South Carolina Casinos and Gambling

Short Summary: This page looks at the different forms of gambling in the State of South Carolina, discusses the legality of online gambling and gives a detailed listing of all of the casinos in the state.

While it’s at least an improvement over a state such as Utah, South Carolina is hardly one of the gambling meccas of the world. Quite the opposite, in fact, as The Palmetto State does not have any legalized and regulated land casinos whatsoever.

The closest you’ll get to an actual casino in the state (literally) is a few miles out to sea on one of the casino ships. Not to be confused with, “Riverboats,” that are found in states such as Missouri and Illinois (surrounded by water, but essentially concrete slabs that go nowhere) these are literal ships/yachts that go out to sea.

With that said, there are a few legal forms of gambling in the state for those of you prone to seasickness.

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Online Gambling

Update (December, 2022): Early in 2022, according to Fox54, a bill was introduced in the House that would have allowed for both retail and online sports betting through the state’s lottery department, which is presently the only regulated form of Commercial Gambling that exists in the state. According to LegiScan, that bill was dead in committee and didn’t even go to a full vote.

Surprisingly, South Carolina was one of the first states to legalize Daily Fantasy Sports, although, that exists in some other states in an unregulated way as those other states didn’t even care enough to officially address it. Aside from DFS, however, South Carolina has been a state traditionally opposed to any form of gambling expansion, so we would expect it to be a long time before sports betting becomes legal online and also expect that it would be several decades, if ever, for online casinos to become legal.

Fortunately, many offshore casinos offer their websites to residents of The Palmetto State, so please make sure to check out our top recommendations above!

Charitable Gambling / Raffles

Charitable-Gambling South Carolina limits even Charitable Gambling pretty strictly, with a fairly restrictive list of exempt and non-exempt organizations allowed to conduct such affairs. For instance, prize raffles are permitted if the value of the prize does not exceed $500. 50/50 raffles are also permitted, but those are restricted to total contributions of $950. These are the types of raffles that can be held without registration, by those entities that are permitted to do so.

Of course, they can hardly hold, “Exempt,” (no registration required) raffles daily. Each organization may only conduct up to one such raffle per week.

Non-Exempt raffles do require registration with the Secretary of State and come with a different set of rules–though they also allow for bigger prices. Individual prizes may not exceed $40,000 and total prizes for a particular event may not exceed $250,000.

Naturally, these may not occur on a daily basis and are usually special events. Organizations registered to conduct such raffles may have no more than four during a year.

Registration can also be fairly costly for nonexempt raffles. Just to get registered with the Secretary of State for a given year requires an annual fee of $500.

Casino nights? Forget about them:

Although nonprofit raffles are now legal, “casino nights” and other fundraising events using gambling devices remain illegal, unless the event is conducted for entertainment purposes only and no prizes, financial awards, or incentives are received by the players. Likewise, events using electronic gambling devices, video poker, slot machines, and wagering on sports events are not permitted.

The closest that you might get is a casino night that does not give a person the ability to win prizes, monetary or otherwise, but charges a fee for admission or makes money on concessions. In other words, for fun only.

Bingo

Bingo In addition to raffles, South Carolina gambling laws also allow for the conduct of bingo, which is separated into the following classes for licensing. (Costs in parenthesis)

Class AA: An organization operating a bingo game offering prizes with a minimum payout of fifty thousand dollars a session shall obtain a Class AA bingo license at a cost of four thousand dollars. The prizes offered at any one session may not exceed two hundred fifty thousand dollars. The holder of a Class AA license may not conduct more than one bingo session a month. ($4,000)

CLASS B: An organization operating a bingo game offering prizes, which do not exceed eight thousand dollars a session, shall obtain a Class B bingo license at a cost of one thousand dollars. The holder of a Class B license may not conduct more than five bingo sessions a week. ($1,000)

CLASS C: An organization operating a bingo game and offering prizes of twenty dollars or less a game during a single session shall obtain a Class C bingo license at no cost. However, the organization may offer a prize in cash or merchandise of no more than one hundred fifty dollars for six jackpot games a session. The department, in its discretion, may allow certain Class C licenses to use hard bingo cards instead of the paper cards required by this article. ($0)

CLASS E: An organization which has a game of bingo and operates exclusively by bona fide members who are residents of this State and who do so on a strictly volunteer basis and whose gross bingo proceeds do not exceed forty thousand dollars a calendar quarter, and where prizes do not exceed four thousand dollars a session shall obtain a Class E license from the department at a cost of five hundred dollars. If the gross bingo proceeds for any calendar quarter exceed thirty thousand dollars, the person or organization within ten days is required to obtain a Class B license from the department and comply with all requirements of a Class B license. The holder of a Class E license may not conduct more than one bingo session a week. ($500)

CLASS F: An organization which has a game of bingo and operates exclusively by bona fide members who are residents of this State and who do so on a strictly volunteer basis and whose gross proceeds do not exceed forty thousand dollars a calendar quarter, and where prizes do not exceed four thousand dollars a session and where bingo proceeds are only used to pay the organization’s utility bills, to pay charges for bingo paper, and for the charitable purpose of the organization, shall obtain a Class F license from the department at the cost of one hundred dollars. The holder of a Class F license may not conduct more than one bingo session a week. ($1,000)

***Class D licenses refer to temporary licenses to operate at events such as County Fairs, they also provide that the maximum win cannot be more than $50 of merchandise.

That’s quite a lot and is probably one of the longer lists of Bingo classes you’ll see in any state. It mostly has to do with total proceeds and/or how many events that you plan to conduct in a given period of time.

So, you pay these high fees and that’s it, right?

Yeah, you wish:

The SCDOR shall charge and retain ten cents for each dollar of face value for each bingo card sold for AA, B,& D and E licenses. The department shall charge and retain five cents for each dollar for face value for each bingo card sold to an F license. The department shall charge and retain four cents for each dollar of face value for each bingo card sold for a C license. Twenty-eight percent of this revenue will be distributed to the sponsoring charities, with the remainder distributed in accordance with the statute for governmental purposes.

That’s not even a percentage of after prize revenues, that’s a straight-up percentage of sales that has to be remitted to the South Carolina Department of Revenue. For the license classes AA/B/D/E, that’s basically a 10% slice for the state right off the top…easily among the highest effective tax rate in the country, if not the highest.

Even Class C gets a 4% shave right off the top, and they’re limited to $20 prizes and as many as six prizes of up to $150, per event. How much could you even charge for a card? Who would ever even want to play that?

All bingo classes except for C & E must also charge entrance fees of varying amounts, depending on the type of license. It’s possible that the organization could instead choose just to eat those costs rather than actually directly charging patrons just to get in.

If I was an organization in South Carolina, I think I’d just stick to having a steak fry, or something.

Also, South Carolina is one of the few states that does NOT allow for the sale of pull-tabs during bingo games…so don’t be surprised when you don’t see folks running around promoting them between games.

Horse Racing / Greyhounds

Horse_Racing-Greyhounds We won’t be discussing horse racing on this page because, you guessed it, you’re not allowed to bet on the horses in South Carolina! Wow!

Greyhound/dog racing is illegal in the state, and even if it wasn’t, you almost certainly wouldn’t be permitted to bet on it.

The Law

Before we get to the lottery, let’s turn our attention to the laws as relate other forms of gambling in the state:

SECTION 16-19-40. Unlawful games and betting.
If any person shall play at any tavern, inn, store for the retailing of spirituous liquors or in any house used as a place of gaming, barn, kitchen, stable or other outhouse, street, highway, open wood, race field or open place at (a) any game with cards or dice, (b) any gaming table, commonly called A, B, C, or E, O, or any gaming table known or distinguished by any other letters or by any figures, (c) any roley-poley table, (d) rouge et noir, (e) any faro bank (f) any other table or bank of the same or the like kind under any denomination whatsoever or (g) any machine or device licensed pursuant to Section 12-21-2720 and used for gambling purposes, except the games of billiards, bowls, backgammon, chess, draughts, or whist when there is no betting on any such game of billiards, bowls, backgammon, chess, draughts, or whist or shall bet on the sides or hands of such as do game, upon being convicted thereof, before any magistrate, shall be imprisoned for a period of not over thirty days or fined not over one hundred dollars, and every person so keeping such tavern, inn, retail store, public place, or house used as a place for gaming or such other house shall, upon being convicted thereof, upon indictment, be imprisoned for a period not exceeding twelve months and forfeit a sum not exceeding two thousand dollars, for each and every offense.

South Carolina law is even pretty strict when it comes to social games—in that you’re not allowed to bet whatsoever.

These being older laws, they don’t seem to address gambling online (as a player) in any real way and we can certainly find no examples of players being prosecuted for gambling online. Obviously, you could not operate an online casino out of South Carolina, but casinos located offshore are out of jurisdictional reach.

Sports Betting in South Carolina

Sports-Betting-in-South-Carolina South Carolina doesn’t have any legal sports betting available. Residents still place bets in office pools, especially around the March Madness tournament just like everywhere else in the United States, but this is technically illegal.

You can also place bets with local bookies around most fair-sized and larger cities or find an online sportsbook that’s willing to take your action.

Any time you look for options to place wagers in a state that makes it illegal you need to determine if the risk is larger than the possible reward.

Sports bettors, either when placing bets with bookies or online, don’t usually face charges, but that doesn’t make it ok in the eyes of the law.

Remember that they didn’t get Al Capone on charges covering his worst crimes. They found lesser charges that they could prove. The point I’m trying to make is if law enforcement starts looking at you, illegal gambling can be a fairly easy charge to prove.

Lottery

The only gambling-related arena where South Carolina can be said to be similar to most other states is in the Lottery Department. The South Carolina Education Lottery conducts and regulates a number of games of chance, so let’s see what there is to be learnt from their most recent Annual Report:

The first thing that we’ll notice from Page 4 of the document is that the report does us the favor of separating Instant Games and Drawing Games, both in terms of revenues and prize payouts. With this, we will determine the returns-to-player on the different game styles:

Instant Games: 1,450,400,000 (Sales); 1,058,600,000 (Prizes)—(72.99%)

Drawing Games: 530,500,000 (Sales); 253,500,000 (Prizes)—(47.79%)

Ultimately, we’re looking at Instant Games that pay a few percentage points better than average back to the players and drawing games that pay a few percentage points worse. It’s pretty likely that the disparity in drawing games is brought on by disproportionately high sales of Mega Millions and Powerball tickets compared to other states.

All told, the lottery had a margin of $672,500,000 on all lottery games, which represents losses. Given the population estimate of 5.149M denizens, the average resident lost $130.61 to the lottery that year.

Adjusted on a per resident basis, what we see here is that South Carolina has little in the way of other forms of gambling, but it doesn’t seem to help the Lottery (and especially state revenues) all that much compared to other states. In other words, the legalization of other forms of gambling with a significant tax on revenues (as other states do) would almost certainly net the Palmetto State more money than lottery combined with charging extravagant sums for bingo.

Slot Machine Ownership

If you live in South Carolina the ownership of slot machines is completely prohibited. Most states allow ownership of slots that are 25 years or older, but South Carolina completely prohibits ownership.

Land Casinos In South Carolina

This will be quick: There aren’t any. There’s one dedicated water-bound casino:

The Big M

The-Big-M The Big M Casino consists of two luxury yachts that depart at regularly scheduled times, head out to sea so patrons can enjoy gambling, then comes back.

In terms of slot machines, The Big M is home to some 400 combined slot, video poker and video keno games ranging in denomination from $.01-$5. We don’t know if it’s true of The Big M, or not, but we can say that cruise ship casinos are pretty notorious for poor video poker paytables, unfavorable table game rules and tighter than typical slot machines.

Table Games include Blackjack, Craps, Roulette, Let it Ride and Three-Card Poker. Card games generally have a table minimum of $10, with $5 on the other games, as of the time of this writing.

The Big M casino does have a few poker tables, but going through the hassle of boarding a ship for a few hours of play doesn’t make it a great option for serious players. Poker players often play for hours at a time, so having a time limit is an issue for many players. The only other options for poker players in South Carolina are finding a local underground game or traveling to Florida.

In addition to the gambling offerings, there’s also a few to board the ship…that way you’re already starting in the hole a few bucks. The price varies depending on whether or not you want a meal to be included with your trip.

The Carnival Sunshine Casino also sails out of Charleston, South Carolina, but it does not exist solely for the purpose of being a casino, so it’s difficult to include as a casino listing. The Big M exists only for the purpose of gambling.

Unless you want to take a casino cruise on The Big M just for the novelty of it, then we would find this very difficult to recommend. While we don’t know anything specific about The Big M’s returns, the returns-to-player on virtually any cruise-type casino generally suck.

Conclusion

The topic of expanding gambling to include casinos, both online and land-based, has been bandied about by lawmakers, but we’ve seen no efforts in that regard get very far off of the ground. Maybe they’ll surprise us, but most likely, it’s going to be a long wait.

The good news is that there are plenty of relatively nearby states that have land-based casinos, especially if you don’t mind going to Tribal Casinos. As far as online gambling is concerned, the laws are ambiguous (but it seems there is no specific law against for players), and it’s not like anyone would care anyway, so you’ll have a wide range of choices among offshore-based online casinos.