Poker rooms in Honduras: licensed casinos that residents may not enter

Honduras is the only market we write about where the obstacle to a live poker game is not the absence of a room but the law on who may sit in it. The country licenses casinos. It also forbids them, in terms, from admitting a player who cannot prove with a passport that they are a foreigner.

The admission rule, in the statute's own words

The Ley de Casinos de Juegos de Envite o Azar, Decreto No. 488 of 8 July 1977, was read in the copy published by the Tribunal Superior de Cuentas on 28 October 2026. Article 6, as reformed by Decreto 76-90, reads: "La finalidad de los Casinos de Juegos de Envite o Azar, es la promocion del turismo extranjero, por lo tanto queda terminantemente prohibido admitir como jugadores a dichos centros, a quienes no acrediten mediante la presentacion de su pasaporte, la calidad de extranjeros."

The sanction falls on the venue rather than the player: 50,000 lempiras for a first breach, and immediate and permanent cancellation of the operating licence on a repeat. Whatever happens in practice on a given floor, that is what the statute says, and it means a Honduran resident has no lawful route into a licensed casino game at home. This is a reading of the published law offered as general information, not legal advice.

What a licensed Honduran casino looks like

Licences are granted by the executive through the tourism secretariat (article 3), for up to 25 years from the start of operations and extendable in five-year periods (article 4). The operation must sit inside a first-category tourism establishment with fixed investment above one million lempiras (article 3a). Inspectors are appointed by the same secretary (article 10). Decreto Ejecutivo 70-92 bans unlicensed gambling houses nationwide.

Article 2 defines the games covered: roulette, dice, card games, punto y banca, baccarat, slot machines and other similar games. Poker is not named, and the statute draws no line between poker played between players and a card game dealt against the house.

Why no venue is listed

Casino floors operate in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula and appear in industry directories with addresses and photographs. On 28 October 2026 we could not find a Honduran venue publishing its own poker schedule, cash-game stakes or table count, and we do not list a room as a poker room on a directory entry. Dealer-banked card variants — three-card poker, Ultimate Texas Hold'em, stud against the house — are common on Central American floors and carry the name without being the game.

So Honduras has two separate gaps: nothing verified to list, and a legal bar that would keep residents out of anything we did list.

What would change this page

A Honduran venue publishing its own cash-game or tournament schedule. A confirmed negative is equally publishable — a floor that deals only house-banked card games, or a room that has closed, is useful to a visitor planning a trip. We would also want to record how the passport rule is applied in practice, but that is a question for a primary source rather than an inference.

Sources read for this page

Tribunal Superior de Cuentas (tsc.gob.hn), Ley de Casinos de Juegos de Envite o Azar, Decreto 488 of 1977 with its amendments — articles 2, 3, 4, 6 and 10, and Decreto Ejecutivo 70-92 — read 28 October 2026.