Pokies in New South Wales: what is actually licensed, and what the ACMA has been warning off

A person searching for pokies in New South Wales is looking for a building to walk into, a machine to sit down at, and a session that runs under rules a state authority can enforce. They are not looking for an offshore website. The honest answer to that search sits in 2,195 NSW pubs and clubs, plus two casino floors, where the Liquor & Gaming NSW register records more than 87,000 gaming machines — more licensed machines than any other Australian state keeps outside its casinos. The rest of this page walks that landscape as it stands: what NSW actually licences, where the playing day starts and stops, how payout percentages are set, who runs the responsible-gambling schemes that bind those venues, and the parallel online world that advertises “pokies” to Australians without any right to.

Data current as of 29 October 2026, cross-checked against the ACMA formal-warning register, Liquor & Gaming NSW machine counts and the NSW Independent Casino Commission’s published media releases.

How this comparison is built — the eleven offshore brands the ACMA itself named

NSW is not short of an offer. Eleven offshore brands below have run a “pokies” page targeted at Australians, and each one of them has been named in a formal warning from the ACMA under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001. They are listed here in that order because that order is the regulator’s own. No bonus terms are attached: the only places those terms appeared were affiliate marketing pages, and a recommendation is not what this page is for. The comparison that matters is whether a brand is operating under an Australian licence at all — and for an offshore casino, the answer in every case below is no.

A row of em dashes down the last column is not a hole in the research; it is the shape of the answer. NSW does not licence offshore sites, so none of these brands has a “pokies support” entry in NSW to populate. What each row carries instead is the regulator’s own record of action against the brand, on the date stated, in the language the ACMA publishes.

The NSW machine floor — pubs, clubs, and the two licensed casinos

The headline figure sits in Liquor & Gaming NSW’s own count: 87,298 gaming machines outside casinos, in 2,195 venues, as at June 2023. That single statistic reframes the whole question. NSW is not a state where pokies live in a casino; it is a state where pokies live in the corner of a suburban RSL, a bowling club, a hotel on the Pacific Highway, and a city pub that opens at ten in the morning. The same count shows the money that follows: NSW players lost A$8.18 billion on those machines in 2022–23, about A$986 per adult. Turnover the year before was A$85.72 billion across the state, A$13,559 per adult — a figure large enough to make the case that NSW is paying for its own machine density.

Casinos are a different and much smaller layer. Two are licensed. The Star Sydney has operated on Pyrmont for decades, and Crown Sydney at Barangaroo opened in December 2020. Both sit under the NSW Independent Casino Commission, which has been busy with both of them in 2026: it fined The Star Sydney A$10 million and accepted an enforceable undertaking in a 2 June 2026 action, then on 19 August 2026 fined Crown Sydney A$1.75 million and The Star Sydney A$500,000 in a coordinated enforcement action after a minor was admitted to each venue. The Sydney casino market is two operators under active supervision, not a competitive field.

What NSW actually licences — and what it does not

The Interactive Gambling Act 2001, tightened by the Interactive Gambling Amendment Act 2017, makes it an offence to provide online casino games, online pokies or in-play betting to a person physically in Australia. No state or territory licences those products. What IS licensable sits in a narrower lane: wagering on races and sporting events placed before the event, lotteries, and keno. In practice those wagering services are licensed in the Northern Territory — fifty-two of them, including Sportsbet, Bet365 and Ladbrokes, under the Northern Territory Racing and Wagering Commission, which runs with no full-time staff and meets once a month in Darwin. The territorial licensing is a tax-driven choice by the operators, not a substantive difference in consumer protection.

The ACMA enforces the prohibition. It investigates complaints, issues formal warnings, and directs Australian internet service providers to block offending sites. As of a June 2026 round reported by industry press, 1,751 illegal gambling and affiliate websites had been blocked since the first blocking request in November 2019, and more than 230 unlicensed services had left the Australian market since enforcement was tightened in 2017. The most recent batch on that list — 7Signs, ChromaBet, Donbet, Duospin, Freshbet, Slots Gem, Jacks Club, Lucky Start, Pointsbetz, Spinrise, Vinyl Casino and Wildsino — is twelve names, twelve different offshore operators, none of which can lawfully take an Australian deposit.

H2 Gambling Capital’s 2025 report puts the leakage at A$3.9 billion a year going to illegal offshore sites, and notes that the share of gambling going through legal Australian channels fell from 74% in 2021 to 64%. The “legal channel” figure includes licensed wagering — not licensed casino play, because that product does not exist online in Australia. Whatever an offshore site’s homepage says about a Curaçao or Kahnawake licence, that licence does not extend into a NSW living room.

A punter’s day at a NSW pub or club — hours, identification, the cashless question

The 24-hour pokies idea does not exist in NSW the way it does in some other markets. Pub and club gaming-machine areas open and close with the venue’s liquor licence, and most close by midnight or 1 a.m. Some larger clubs hold extended trading approvals, but the round-the-clock floor belongs to the casino, not the corner pub. The NSW clubs-pokies hours question has the same answer: as long as the venue is licensed to serve alcohol, the machines run; once it isn’t, they don’t.

Identification is the second non-obvious thing. From 1 July 2023, NSW pubs and clubs have required patrons to use a digital ID-linked player card before playing any gaming machine — the state’s cashless gaming push, written into the Gaming Machines Regulation 2023 and rolled out across the venue base. The card links each session to a verified identity, records deposits and withdrawals, and ties the player into the state’s self-exclusion registers. A visitor who walks in without ID does not walk out with a session.

That same system opens the door to NSW cashless pokies. The card-based wallet replaces the bucket of cash that used to feed machines; it caps how much can be deposited in a session, what kind of funds can be loaded, and how withdrawals are returned to the player. The reform is real and operational, and it does not rely on the player to opt in.

Payout percentage, RTP, and how NSW compares

NSW does not set a single, published, statewide RTP floor the way South Australia does for its non-casino machines. South Australia requires a minimum return-to-player rate of 87.5% on every machine outside the casino and a general A$5.00 maximum bet, while Adelaide Casino itself has no maximum-bet cap. NSW instead publishes each machine’s individual return-to-player on the venue floor and on the Liquor & Gaming NSW register, and venues can set their own floor mix within the regulatory bands.

The cross-state comparison is best read in plain loss-per-adult numbers, because RTP figures vary machine by machine. NSW players lost A$986 per adult on gaming machines outside casinos in 2022–23; South Australians lost about A$497 per adult on the equivalent machines over the same period, on a base of 11,672 machines in 471 venues. Queensland sat between the two, with 21,122 machines in 351 venues in October 2023. The headline comparison — NSW’s per-adult loss roughly double South Australia’s — reflects venue density and opening hours, not machine RTP. The cashless card is NSW’s structural response to that gap.

Maximum cash payout is another figure NSW venues publish on the machine itself. Cash payouts above a set threshold require staff interaction, an ID check, and a printed receipt, and the limit varies by venue and machine configuration. There is no single statewide cap the way there is a single statewide RTP floor in South Australia; the figure is set at the machine level and printed on the paytable glass.

Responsible gambling in NSW — BetStop, Gambling Help, and what an offshore site is not connected to

The National Self-Exclusion Register, BetStop, went live in August 2023 and binds every Australian-licensed online and phone wagering service. A person who registers is excluded from opening new accounts and from transacting with existing ones, across the entire licensed wagering sector. That is the protection that exists for licensed wagering.

For the pub and club floor, NSW runs its own exclusion schemes, including the Gaming Machines Regulation framework that ties venue exclusion orders to a player’s verified ID. A bar on entry at one venue can be statewide, depending on the order. The state also funds Gambling Help Online and the National Gambling Helpline on 1800 858 858, a free 24/7 service with chat, which is the same front door a person in NSW, Victoria, Queensland or Western Australia uses when they decide to step back.

An offshore casino is connected to none of this. A player who signs up to BetStop is still able to deposit at an offshore site, because the operator is not licensed in Australia and has no obligation to consult the register. There is no Australian complaints body an offshore site has to answer to, no enforceable code of conduct for advertising, and no recourse when a withdrawal is refused. The Interactive Gambling Act’s enforcement arm is the ACMA, which can block the site, but it cannot force a payout of a balance stuck on a blocked domain.

Payments — what an Australian can actually use at a licensed wagering site, and what gets blocked

Since 11 June 2024, credit cards, credit-related products and digital currency have been banned as payment methods for licensed online wagering in Australia. The penalties for an operator that takes them run to A$247,500. The legal deposit routes are debit card, bank transfer, PayID/Osko and BPAY. An offshore site asking an Australian for a credit card or a crypto deposit is operating outside the Australian rules; the same site asking for an e-wallet funded by any of those methods does not change the analysis, because the question is whether the merchant is licensed, not which rail the money travels along.

For NSW pub and club play, the cashless card wallet covers deposits and withdrawals inside the venue, and the venue’s own banking arrangements handle any cash-out above the floor limit. There is no separate “NSW pokies payout percentage” in the payments sense — the question of how long a payout takes is a question about whether the venue is licensed and whether the machine is in the regulated fleet.

The offshore brands in detail — what each warning actually covers

The eleven brands in the comparison table are not a shortlist. They are a record of ACMA action. The detail of each warning is the substantive part of the page, because it is what a reader who has already seen one of these brands advertised can cross-check.

RocketPlay

The ACMA issued a formal warning to Pulsup Ltd over RocketPlay in March 2026. The same brand sat under a 2022 warning to Dama N.V. alongside five other Dama brands. The Australian player’s situation under either operator name is the same: no Australian licence, no Australian consumer protection, and a domain that has been on the ACMA’s published action list twice. A reader who has used either iteration of the brand has used a service the ACMA has named twice.

Level Up Casino

Dama N.V. picked up a single formal warning in May 2022, which covered six brands at once — Bambet, Dazard, Level Up, Rocketplay, Wild Tornado and Cobra Casinos. The 2022 warning predates the 2017 amendment’s bite by some years, but the IGA’s prohibition has stood since 2001 and the ACMA’s enforcement window is not bounded by the date of the latest law change.

Woo Casino

Woo Casino earned its own formal warning in March 2025, still under Dama N.V. The brand sits in the same corporate group as RocketPlay and Level Up but carries its own warning on its own date. The Dama group has now been the subject of three separate ACMA formal warnings across 2022, 2025 and 2026, which is a record on its own.

Spirit Casino

Spirit Casino is the second Dama N.V. brand to earn a warning in 2025, in May. The Dama trail is the clearest in the offshore cohort: the same operator named three times across three years for the same kind of conduct.

National Casino

Consolutetish S.R.L. picked up a formal warning in July 2025 covering both National Casino and Bizzo Casino. National Casino is the cleaner of the two cases for a reader to track, because the warning is single-operator, single-brand, single date.

Bizzo Casino

Bizzo Casino has a layered record. Consolutetish S.R.L. drew a warning in July 2025, but the brand itself had already drawn a 2022 warning to TechSolutions (CY) Group Limited and TechSolutions Group N.V. Two operators, two warnings, one brand — the kind of history that tells a reader the brand has been in the ACMA’s field of view across more than one corporate parent.

Ignition Casino

Bamboo Media drew a July 2025 formal warning over Ignition Casino. The brand’s name carries an Australian-sounding cadence, which is a marketing choice rather than a licensing one; the warning is the ACMA’s own statement that the name does not correspond to an Australian-licensed product.

Instant Casino

EOD Code SRL drew a formal warning in February 2025 over Instant Casino. The timing sits inside the same enforcement window as the Consolutetish and Dama actions, and the conduct alleged is the same: providing a prohibited interactive gambling service to people in Australia.

Jackbit

Ryker B.V. drew a formal warning in April 2026 covering Jackbit and CasinOK. The Ryker action is the most recent in this comparison, and it has not yet been overtaken by a fresh round.

Casino Intense

Sterplay Holding Ltd drew a formal warning in April 2025 over Casino Intense. The brand sits in the same year as the EOD Code SRL and Bamboo Media actions, and the conduct alleged is the same as every other entry on this list.

Sky Crown

Hollycorn N.V. drew the earliest formal warning in this comparison, dated September 2022, covering Sky Crown and Blue Leo. The Hollycorn case is the oldest of the eleven and the only one that predates the 2024 enforcement rounds.

Where this list came from — a note on the blocking-rate arithmetic

The ACMA’s own published numbers make it possible to give the offshore marketing machine a single quantitative figure: how many sites have been blocked, and over what period. As of June 2026, 1,751 illegal gambling and affiliate websites have been blocked since the first blocking request in November 2019 — a span of about six and a half years. The arithmetic, on those inputs, is roughly 269 sites blocked per year on average, or around 22 per month — but the rate is not even across the years. Enforcement strengthened in 2017; the first blocking request did not come until November 2019; and the June 2026 round alone added twelve. The honest band for the rate is “around twenty to thirty per month in active periods, slower in between”, with the conditional that the figure is an average of regulator action, not a forecast of what is to come. The eleven brands on the comparison table above are a sample of that pattern: a steady drip of formal warnings, with operators cycling through new corporate names faster than the ACMA can act on the old ones.

What to take from this — and what not to

A NSW punter who wants pokies has a licensed path: 87,298 machines in 2,195 venues, plus two casinos under active supervision, all of them tied into the state’s cashless card and responsible-gambling framework. A NSW punter who wants online pokies has no licensed path at all, because the IGA prohibits the product. The eleven offshore brands in this comparison are not options in that licensed sense; they are a record of what the ACMA has done about the marketing that targets NSW residents.

A reader who has deposited at one of these brands has deposited at a service the regulator has named. The balance they hold on it is not protected by any Australian consumer framework. If the site is blocked, the balance sits where it sat. The path back is the responsible-gambling services listed in the section above — Gambling Help Online, the 1800 858 858 helpline, and BetStop for licensed wagering — and the licensed NSW venues, which run under the rules a state authority enforces.

Frequently asked questions

Which venues in NSW are actually licensed to run pokies?

NSW has 2,195 pubs and clubs licensed to operate gaming machines outside casinos, holding 87,298 machines between them as at June 2023. Two casinos are also licensed — The Star Sydney at Pyrmont and Crown Sydney at Barangaroo, the latter since December 2020. Liquor & Gaming NSW maintains the public register of venues.

Are NSW pokies open around the clock?

Generally no. Pub and club gaming areas open and close with the venue’s liquor licence — typically closing at midnight or 1 a.m. The round-the-clock gaming floor is at the two casinos. Some larger clubs hold extended trading approvals, but the 24-hour idea does not apply to the suburban pub.

What ID does a NSW venue ask for before play?

Since 1 July 2023, every NSW pub and club gaming machine has been cashless and card-linked, with the player’s verified identity tied to the session. A visitor cannot play without producing ID; the venue checks it on entry and records the session against the card.

Can a NSW visitor use the state’s self-exclusion schemes?

The state exclusion schemes apply across NSW venues on the terms the exclusion order sets. A NSW exclusion can be statewide; a Victorian, Queensland or other interstate exclusion does not transfer to NSW venues automatically — the order has to be made under NSW law. BetStop, the national register, binds licensed wagering services but not pub or club floors and not offshore casinos.

How does NSW’s machine payout percentage compare with other states?

NSW does not publish a single statewide RTP floor. South Australia requires 87.5% on every non-casino machine, with a A$5.00 maximum bet, while Adelaide Casino has no maximum-bet cap. Per-adult losses on gaming machines in 2022–23 were about A$986 in NSW versus A$497 in South Australia — a gap that reflects venue density and opening hours as much as it does machine RTP.

Is it legal for an offshore casino to advertise pokies to people in NSW?

No. The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 prohibits providing online casino games and online pokies to a person in Australia. The ACMA issues formal warnings, blocks sites, and has had 1,751 illegal gambling and affiliate websites blocked since November 2019. The brand may be licensed offshore; that licence does not extend into NSW.