In the vocabulary of gambling intermediaries, Costa Rica figures as "the country" where you can supposedly incorporate a company and run online operations without a gambling licence. That formulation is partly true and partly a dangerous simplification, and this page's task is to take it apart into three realities: what is established officially by statute; what is established by absence; and what is market practice that could not be verified from official sources. Each tier is shown separately, labelled by where the fact comes from — and the page closes with a direct list of the risks, because the main content of the "no licence" model is precisely risk. At the end comes the Georgian cross-border layer, which works here with particular clarity.
The first reality: what the statute establishes
Costa Rica's gambling legal base is more than a century old: the games of chance law (Ley de Juegos) was adopted on 3 August 1922 as law No. 3, and the frame of its first article is this: games whose outcome depends on luck rather than skill are prohibited, except as permitted by law. That is a prohibition-with-exceptions model — and the whole modern picture grows out of it. The law was followed by an implementing decree of 1974, partially annulled by the constitutional chamber; the modern regulation is built on land-based casinos: the 2008 casino regulations were adopted by decree and published in the official gazette, and by their definition a casino is a physical premises — a "local" — where permitted games are conducted. The casino tax law and its regulations repeat the same logic: a casino is premises authorised for games permitted by law.
Lotteries remain a state monopoly in this picture: they are administered by the social protection board (JPS), and it is that body which adopted, in 2021, the regulations granting concessions for the web-based sale of its own lotteries and games of chance — those concessions concern the web format but are not an operator-licensing regime for third parties. And one more official quotation worth memorising: a rule published in an issue of the state gazette states that no person may exploit the activity of betting, casinos or games of chance without authorisation. In sum: the reality established by law is one of land-based premises and a state lottery monopoly.