Oregon Sports Betting: Lottery Rulemaking Authority (ORS 461.210)

Oregon's first sports-betting law, ORS 461.213, authorized "Sports Action", the Lottery's NFL and NBA parlay-card game, starting in 1989. Facing NCAA pressure to keep tournament games out of the state as long as it ran sports wagering, the legislature repealed 461.213 in 2005 and the Lottery shut Sports Action down after the 2007 season; Portland got NCAA basketball tournament games in 2009. Lawmakers never replaced 461.213 with a new sports-betting statute.

Instead, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal sports-betting ban in 2018, the Oregon State Lottery Commission relied on authority it already held. ORS 461.010(6) defines "lottery game" broadly as "any procedure authorized by the commission whereby prizes are distributed among persons who have paid...for tickets or shares that provide the opportunity to win such prizes," and ORS 461.210 lets the Commission "adopt rules specifying the types of lottery games to be conducted." Acting on that rulemaking power alone, no new bill, no ballot measure, the Commission approved Scoreboard, its own mobile sportsbook, which launched in October 2019. DraftKings took over as the Lottery's exclusive "Official Provider" on January 18, 2022, operating under Oregon Administrative Rules chapter 177, divisions 92 and 93.

ORS 461.040 exempts Lottery-run games from the state's general gambling laws entirely: "the state-operated lottery...shall not be subject to such laws." Oregon's nine federally recognized tribes run their own retail sportsbooks, including at Chinook Winds Casino Resort, under separate tribal-state gaming compacts negotiated under the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, entirely outside ORS chapter 461. The Lottery, not any statute, chose to exclude betting on Oregon college teams and in-state college events from its platform; that limit is a Commission policy and contract term, not a legal prohibition.

Betting outside the two licensed channels is a crime. Placing a wager with an unlicensed bookmaker, or otherwise participating as a player in an unlawful game, is unlawful gambling in the second degree, a Class A misdemeanor (ORS 167.122). Anyone who promotes or profits from unlicensed betting, running an office pool for a cut, operating a bookmaking operation, commits unlawful gambling in the first degree, a Class C felony (ORS 167.127). ORS 167.117 defines "bookmaking" as unlawfully accepting bets from the public as a business.