their home state or California’s Levi’s Stadium, the game’s host.
The Seattle Seahawks’ opponents, the New England Patriots, play their home games in Massachusetts (six legal mobile sportsbooks), which borders five other states that all have at least one regulated mobile betting option. A bettor making the (much) longer drive from the Boston area to Northern California for the game would have legal betting options for around 2,400 of the 3,000 or so miles, or roughly 80% of the trip.
With a bit of maneuvering, that Massachusetts driver could get to the California border without passing through a state that prohibits legal mobile betting.
The upcoming Super Bowl, featuring a Washington team and played in California, spotlights the West Coast’s continued dearth of legal betting options. In all three states, existing laws and tribal gaming complexities have made mobile sports betting adaptation far more difficult than for most of the country.
Washington ban remains
The Seahawks have been one of the NFL’s more successful franchises in the past 20 years, earning four Super Bowl trips in the two-decade stretch. Their home state’s mobile sports betting prohibition can trace its roots to before the 2018 Supreme Court decision overturning the federal wagering ban - and even the Seahawks’ recent run of success.
Washington passed one of the nation’s most stringent online gambling prohibition laws in 2006, coincidentally, shortly after the Seahawks’ first Super Bowl run. The bill made it illegal to “facilitate internet gambling in any way,” according to the Washington State Gambling Commission. Violators faced a felony charge, among the toughest online gambling criminal charges in the country.
Though the commission and law enforcement have said they focus on combating illegal operators, Washington players that appear multiple times in an illegal operator’s records could face criminal charges.
“Gambling has a history of connection to crime and corruption and as a result is strictly controlled virtually everywhere,” the commission states in an information pamphlet on its website. “Just because gambling occurs on the Internet doesn’t change this potential or the concern.”
These harsh penalties were enough that Washington remains one of the few states where daily fantasy sports providers, who have long argued they are not a form of gambling, will not accept players. Not surprisingly, the nation’s major licensed sportsbook operators have not attempted to accept bets in the state.
Washington has a thriving tribal gaming environment with roughly three dozen casinos on Native American lands. Nearly a dozen offer legal sports betting, but a player must be physically on tribal lands to place bets.
Lawmakers are considering a bill that would expand tribes’ and sportsbooks online options, but those remain tied to physical lands in Indian Country. There has been virtually no political appetite for the type of competitive, statewide mobile setup now available in more than 30 states.
That leaves the hypothetical Seattle traveler heading south to the game with few opportunities to place a legal bet - and none outside tribal lands.
The Oregon ‘oasis’
The Interstate 5 driver heading south will access a legal mobile betting opportunity once they cross the Oregon line. It may be years until they have a second.
DraftKings is Oregon’s lone mobile sportsbook. Another law passed before the court’s 2018 ruling helps maintain that de facto monopoly.
Oregon was one of four states, along with Nevada, Montana, and Delaware, that were allowed some form of legal sports betting after the 1992 law banned sports gambling nationwide. Oregon’s exemption was tied to parlay cards run by the state lottery, a comparatively minuscule betting option that was nevertheless controversial at the time; the NCAA prohibited postseason competitions in the state because of these cards, which in part led Oregon to discontinue the games in 2007.
When the federal sports betting ban was overturned 26 years later after it was signed into law, Oregon policymakers moved to revamp the lottery’s sports betting, this time with a mobile betting platform instead of the antiquated in-person parlay cards. SBTech, the lottery’s provider, was then tasked with launching Oregon’s lone legal mobile sports betting platform.
A driver from Seattle's Lumen Field to Levi's Stadium would spend only around 300 miles of the 835 mile trip (37%) in a state with legal sports betting; a driver from Massachusetts ' Gillette Stadium would spend around 2,400 of that 3,000 mile drive (80%) in legal betting states
— Ryan Butler (@ButlerBets) January 27, 2026
DraftKings merged with SBTech in 2019, leading the lottery to rebrand under the better-known daily fantasy sports pioneer-turned-major U.S. sports betting company. DraftKings has been more than content with its monopoly; its competitors have been unwilling or unable to try to dethrone them.
Like its northern neighbor, Oregon also has a tribal gaming network with on-premises sports betting. Though it doesn’t have Washington’s strict codified digital anti-gambling statutes, lawmakers have remained more than content to leave the status quo, a sentiment appreciated by the tribes as well as the Oregon Lottery and DraftKings.
This keeps Oregon - and its single sportsbook - as the only state with any form of legal mobile sports betting along the West Coast. It will have that title until at least 2029 - and possibly years after.
California dreaming
The nation’s largest potential legal sports betting market remains the industry’s most coveted launch jurisdiction - and among its most elusive.
Home to nearly 40 million residents and the world’s fourth-largest economy, California has been at the epicenter of all major legal sportsbooks’ business dreams. New York, the nation’s current largest legal sports betting market, is now generating roughly $24 billion in annual handle and more than $2 billion in operator revenue; California would likely double both those figures.
But legalization has not come easy. DraftKings and FanDuel led a consortium of sportsbooks in an ill-fated attempt to legalize mobile sports betting via a 2022 ballot referendum. The measure, despite more than $150 million in sportsbook campaign contributions, was opposed by more than 80% of voters.
The online sports betting proposition backed by DraftKings and FanDuel got *crushed* by California voters. Just an absolute beatdown. https://t.co/818A5dIKIA pic.twitter.com/TKfSMhYuSG
— Matt Pearce 🦅🇺🇸 (@mattdpearce) November 9, 2022
The strongest opposition came from California’s gaming tribes, which prioritized defeating the commercial operators’ ballot measure over supporting an in-person-only sportsbook authorization campaign of their own. A 2000 ballot measure gave the tribes exclusive rights to casino gaming, a right they have used to fight off outside gaming interests ever since.
The lopsided defeat led the commercial operators to publicly apologize to the tribes and promise to work with them on any future California gaming expansions. Tribal leaders have expressed an openness to work together in the future.
When that “future” is remains to be determined.
Aside from the concerns among some California tribal stakeholders on working with out-of-state commercial interests, California’s tribes themselves have not reached consensus on a potential partnership framework. The massive state has roughly 100 tribes with vastly different histories, cultures, and future priorities, making a deal that satisfies all these groups - and the sportsbooks - a difficult endeavor.
The two groups have passed by key deadlines for an attempt on the 2026 ballot. It remains to be seen if a deal can be reached in time for a 2028 campaign. In the meantime, Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara will be played without legal betting sportsbooks.
So too will Super Bowl LXI, outside Los Angeles.
Prediction markets, potential change
Much can - and will - happen in the regulated gambling industry by next year’s Super Bowl. Though West Coast residents won’t have any new betting options when the AFC and NFC champions return to California next season, there are ways fans can “predict” the outcomes.
Next week’s Super Bowl will be the second since major prediction markets such as Kalshi began offering sports event contracts and the first with platforms from the U.S. market-share leaders FanDuel, DraftKings, and Fanatics. These sites - all of which are live in California - allow users to buy and sell contracts on the outcome, points scored, and individual player performances.
These trades, which critics call a workaround for accepting sports bets, have drawn the ire, and lawsuits, of California tribes as well as lawmakers and regulators across the country - including Massachusetts. The major established prediction markets are facing dozens of lawsuits as a growing number of state-level lawmakers look to pass sports event contract bans.
Betting not legal in California, but “prediction markets” are on billboards at LAX. pic.twitter.com/HZCbpOpytr
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) January 9, 2026
With both sides acknowledging a final determination on their legality is heading for a Supreme Court ruling several years from now, sports event contracts will continue to be available in California and elsewhere. These platforms, which many Native American tribes vehemently oppose, could again strain relationships between the major sportsbooks operating them and the groups books need to partner with to bring legal sports betting to the Golden State.
But their launch could signal that such a deal was a long shot to begin with.
Washington’s laws, Oregon’s contentment, and California’s complexities make sports betting legalization difficult, even when most of the country has already opened its doors. Prediction markets give West Coast bettors (or, in this case, traders) an option to win (or lose) money on the Big Game.
But their existence adds another variable to some of the longest-standing sports betting legalization stalemates.
