There is nowhere to get a game of poker that is strictly legal, even in a private home game where no one is taking a rake. It has a lottery, but it was late to the party, establishing it in 2000. The state has legalized neither sports betting nor online gambling and has never come close to doing so. The tribe recently launched a casino on ancestral lands just north of the border, in North Carolina, where it claims ancestral ties. There are no land-based casinos, and South Carolina's only federally recognized tribe, the Catawba, has been thwarted by the state in its attempts to establish one. In fact, it has some of the strictest laws around gambling in the US - and the most vigorously enforced. South Carolina is not what you would exactly call a gambling-friendly state.
