The History of Gambling in Chile
Chile’s gambling law rests on a single inherited principle: games of chance are illicit unless a specific statute says otherwise. That rule, rooted in the 1874 Código Penal, is why the country’s casino industry exists as a set of narrow legal exceptions — a 1928 loan law for Viña del Mar, two charitable-lottery statutes from the 1930s, and a 2005 licensing law — rather than a general permission. It is also why Chile’s online betting market sits in open legal limbo in 2026: the Corte Suprema has twice ordered internet providers to block offshore betting sites as illegal, a licensing bill has been before Congress since 2022 without being enacted, and the tax authority has separately begun registering the same “illegal” operators to collect VAT from them.
Colonial dice, republican prohibition
Card and dice games arrived with Spanish colonisation and were played across the social spectrum through the colonial period, from elite salons to street corners. Colonial and early-republican authorities issued repeated bandos (edicts) against gambling, from the late colonial governors through to Bernardo O’Higgins, without ever suppressing it. By the nineteenth century, unlicensed gambling had migrated into garitos — clandestine gaming rooms in Santiago and Valparaíso, sometimes operating out of restaurants and hotels, offering cards, dice and roulette beyond the reach of the law.
The state’s formal position hardened with the Código Penal, promulgated on 12 November 1874 and in force from 1 March 1875. Articles 277 to 279 of the Code criminalised the operation of and participation in games of chance. That prohibition remains the default rule today: nothing in Chilean law has repealed it, and every subsequent legal casino, lottery or racetrack betting pool exists only because a specific statute carved out an exemption from those three articles.
The charitable lotteries: Lotería de Concepción and Polla Chilena de Beneficencia
The first durable exemption was not a casino but a university fundraising scheme. Facing financial difficulty soon after its 1919 founding, the Universidad de Concepción began running “donations by raffle” draws among wealthy patrons from 1921, deliberately avoiding the word “lottery” to sidestep the Penal Code. Roughly forty such draws were held in the scheme’s first years. The mechanism only acquired formal legal existence with Ley N.º 4.885 of 6 September 1930, which constituted it as the state-sanctioned “Lotería de Beneficencia Pública.” Four years later, Ley N.º 5.443 — promulgated 6 July 1934 and published 13 July 1934, under President Arturo Alessandri Palma — renamed it, in its Article 7, “Lotería de Concepción,” the name it carries today.
That same 1934 statute did double duty. Its principal purpose was to authorise the Junta Central de Beneficencia y Asistencia Social to establish “Polla Chilena de Beneficencia”: a system of sorteos (draws) combined with the outcome of a classic horse race at an authorised hipódromo, capped at four races a year, with a minimum of 60% of ticket revenue reserved for prizes and a maximum of 10% for administrative costs. The remaining charitable surplus was split by the same law: half to fund casas de socorro (first-aid posts), the rest to hospital services and staff welfare. Polla Chilena’s origins are, by law, inseparable from horse racing — the two activities were created in the same clause.
Both institutions were later reorganised as commercial entities. A 1960 decree with force of law fixed Polla Chilena’s operating rules, and Ley N.º 18.851, promulgated 7 November 1989 and published 22 November 1989, converted it from a state agency into a sociedad anónima — a joint-stock company owned 99% by the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción (CORFO) and 1% by the Chilean Treasury. Lotería de Concepción, administered in coordination with the Universidad de Concepción, and Polla Chilena together hold Chile’s duopoly on public lottery and numbers-game draws, and — as later Corte Suprema rulings confirm — an exclusive, legally protected right to run certain classes of betting pool.
The municipal casino era, 1928–1990
Casinos followed the same case-by-case pattern. Ley N.º 4.283, promulgated 7 February 1928 and published 16 February 1928, was in form a loan authorisation for public works in Viña del Mar; its Article 8, almost as an aside, authorised the city’s Junta pro-Balneario to establish a casino “destined to provide pastime and attractions to tourists,” explicitly exempted from Penal Code Articles 277 to 279. Revenue was split 67% to the improvement of the Viña del Mar seafront resort and 33% to the Junta de Beneficencia Pública de Valparaíso, to fund its hospitals. The casino opened on 31 December 1930 and became the model for Chilean casino law: a local, revenue-sharing exemption tied to tourism and welfare spending, administered by or on behalf of a municipality.
Six further municipalities won the same kind of exemption over the following six decades, each under its own special law: Arica (1960), Puerto Varas (1970), Coquimbo (1976), and Iquique, Pucón and Puerto Natales, all authorised in 1990. Together with Viña del Mar these became known as Chile’s seven historic municipal casinos — three in the north, three in the south, one near the capital — legally distinct from any later national framework, regulated locally, and exempt from the general Penal Code prohibition purely by virtue of their own founding statutes. For most of the twentieth century, this is what “legal casino gambling in Chile” meant: seven specific towns, each with its own Act of Congress.
Ley 19.995: a national licensing system
That patchwork ended, at least for new casinos, with Ley N.º 19.995, promulgated 4 January 2005 and published 7 January 2005. Rather than legislating casino-by-casino, it created a general licensing regime and a dedicated regulator, the Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego (SCJ), which relates to the President of the Republic through the Ministerio de Hacienda. Under the law, a “permiso de operación” — a competitively tendered operating permit bundling gaming licences and ancillary services — is required to run a casino anywhere in the country.
The law caps the market at 24 casinos nationally: a guaranteed minimum of one per region, a maximum of three in any single region, no casino in the Región Metropolitana, and a minimum road distance of 70 kilometres between any two casinos. Games are restricted to those on an official catálogo de juegos maintained by the SCJ — roulette, cards, dice, bingo and slot machines are mandatory categories in every licensed casino. Article 5 of the law is explicit, and directly relevant to everything that follows: “en ningún caso el permiso de operación comprenderá juegos de azar en línea” — under no circumstances does an operating permit cover online games of chance. Chile’s principal casino statute, in other words, was drafted to exclude the internet entirely, leaving online betting to be dealt with, if at all, by other means.
Taxation follows Article 59: a 20% specific tax on each operator’s gross gaming revenue (net of VAT and provisional tax payments), collected by the Servicio de Tesorerías and redistributed the following month in equal halves to the municipality hosting the casino and the regional government of the region in which it sits. Winning bidders also pay an “oferta económica” — an additional annual sum in unidades de fomento, offered competitively during the tender and paid directly to the host municipality on top of the Article 59 tax.
Absorbing the municipal casinos
Ley 19.995 counted the seven pre-existing municipal casinos toward its 24-licence ceiling but initially left their old municipal concessions running on their original terms, due to expire on 31 December 2015. Ley N.º 20.856, promulgated 5 August 2015 and published 11 August 2015, extended that deadline to 31 December 2017 while the SCJ ran competitive tenders — representing roughly 28% of Chile’s casinos by count at the time — to bring the seven into the standard Ley 19.995 regime. Not every tender found a winning bidder; some rounds closed without an operator willing to meet the terms on offer. By 2026, market reporting puts Chile at 25 operating casinos: 22 holding Ley 19.995 licences and three — Iquique, Puerto Varas and Puerto Natales — still operating under municipal arrangements outside the SCJ’s competitive framework.
The SCJ’s own figures illustrate the scale of the industry today. For the twenty-two Ley 19.995 casinos, tax contributions to the state and to host regions/municipalities totalled CLP 148.1 billion in the twelve months to September 2025 (a specific gaming tax of CLP 64.2 billion, split 50/50 between regions and municipalities; VAT of CLP 62.0 billion; and a gaming-hall entry tax of CLP 21.9 billion to general government funds), on gross gaming revenue of CLP 388.1 billion for the same period — a real decline of around 5% on the prior year, alongside a 6.6% fall in visits to 4.58 million. Industry-wide GGR across all Chilean land-based casinos was reported at roughly CLP 509.8 billion (about USD 597.5 million) for calendar 2025, down 4.5% in real terms.
Horse racing: a separate legal track
Betting on horse racing has never sat inside the casino framework at all. Decreto Ley N.º 2.437, promulgated 18 December 1978 and published 29 December 1978 under the Ministerio de Hacienda, sets the rules for apuestas mutuas (pari-mutuel betting) at Chile’s hipódromos, fixing a 30% gross commission on betting turnover at each track, with a minimum of 10.5% reserved for race prizes, and repealing an earlier 1970 decree with force of law on the same subject. It was amended in 2013 by Ley N.º 20.662 to allow simulcast betting on thoroughbred races run abroad and broadcast live in Chile. Racetrack betting is regulated independently of the SCJ, under rules dating to the military government, and is untouched by either the 2005 casino law or the online-betting bill working its way through Congress in 2026.
Sports pools have their own separate track too. Decreto Ley N.º 1.298, promulgated 23 December 1975 and published 26 December 1975, created the Sistema de Pronósticos Deportivos — commercially branded “Polla Gol” — operated by Polla Chilena de Beneficencia to fund Chile’s national sports institute (then Digeder, now the Instituto Nacional del Deporte). The decree has been amended repeatedly since, most recently by Ley N.º 21.755 in July 2025, and — as discussed below — is also targeted by the pending online-betting bill, which would redirect 22% of the pool’s gross revenue to sport in the same way it taxes new online operators.
The online grey market: courts, telecoms and the tax office
Because Ley 19.995 never covered the internet and no other statute filled the gap, offshore-licensed betting sites have operated in Chile for years in a state the Corte Suprema itself has repeatedly labelled illegal, without ever being effectively shut down. In September 2023, the Court’s Tercera Sala (Third Chamber) ruled on a recurso de protección filed in 2022 by Polla Chilena de Beneficencia against internet provider Mundo Pacífico, ordering it to block access to 23 named betting platforms. The Court’s reasoning, based on an SCJ report to the case, was direct: gambling activity is illicit in Chile except where expressly authorised by law, and only Polla Chilena, Lotería de Concepción, licensed hipódromos and Ley 19.995 casinos hold that authorisation.
The ruling had an immediate knock-on effect in football. On 1 September 2023 — in the same window as the Court proceedings — the Subsecretaría de Justicia gave the Asociación Nacional de Fútbol Profesional (ANFP) thirty days to terminate its sponsorship contracts with betting houses, warning that continued non-compliance could see the ministry ask the Consejo de Defensa del Estado to seek dissolution of the ANFP’s legal personality. The ANFP had signed a three-year, roughly US$2.5 million naming-rights deal with the Swedish-listed operator Betsson for Chile’s Primera División and Ascenso competitions earlier in 2023; the contract was terminated around October 2023, and Banco Itaú took over the league’s naming rights from the 2024 season. The episode became the clearest public illustration that offshore betting operators, whatever their international listings, had no recognised legal standing in Chile.
Court orders did not end there. On 30 September 2025, the Corte Suprema’s Tercera Sala ruled again — Rol N.º 18.080-2025 — this time on a case brought by Lotería de Concepción (with Polla Chilena intervening in support) against six internet service providers: Claro, Entel, GTD Manquehue, Telefónica, WOM and VTR. The Court, in a split 3-2 decision, ordered all six to immediately block access to a list of named platforms including Betano, Coolbet, JugaBet, Rojabet and Betsson, rejecting the providers’ argument that they lacked the technical or legal competence to filter specific sites. The Court’s reasoning again rested on Lotería de Concepción’s exclusive legal concession over this category of betting, which unlicensed platforms were found to infringe.
Enforcement, however, has proved contested. Offshore platforms responded to the blocking orders by shifting to mirror-site URLs, and the question of how to make blocking stick was still live in mid-2026: after the Corte de Apelaciones de Santiago put the matter to the telecoms regulator Subtel, Subtel replied on 11 June 2026 with a proposal favouring DNS-level blocking of individually identified domains as the most proportionate mechanism, while stating plainly that no method currently exists to block mirror sites permanently and with full effectiveness. The underlying case had been brought in 2024 by the Lotería de Concepción, which alleged that the existing blocking orders were not being complied with. In June 2026, the Servicio de Impuestos Internos (SII) issued Resolución Exenta N.º 69 (2 June 2026), creating a registration and payment mechanism under which foreign betting and gambling platforms with no domicile or tax residency in Chile can register for, and pay, “IVA Digital” — value-added tax on cross-border digital services — via Formulario F129, including retroactive regularisation of the previous 36 tax periods once registered. Because the same platforms had just been described as illegal by the Corte Suprema, industry and opposition figures characterised the resolution as a “de facto legalisation”: the Asociación Chilena de Casinos de Juego (ACCJ) called it a disguised regularisation of operators the Court had explicitly found unlawful, and opposition deputies asked the Contraloría General de la República to review the resolution’s legality, while the Senate separately sought the Corte Suprema’s own opinion on it. The SII’s defence has been that its statutory mandate is limited to tax administration and does not extend to ruling on an activity’s legality — a position that leaves Chile, in mid-2026, with a Supreme Court that calls offshore betting illegal, a tax authority collecting VAT from the same operators, and no enacted statute reconciling the two.
The online gambling bill: Boletín N.º 14.838-03
The obvious way out of that contradiction is the pending statute — and its progress has been slow relative to the urgency of the underlying problem. The government submitted the bill “que regula el desarrollo de las plataformas de apuestas en línea” (Boletín N.º 14.838-03) to Congress in March 2022. The Cámara de Diputados approved it, in its first constitutional stage, on 12 December 2023, sending it to the Senate. There it stalled through 2024 before the Senate approved it “en general” — in principle, without yet settling the detailed text — on 13 August 2025, by 27 votes in favour, 3 against and 5 abstentions, setting 29 September 2025 as the deadline for indicaciones (proposed amendments). Since then the bill has been under article-by-article (“en particular”) review in the Senate’s joint Comisiones Unidas de Economía y Hacienda, with the Executive and the Economy Committee forming a technical working group to reconcile amendments. The government granted the bill “suma urgencia” status on 7 May 2026 to accelerate debate. As of July 2026, the bill remains in that Senate committee stage: approved in general by both chambers, but not yet enacted, not yet law, and still subject to further amendment before a final vote. Any claim that Chile has already legalised online betting is, as of this writing, incorrect.
As currently drafted, the 75-article bill (plus six transitional provisions) would rename the SCJ the “Superintendencia de Casinos, Apuestas y Juegos de Azar,” giving it real-time digital oversight of licensed platforms’ betting and financial flows. Operators would have to be closed Chilean sociedades anónimas with disclosed ultimate beneficial owners and minimum capital, subject to SCJ vetting before certification. The proposed tax package layers a 20% levy on gross gaming revenue on top of standard VAT, a 1% responsible-gambling contribution, and a 2% sports-development levy on sports-betting revenue split equally between eligible sports federations, the Chilean Olympic Committee and the Paralympic Committee — a levy the bill would also apply, at 22%, to Polla Chilena’s existing DL 1.298 “Xperto” sports-pool revenue. Consumer-protection measures include a binding National Self-Exclusion Registry spanning both online and physical casinos (minimum six-month exclusion periods), bans on advertising to minors and on opening accounts for under-18s, and a national Política de Apuesta Responsable set by the Ministry of Finance. Enforcement tools include website and IP blocking and mandatory bank-transaction blocking against unlicensed sites, criminal penalties of 11 to 200 UTM plus possible imprisonment for unauthorised operation, and a twelve-month “cooling-off” period during which an operator caught running illegally cannot apply for a licence. Government projections put annual tax collection under the reform at roughly CLP 84 billion.
Chile’s position in 2026
Taken together, the picture in mid-2026 is one of a mature, tightly bounded land-based industry sitting alongside an unresolved online question. Twenty-five land-based casinos operate under two distinct regimes — 22 competitively licensed under Ley 19.995 and three still running as municipal concessions — generating roughly CLP 510 billion in gross gaming revenue a year and several hundred billion pesos in combined tax and fee payments to regions and municipalities, a revenue stream the seven original municipal towns still rely on disproportionately relative to their size. Horse racing and Polla Chilena’s lottery and sports-pool products continue under their own, decades-old decree-law frameworks, untouched by casino regulation. Online betting remains, in strict legal terms, illegal: the Corte Suprema has said so twice, most recently ordering the country’s largest telecoms to block a named list of offshore brands. Yet the same brands are now able to register with the tax authority to pay VAT, football has already been forced to strip betting-house branding from its jerseys and stadium boards once, and a comprehensive licensing bill — years in the making, now under “suma urgencia” — sits in Senate committee, its final shape and timetable still undecided.
Key dates
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 12 November 1874 | Código Penal promulgated (in force 1 March 1875); Articles 277–279 criminalise games of chance, the default rule ever since. |
| 1921 | Universidad de Concepción begins informal “donations by raffle” draws to fund the university. |
| 16 February 1928 | Ley N.º 4.283 published; Article 8 authorises a casino at Viña del Mar, exempt from Penal Code Arts. 277–279. |
| 31 December 1930 | Casino Municipal de Viña del Mar inaugurated — Chile’s first legal casino. |
| 6 September 1930 | Ley N.º 4.885 formally constitutes the Universidad de Concepción’s raffle scheme as “Lotería de Beneficencia Pública.” |
| 13 July 1934 | Ley N.º 5.443 published: creates Polla Chilena de Beneficencia and renames the 1930 lottery “Lotería de Concepción.” |
| 1960–1990 | Arica (1960), Puerto Varas (1970), Coquimbo (1976), and Iquique, Pucón and Puerto Natales (1990) each authorised by their own special law, completing the seven historic municipal casinos. |
| 26 December 1975 | DL N.º 1.298 published, creating Polla Chilena’s “Sistema de Pronósticos Deportivos” (Polla Gol). |
| 29 December 1978 | DL N.º 2.437 published, governing apuestas mutuas at Chile’s hipódromos — a separate legal track from casinos. |
| 22 November 1989 | Ley N.º 18.851 published: converts Polla Chilena into a state-owned sociedad anónima. |
| 7 January 2005 | Ley N.º 19.995 published: creates the Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego and a national licensing regime capped at 24 casinos; Art. 5 excludes online gambling. |
| 11 August 2015 | Ley N.º 20.856 published, extending the seven municipal casinos’ concessions to 31 December 2017 pending Ley 19.995 tenders. |
| March 2022 | Government submits the online betting bill, Boletín N.º 14.838-03, to Congress. |
| 12 December 2023 | Cámara de Diputados approves the online betting bill in its first constitutional stage. |
| September 2023 | Corte Suprema (Tercera Sala) rules offshore betting sites illegal, orders ISP Mundo Pacífico to block 23 platforms; ANFP given 30 days to end betting-house sponsorships. |
| 13 August 2025 | Senate approves the online betting bill “en general,” 27–3–5, sending it to article-by-article review. |
| 30 September 2025 | Corte Suprema, Rol 18.080-2025, orders six ISPs to block named platforms including Betano, Coolbet, JugaBet, Rojabet and Betsson. |
| 7 May 2026 | Government grants the online betting bill “suma urgencia.” |
| 2 June 2026 | SII Resolución Exenta N.º 69 opens VAT registration for offshore betting platforms, drawing accusations of “de facto legalisation.” |
Sources
- Código Penal (12 November 1874) — Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional (BCN), LeyChile: promulgation date and, via Ley 4.283’s text, confirmation that Articles 277–279 criminalise games of chance.
- Ley N.º 4.283 (1928) — BCN LeyChile, full text: Viña del Mar casino authorisation, Article 8, revenue split, promulgation/publication dates.
- Ley N.º 5.443 (1934) — BCN LeyChile, full text: creation of Polla Chilena de Beneficencia, renaming of Lotería de Concepción (Art. 7), dates and terms.
- Ley N.º 18.851 (1989) — BCN LeyChile, full text: conversion of Polla Chilena into a sociedad anónima; promulgation/publication dates.
- Ley N.º 19.995 (2005) — BCN LeyChile, full text: creation of the Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego, licensing caps, Article 5 (online exclusion), Article 59 (tax).
- Ley N.º 20.856 (2015) — BCN LeyChile, full text: extension of municipal casino concessions to 31 December 2017.
- Decreto Ley N.º 2.437 (1978) — BCN LeyChile, full text: distribution of apuestas mutuas at hipódromos, promulgation/publication dates.
- Decreto Ley N.º 1.298 (1975) — BCN LeyChile, full text: creation of the Sistema de Pronósticos Deportivos, promulgation/publication dates.
- Ministerio de Hacienda — Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego — confirms the SCJ relates to the President through the Ministerio de Hacienda.
- Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego — tax contribution report, September 2025 — official industry tax, GGR and visitor figures for the 22 Ley 19.995 casinos.
- Poder Judicial de Chile — press release on Corte Suprema Rol 18.080-2025 — date, parties, platforms named and reasoning in the 30 September 2025 blocking order.
- Yogonet — SCJ statement on the September 2023 Corte Suprema ruling — confirms the 2023 ruling, the 23 blocked platforms and the SCJ’s legal reasoning.
- Pauta.cl — Ministerio de Justicia’s 30-day order to the ANFP — date and terms of the ministry’s ultimatum to end football sponsorships with betting houses.
- La Tercera — the Betsson/ANFP naming-rights dispute and its aftermath — contract value, termination and Banco Itaú’s replacement sponsorship.
- Servicio de Impuestos Internos — Resolución Exenta N.º 69 announcement — official notice of the VAT registration mechanism for offshore betting platforms, 2 June 2026.
- La Serena Online — analysis of the SII resolution versus the Corte Suprema rulings — the “de facto legalisation” controversy and the Contraloría/Senate response.
- Senado de Chile — key aspects of Boletín N.º 14.838-03 — bill provisions: new SCJAJA regulator, licensing regime, tax, age verification, advertising rules.
- Ministerio de Hacienda — Senate approves the bill “en general,” 13 August 2025 — vote count and next legislative steps.
- BioBioChile — government grants “suma urgencia,” 7 May 2026 — current legislative stage and bill details as of May 2026.
- BioBioChile — sports-development levy and DL 1.298 amendment — the 2% IND levy and its extension to Polla’s Xperto system.
- Infogate — Chilean casino GGR fell 4.5% in 2025 — 2025 industry-wide gross gaming revenue figures.
- Gaming Intelligence — Chilean casinos’ January–February 2026 results — count of 25 operating casinos (22 Ley 19.995, 3 municipal) and early-2026 GGR.
- Plataforma Urbana — the seven municipal casinos’ contribution to their communes — context on the 2015 tender process and revenue significance to host municipalities.
- SciELO México — academic history of the Chilean national lottery for public benefit, 1912–1934 — background on the Universidad de Concepción raffle scheme and early revenue-sharing debates.