Another sweepstakes casino is now active in states where it had previously shut down, as the industry prepares for life without revenue from California beginning on Jan. 1, 2026.
ACE Casino is currently live and operational in four states that it had until recently exited.
Those four states are: Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Maryland.
As of this spring, ACE Casino was not active in any of those states. We aren’t clear on the exact timeline for the re-openings, but between then and late September, the sweepstakes casino removed Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Maryland from its excluded list, likely in response to the United States sweeps gaming market shrinking in an intense 2025 — most notably highlighted by California passing Assembly Bill 831 to ban sweeps casinos starting in 2026.
Other operators following the same strategy
ACE Casino is not alone in re-evaluating its total addressable market and re-opening in states where it was previously offline. For a long time, stories about sweeps casinos exiting states were all you’d hear about in 2025. But in the post-AB831 landscape, the opposite is happening.
In September, after AB831 passed on Sept. 12, Baba Casino relaunched its platform in a whopping six states — including Georgia and Tennessee, but also Iowa, Ohio, Kentucky, and Arkansas. Just a few days before that, Spree Casino went back online in Alabama and Georgia after previously closing its doors in those states.
Before that, in August, B-Two Operations removed Alabama and Georgia from the excluded list for its sweeps casinos, including McLuck, Hello Millions, and SpinBlitz.
There are likely other sweepstakes casinos that have made similar strategic decisions.
Why these 4 states?
Alabama
Alabama has become a popular addition to excluded lists for sweeps casinos in 2025 due to the significant amount of lawsuits filed there.
To date, sweeps operators are facing as many as 13 active class action lawsuits in Alabama. With that amount of legal activity, many companies chose to remove themselves from the state likely out of an abundance of caution — that, and Alabama has arguably the strictest anti-gambling laws in the United States, so it just hasn’t been seen as a universally fertile ground for sweeps.
However, those lawsuits are all class action lawsuits, which, due to sweeps casinos’ notoriously ironclad arbitration clauses in the terms and conditions, mostly go nowhere.
As a result, some sweeps casinos — like Spree and ACE — appear to be prioritizing revenue from Alabama over that abundance of caution.
Georgia
It’s a similar story with Georgia, where a lawsuit was filed against VGW in May 2024, but the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia dismissed the case. The court determined that VGW’s ties to Georgia were too limited to establish jurisdiction, even though state residents were able to access its sweepstakes casinos.
Tennessee
Tennessee is an interesting market. In September, the sweepstakes sportsbook Sportzino shut down in the state following a cease-and-desist order from the Tennessee Sports Wagering Council. Before that, the SWC also spurred Legendz Casino to pull out of the state in April and did the same with offshore betting site Bovada in November 2024. Beyond that, the SWC also recently fined five offshore sportsbooks in July.
Also, a federal court recently ruled that an ongoing lawsuit against VGW in Tennessee must proceed in a Tennessee court, giving the plaintiffs a minor win. However, given that it’s a class action lawsuit, its chances of success seem low, which may explain why ACE Casino was confident enough to remove it from the excluded list.
Maryland
Maryland’s gaming regulatory agency has issued plenty of cease-and-desist orders to sweeps operators, including VGW (Chumba Casino, LuckyLand Slots, Global Poker), Stake.us, High 5 Casino, McLuck, Golden Hearts Games, Rebet, Zula Casino, and Fortune Coins. As a result, Maryland is another popular addition in operators’ excluded lists.
However, ACE Casino nor its owner, Full Stop Limited, have received a cease-and-desist. Also, many operators in this industry look to VGW for a blueprint of how to operate. And, as of Oct. 22, VGW does not include Maryland as an excluded or restricted territory. (Note: Maryland’s cease-and-desists come from the gaming regulator, the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency, not the state’s Attorney General.)
So, the logic may be: If VGW is comfortable staying put, so are we.
Assessing if this move will ease California losses
Losing revenue from California will send shockwaves through the sweeps industry.
Per an analysis from Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, 17.3% of total U.S. sweepstakes casino revenue in 2025 was expected to come from California. Nearly 20% in one state? Jaw-dropping.
And all that … gone, starting in 2026.
As a result, EKG analysts updated their 2025 revenue projection from $4.6 billion to $4 billion and then lowered things to a prediction of $3.6 billion in 2026.
Re-launching its platform in four states won’t erase that pain of losing California for ACE Casino. But it may alleviate it at least a little bit. Just looking at population, Georgia (eighth-most populous state) is the closest to California, which has the largest population in the U.S. Still, Georgia’s population of 11.2 million pales in comparison to California’s 39.4 million.
Tennessee’s 7.2 million residents rank 15th, followed by Maryland’s 6.3 million (18th) and Alabama’s 5.2 million (24th). The combined populations of Georgia, Tennessee, Maryland, and Alabama add up to roughly 29.9 million — still nearly 10 million less than California.
But it’s something. And that’s what sweeps operators are seeking right now.
