Florida Has Legal Online Slots. They Are Called Sports Betting and They Settle on Races Run Years Ago

Open Hard Rock Bet anywhere in Florida and you can put a dollar on the finishing order of three motor races that were run some time in the last twenty years. The app will pick for you if you would rather not. The result is already determined, sitting in a NASCAR results database; the house takes the other side; the reels are a metaphor but only just.

This is a slot machine. It is also, as a matter of the controlling legal document, sports betting — and that is not a loophole somebody found. It is a definition two sovereigns wrote down and signed.

Part III, Section CC of the 2021 compact between the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the State of Florida:

"Sports Betting" means wagering on any past or future professional sport or athletic event, competition or contest, any Olympic or international sports competition event, any collegiate sport or athletic event (but not including proposition bets on such collegiate sport or event), or any motor vehicle race, or any portion of any of the foregoing…

Four words do the work. Any past or future. Most sports-betting definitions in American law are silent on tense because the question never came up; a wager on a concluded event is not a wager in the ordinary sense, and nobody thought to say so. Florida said so, in the affirmative, and attached a motor-vehicle-race clause to it.

Hard Rock Bet launched the resulting product — a package of 21 games, marketed as "Games Powered by Past Motor Races" — on October 29, 2025.

The money is not small

Playtech, the London-listed supplier behind the games, published its 2026 half-year results on September 10. Revenue from the United States and Canada was €56.9 million, against €21.8 million in the same period last year. That is a 161% increase as reported and 176% in constant currency, and Playtech names the cause in its own filing: the "Games powered by Past Motor Racing sports-betting product offered by the Seminole Tribe in the state of Florida."

The group numbers it sits inside: revenue €425.1 million, up 10%; adjusted EBITDA €162.5 million, up 77% from €91.6 million; free cash flow €101.0 million; full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance raised to at least €270 million. Playtech's minority stake in Hard Rock Digital, bought for roughly €80 million in 2023, was carried at €246.7 million at 30 June against €178.8 million at the end of last year, and paid a €4.4 million dividend in the half against €2.1 million a year earlier.

Several outlets have run these figures in dollars — roughly $64.9 million against $24.9 million, a stake at $281.5 million. Those are conversions, not the reported numbers. The company reports in euros and the euro figures are the ones in the filing.

One clause in a tribal-state compact is now a visible line in a FTSE-listed company's earnings.

What Wednesday's ruling says about this

Two days ago the Ninth Circuit told Kalshi that the label on a product does not decide what the product is. In Blue Lake Rancheria v. Kalshi, Judge McKeown wrote that under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act "the analysis is functional. IGRA does not ask whether the operator labels the product a bet or an event contract, or something else. It asks what the activity looks like." Then: "Kalshi may reshuffle the cards, but it cannot change the hand."

We agreed with that on Wednesday and we agree with it today, which obliges us to apply it in the direction where it is less comfortable.

Ask what the Past Motor Races activity looks like. The player pays a fixed stake. The outcome is unknown to the player and fixed in advance of the play. There is no skill input — the app's default requires no selection at all. The house is the counterparty. The session is designed to be repeated at speed. Every one of those features is in the compact's own definition of a Slot Machine at Part II.BB, which the parties wrote separately and in detail precisely because they knew the difference between a slot machine and a sports bet.

The compact's drafters even had a phrase for the category. Part III, Section U defines "Other Casino-Style Gaming" by reference to the "casino gambling" language in Article X, Section 30 of the Florida Constitution, and then sweeps in anything that "involve[s] any slot-like or casino-style game." The document contains the words slot-like. Whoever wrote it was thinking about exactly this boundary.

The one thing that distinguishes the product is that somewhere underneath, a real car really did cross a real line, in front of a crowd, years ago.

We do not think that survives a functional test. The player is not forecasting anything; the event is not pending; there is no proposition about the world that the wager resolves. What is being sold is a random draw from a fixed historical distribution, which is what a reel is.

Why nobody is litigating it

The honest answer is structural, not legal.

Class III gaming on Indian lands runs on a compact, and a compact has two parties. The Tribe built the product. The State takes a share of the net win under Part XI. Neither has an incentive to argue that the definition they jointly drafted means less than it says.

Everybody else is out of position. Florida's commercial pari-mutuel operators tried, and in March 2024 the Florida Supreme Court denied West Flagler Associates' petition for a writ of quo warranto in West Flagler Associates v. DeSantis, No. SC2023-1333 — holding that quo warranto "is not, and has never been, the proper vehicle to obtain a declaration as to the substantive constitutionality of an enacted law," that the petitioners had waited too long, and that the Tribe was not a party. That is three procedural grounds and no merits ruling. The United States Supreme Court declined to take the related federal case. West Flagler and the Tribe settled the remainder in October 2024.

So the constitutional question underneath has never been answered by any court. It has only ever been dismissed for being asked in the wrong way, by the wrong parties, too late. And the compact itself raises it, in its own opening recitals: "The voters of Florida approved a constitutional amendment at the 2018 General Election (Amendment 3) which created Article X, s. 30 of the Florida Constitution" — the provision reserving the authorisation of casino gambling in Florida to the voters by citizens' initiative. The drafters knew what they were drafting around.

Then there is the detail that Part XVIII, Section A of the compact obliges the Tribe and the State to negotiate in good faith, within 36 months, "to consider an amendment to authorize the Tribe to offer all types of Covered Games online." The parties in 2021 plainly understood that online casino gaming was not authorised and would require a further, negotiated step. The Past Motor Races product delivers the experience of that further step without anybody having taken it.

What we could not establish

CDC Gaming's brief on the launch is headlined as NASCAR not knowing. The underlying reporting does not show that, and neither could we. We found no statement from NASCAR, no announced data agreement, and no indication either way of whether the sanctioning body licensed twenty years of its own results to a house-banked gaming product in a state where online casino play is unauthorised. We are not going to assert a fact we cannot source. It is a question worth someone in Daytona Beach answering, particularly in a season when the NFL has spent its energy policing which of its partners may use league data in which advertisement.

The best case for the other side

It is stronger than it sounds and it comes in three parts.

The text is unambiguous. "Any past or future" is not a drafting accident that a clever lawyer exploited; it is an express term, negotiated between a sovereign tribe and a state, approved into effect under IGRA and never struck down. Reading it to mean "future only" would require a court to rewrite it.

The events are real. Unlike a random number generator, the outcome derives from a thing that happened in the physical world, which is more than can be said for the product Florida actually prohibits.

And there is a sovereignty argument that this newsroom should take seriously two days after siding with two California tribes. Tribal gaming revenue funds tribal government. Second-guessing a compact term that a tribe negotiated, after a state spent decades negotiating hard against tribes elsewhere, is exactly the kind of move that has historically gone badly for tribes.

We take the third point seriously and it does not change the answer. The Ninth Circuit's functional test is not a rule about who deserves the revenue; it is a rule about what an activity is. Applied to Kalshi it produced a result tribes liked. Applied in Florida it produces one they will not. A test you only run when you like the output is not a test.

What to watch

Playtech has already told its own shareholders what to expect: Florida's contribution "is expected to normalise at a more sustainable level in H2." That is a supplier warning the market that a 161% half was a launch curve, not a run rate — and it is the most useful number here, because it tells you the company thinks the product's novelty, not the clause, is what is being monetised.

The clause is not going anywhere. The compact runs to July 31, 2051.