Bet On USA Sports Events Legally Online In 2024
The Internet is absolutely flooded with online gambling sites, so much so that it can be a rather difficult thing to find the right one with which to bet. There are many factors at play if you’re a gambler, particularly if you’re a gambler from the United States. Not only do you need a reputable site that offers fair-play options, lucrative bonuses and ironclad security, but you also need sites whose practices are fully licensed and regulated; you need a legal site with which to play, and one whose legality is not going to suddenly change and leave you with lost money.
Our website provides gamblers with information pertaining to USA online sports betting. We aim to help you make informed decisions by giving you a rundown of what’s legal, first and foremost, but also by providing you with general sports betting information for your favorite sports.
Our team here are Bet on Sports USA is comprised of men and women who actually enjoy betting on sports. We don’t simply research a few regulations and sites; we participate in online sports betting and thus have a rooting interest in finding current, accurate information pertaining to the field. We operate by a very simplistic standard: We would never recommend a site or a course of action that we ourselves wouldn’t follow.
Since the world of sports betting is so incredibly large, you have to understand what you’re getting in to if you’re not already an expert in the field. Not only will you find every type of competitive sport out there, from horse racing and greyhounds to cricket and golf, but you will also find live betting options, prop bets, and even options to bet on things like futures and politics.
This amount of information can be overwhelming for many gamblers. Our mission is to explain to you these different sports betting options while also explaining the legality of the genre. Overall, we strive to deliver the most accurate and current information possible.
Best USA Online Sports Betting Sites For 2024
| Site Name | Bonus Offer | Rating Out Of 100 | USA Friendly? | Visit Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bovada Sportsbook | 50% Max $1,000 | 98% | Yes | Visit Site |
| Bookmaker | 100% Max $500 | 94% | Yes | Visit Site |
| Betonline Sportsbook | 50% Max $1,000 | 91% | Yes | Visit Site |
| Sportsbetting.ag | 50% Max $1,000 | 88% | Yes | Visit Site |
Is It Legal To Bet On Sports In The United States?
Sports betting, or really betting in general, is a fickle, tricky subject in the USA. First and foremost, gambling on games of chance is illegal. There is a trifecta of federal regulations which basically stop the overwhelming majority of all sportsbooks from operating on US soil.
States that are exempt from these regulations include Montana, Oregon, Delaware and Nevada, but all other 46 states comply with federal regulations, meaning that gambling is illegal. This isn’t just some loose piece of legislative pork that was passed while no one was looking.
There are three major pieces of gambling-specific legislation at play here: The Federal Wire Act, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA), and the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA). Needless to say, the government doesn’t play around with gambling.
Laws That Impact The Online Sports Betting Industry In The US
Federal Wire Act
In 1961, the Interstate Wire Act was passed, with the express intent on shutting down betting establishments that knowingly used wire communications to transfer funds. Eventually, this act started taking on a different name colloquially, the Federal Wire Act, after the language was juked a bit to include the Internet. But since this act alone couldn’t cover the breadth of American gambling, it has been supported by other pieces of legislation over the years.
PASPA
This act is also known as the Bradley Act, and it defined the legal status of sports betting around the entire nation. Unfortunately, the definition of sports betting became an unlawful activity. So, outside of the four safe states, PASPA ensures that betting on sports remains illegal on US soil. And while many states are fighting hard to get out from under the regulations of PASPA, the federal government is currently winning and there seem to be no new changes on the horizon.
UIGEA
This was the big one. Starting in around 2002 or so, when ESPN’s airing of the World Series of Poker became a worldwide phenomenon, millions upon millions of Americans started playing online poker at a variety of sites, many of which were actually regulated in the USA.
There were billions of dollars in peoples’ accounts on these sites, when George W. Bush, the Mensa member that he is, decided it was best to sign into law the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, and millions of people lost their money, with untold thousands actually losing their entire livelihoods in 2006. Basically, this law makes it illegal for any website to knowingly accept money that’s intended for gambling.
Once you combine these three federal laws, you’re looking at a very strong defense against US-based gambling sites opening up and offering their services to Americans. While the government continues to literally gamble with the future of the nation by compiling debt, and why they themselves have no issues offering lottery tickets to Americans, they rule as iron-fisted Puritanicals in their refutation and regulation of gambling.
A Beautiful Area of Oversight
The overwhelming majority of Americans obviously love their nation. America is a fantastic place. But when it comes to how government acts, they’re more than a little hypocritical, particularly in the realm of gambling. But there is an area of oversight that’s laughably ironic to Americans wanting to gamble.
With all the wars and invasions and sanctions America attempts to inflict on other nations, the USA is utterly powerless to regulate how anyone outside of America governs its gambling. This means that sites based outside of American jurisdiction can do what they want, and this means that, if these offshore sites want to accept US customers, then there’s not a thing the government can do.
You see, throughout all that language in the three federal acts, one thing is consistent: The government looked to punish those providing the opportunities for gambling, not the gamblers themselves. Because of the moral judgment the government makes, they view gamblers as victims of a gambling industry, so they only seek to punish the industry.
This means there was an oversight, and it’s too late to correct now. If you’re in the USA, you can deposit money with an offshore site and gamble ’til your heart’s content, and there’s not a thing the government in America can do about it. Just make sure you comply fully with all tax laws on your winnings, and you can gamble anywhere in the world that’s not based in America.
Offshore Sportsbooks Give US Residents Access To Legal Sports Betting Options
This offshore backdoor is something that millions of Americans take advantage of every single day. The only thing you have to focus on here is finding a safe, licensed, regulated site with which to bet. And this is where we attempt to help.
Our vast network is dedicated entirely to responsible gambling, and foremost on that list would be a legally recognized site that is currently licensed, thoroughly regulated, and based outside of US jurisdiction. There’s nothing shady going on here; this isn’t like a legal technicality loophole. It is a 100% legal backdoor through which you can gamble safely without Uncle Sam throwing his weight around.
USA Football Betting
The world of football sports betting is massive and complicated. Different sportsbooks obviously offer different betting options, and we attempt to bottle everything up for you so that you can find out which sites are offering which options.
Not only do you have the normal point spreads and over-under lines that are typical of nearly every type of football betting option, but you will also find live betting options that allow you bet per quarter, per half, and even on aspects like who wins the coin flip and which team will end up scoring first. Then you have a large section of prop bets to deal with.
These bets can operate more like fantasy football, in that you may be betting on which QB throws for the most yards, or which RB rushes for the most touchdowns.
The vast expanse of sports betting on football also covers the NCAA league. This is a league that’s exponentially larger than the NFL. You have hundreds of D1 teams to keep track of. You have 50 states throughout the nation, and most states have at least two contending schools eligible for the bowl season.
This means that the action during the NCAA weeks will be thick, heavy and fast. And what complicates things even further is that the NCAA and NFL have about a four-month overlap with their seasons; e.g. college games on Saturday and NFL games on Sunday. This is a whole lot of action you will have to contend with, and the best sportsbooks are offering a ton of different college betting options, including their new four-team playoff system and the old bowl system.
Navigating the football field takes a lot of time and talent. We’re going to help you over time to really simplify how you view football bets, via helpful tips articles and other information geared toward helping you get a grasp on the genre. It all starts with the right site; it all ends with an informed, winning bet. Our USA football betting guide covers it all from top to bottom.
USA Basketball Betting
Basketball is another extremely popular sport on which to bet. Reputable sportsbooks make sure that they offer dozens, if not hundreds, of unique betting options for you to take advantage of. Our job is to help you navigate this field so that you’re always placing informed bets on basketball.
This includes helping you understand the betting structure and the lines you’re reading. A line that reads Magic -4/Heat +3 might be a little confusing at first, primarily because it’s such a low spread on a high-scoring sport. We will help you understand why lines are put together like they are, and how to leverage your bets so that you’re always in the running to win. We will explain all the many different NBA and NCAA betting options at your disposal, particularly when it’s Playoff time in the NBA and March Madness for the NCAA.
When the respective playoff seasons roll around in basketball, it’s a hot mess on most sportsbooks. Even people who understand betting lines and structures may easily become very confused because of how frequently lines change and at the sheer number of new lines to pop up. You have to deal with brackets, seeding, early eliminations, unexpectedly long series, and much, much more. Stick with Bet on Sports USA and together we will push through the confusion so that you’re only making informed wagers on the sports you love.
USA Golf Betting
Golf is a very unique sport, in that it doesn’t have a regular season or a playoff structure per se. What you have are different professional leagues, like the PGA, and different tour stops referred to as majors. These majors pick up a lot of action, but things can get very confusing in a hurry.
For instance, a tour stop major like the Masters is basically a regular season and the playoffs all built into one tournament. After the first two rounds of play, the field is cut in half and only the best golfers will carry through to the final two rounds. And while that seems easy enough to understand in principle, it can really make for some complex and detailed lines that many people cannot easily navigate.
Sportsbooks that offer golf betting are offering betting options on odds-on favorites to win, placing odds, pairing odds (e.g. player-vs.-player match-ups), and even live-time hole-by-hole betting options like which player makes par, comes in under, bogies over and more. And as each round whittles down the field, the betting options actually become more numerous. This is because the prop bets really begin to pick up steam as golf tournaments reach their conclusion.
Different gamblers on these legitimate sportsbooks love wagering on golf’s odds and ends, like over-unders on how far a drive will go, how many strokes it takes a player to shoot 18, how many in the initial final cut will be in contention for the title, whether or not there will be a playoff, and more. We take the complicated jargon of golf betting and we work to simplify it for you in language and terms that you can easily understand, with the end goal hopefully resulting in you, the gambler, making safer bets.
USA Baseball Betting
The regular season in baseball is 162 games and takes up basically all of spring, all of summer, and half of fall. It starts in April with the season opener and ends in late October with the World Series. What results is thousands upon thousands of different games on which players can bet. And unlike football or golf where you have around a week to make an informed decision, baseball teams frequently play on back-to-back nights. In fact, many baseball teams still play double-headers, which means they’re playing two games in the same day.
Now, if you’re an avid sports better who likes, say, the Chicago White Sox, then you need to know how to properly navigate betting lines if you want to place winning wagers with such a short turnaround. It’s not as if you have a six-day span to study weather conditions, injury reports, starting rosters, player trends, and other bits of information. You need to act more quickly, which means instead of relying on betting per the information gleaned from the sport, you will be betting on the information gleaned from the betting lines themselves. This means betting for leverage, parlaying your bets, betting in pools, etc.
Proper baseball betting goes well beyond simply betting on winners and losers on a game-by-game basis. There is so much to explore within the context of baseball betting lines that even professional gamblers often struggle and decide to wait for playoff series. We can simplify what’s going on for you and give you some tips and tricks to use here in order to leverage smaller bets on different lines that will hopefully pay off and have an accumulative effect in your account.
By betting smart in smaller increments using your knowledge of baseball betting options, you can focus on the odds rather than a specific team, and this may result in winning big over the course of the baseball season.
USA Soccer Betting
Soccer isn’t that popular in the United States, but in Europe and South America, where it’s called football or futbal, it’s the biggest sport imaginable. There are billions of soccer fans around the globe, and this means that when soccer matches take place, sportsbooks light up with activity. The activity is so frequent and fast, in fact, that smaller sportsbooks on lesser servers end up freezing and have to limit action just so they can stay operational.
There are numerous professional soccer leagues around the globe, and the right sportsbook will offer you betting options for all of them. You can bet on the Champions League, Major League Soccer, the Scottish Professional Football League, the National Women’s Soccer League, the United Soccer Leagues, the Premier League, and more.
Soccer bets include winners and losers, placements in tournaments, brackets, goals scored, minutes played, and even live-time and prop betting action like penalty kicks taken, yellow cards handed out, and much more. And this is just for your regular soccer game. Once the World Cup comes around every four years, sportsbooks absolutely explode with action.
How are you going to figure out which bets are safe and which should be avoided? Your heart might say, “Bet on America in every game!” But emotional betting and winning are mutually exclusive. Betting with your head, on the other hand, is how you win money, and this is what we aim to help you do.
Proposition Bets And Live In-Play Betting During The Game
Two fields that are inherently complex for newcomers to sportsbetting are proposition bets and live betting options. With proposition bets, known as prop bets, you’re betting on things other than the solid line outcomes. In other words, rather than betting on which team wins or which loses, you will be betting on options like which team gains more yards in a quarter, which golfer has the lowest stroke count, which soccer goalie has the most defended goals, and on and on.
These prop bets are often initiated by the community in pool bets rather than being initiated by the actual sportsbook. So this means that you can actually play a peer-to-peer style of game, so to speak, while betting on your sports. Of course, you’re only going to be able to find these unique options with the best sportsbooks, and you’re only going to find the best sportsbooks with Bet on Sports USA.
Have you ever put down a few bucks on a team to win and then regretted that decision after the game started? This is where live betting options really make sense. With live bets, what you’re betting on isn’t the solid line outcome of the game; e.g. winners and losers. What you’re betting on is up-to-the-minute action currently happening in the games and match-ups.
For instance, let’s say it’s an NBA game and the Celtics are playing the Lakers in the Finals. You bet on the Celtics to win in game 3, but the Lakers have a 20-point lead at halftime. With these live betting options, you can actually change and leverage your bet, or you can find unique options like whether or not the Celtics can come back to within X points in the 3rd quarter, which player will have the best game, which team will lead after 3, and much more. Again, these are options that are only going to be available via top-flight sportsbooks, and we can help you find them.
Playing Responsibly
Bet on Sports USA isn’t a site inundated with unsightly advertising. We’re not running any click-through affiliate schemes with shoddy websites. We take our business seriously and we work hard to vet these sportsbooks and to explain sports betting information to you. We want you to be safe when gambling and have the best odds of winning. And we hope that you always bet responsibly.
Gambling should be fun; and if done right, it can be lucrative. But you should never just chase bets and hope to operate a get-rich-quick scheme through sports betting. It’s a surefire way to go broke. So, please, always gamble responsibly and use your head when placing your wagers. If you need any information pertaining to the legality of sports betting or any type of line structure, make sure to look us up. We’re here to help.
A special thanks goes out to Tom over at USAsportsbooksites.com for taking the time to give us an interview and help us gain a better understanding on the legalities of betting on sports in the United States.