Another year will pass without legal sports betting in Oklahoma, as two bills have failed to meet the House deadline for consideration on May 8th.
Representative Ken Luttrell authored House Bill 1047 and House Bill 1101 and has been pushing for the legalization of OK sportsbooks for the past three sessions.
The purpose of House Bill 1101 is the creation of a voter referendum where Oklahomans could weigh in on whether sports betting would be legal in the state.
House Bill 1047 amends the Model Tribal Gaming Compact to permit local tribes to operate sportsbooks if they pay a 10% exclusivity payment.
The two bills would have worked in unison. Luttrell anticipates further amendments once the bills are discussed again in 2026.
Negotiations with OK tribes are expected to continue in the approach to next year’s session to come to some sort of agreement on mobile sportsbook apps.
Discussions with the tribes have been positive thus far, but there have been some disagreements among them in regard to how sports betting apps will be handled.
The hold up was mostly to do with the boundaries for mobile gambling. Some want services geo-fenced to the property while other groups are not interested in mobile betting at all.
“We didn’t want to overregulate and tell the tribes how to run it.”
Rep. Ken Luttrell
The bills will remain on the docket and do not have to be reintroduced next session. There is the potential that the agreed-upon tribal language could be amended, and the two bills could pass swiftly.
Oklahoma lawmakers have bought themselves some time due to the presence of Texas on their southern border.
Texas is one of the largest sports betting holdouts in the country, and alongside OK, is one of 11 states that does not have locally regulated sportsbooks.
The same is not true on the northern border, as Kansas has mobile sportsbook apps that are accessible as soon as players cross state lines. New Mexico to the west has a similar model to what Oklahoma is trying to achieve, with sports betting only allowed on the premises of tribal casinos.
Still, the threat of Oklahomans travelling to other states to use their local sportsbooks is not as significant as in most states, other than Hawaii and Alaska.
