Over five years since a regulatory scheme covering sports betting and online gambling in Brazil was originally signed into law, the first sites to be formally approved to offer their services in South America’s largest and most populous country began operating as regulated licensees on Wednesday.
Fourteen companies to date have received the full operating approval, with another 58 companies receiving a provisional approval with expectation of receiving full approval within 60 days. The 14 companies approved to date include both global and local (Brazilian) operators, with a heavy emphasis on sports-betting sites.
The sports-betting emphasis among original licensees is due to the path the law, now known as Bill 3,626/2023, followed on the way from original passage in late 2018 to going into effect. Originally a bill and framework designed to cover sports betting and all of iGaming, the iGaming portion was stripped out for some time before being reinserted and reapproved, and some specifics regarding online-poker remain a regulatory question mark.
PokerStars Brazil among provisional licensees
Brazil is one of the world’s largest countries in terms of online-poker participation but had fallen behind the curve in regulatory oversight. For the moment, no major online-poker operators have full approval to operate there, though PokerStars Brazil, as a provisional licensee for now, comes closest.
In October, PokerStars parent Flutter Entertainment announced that PokerStars would become a poker-only operator in Brazil, with that transition taking place in mid-December. All other iGaming and sports betting offered in Brazil will be under the Betfair brand name, and both Stars and Betfair in Brazil are licensed under Flutter’s Brazilian corporate entity, Betfair Brasil LTDA.
The status of other major global online-poker operators regarding Brazilian licensing is unclear. For instance, GGPoker and WSOP parent NSUS does not appear among the lists of fully or temporary approved licensees, though dozens more operators are reportedly still at earlier points in the approval process.
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