"Licensed in Costa Rica" means no licence at all
Costa Rica appears in the small print of more gambling sites than almost any jurisdiction on earth, and it has never issued a gambling licence. We looked at what operators actually hold there — and at three countries nearby that do license poker properly.
Scroll to the footer of enough poker and casino sites and you will keep meeting the same sentence: licensed in Costa Rica. It is worth knowing that no such licence exists.
Costa Rica does not issue a conventional online gaming licence comparable to Malta's or Curaçao's, and it has no gaming regulator supervising the companies that name it. What an operator obtains there is a corporate presence: a Costa Rican company with ordinary business permissions. Law 9050 applies specific taxation to companies handling electronic betting communications — but it is a tax provision, not a gaming licence, and the two get conflated constantly. Often the Costa Rican entity does support work: technology, back office, customer service.
The consequence for a player is simple. If Costa Rica is the only credential a room offers, nobody is checking its game fairness, whether player funds are segregated, or how it handles a dispute. There is no authority to escalate to, because there is no authority. That does not make every site with a Costa Rican company dishonest — but it means the claim carries no weight, and you should look for a real licensing jurisdiction behind it.
The contrast with the region we covered this week is sharp.
**Serbia** licenses online poker as its own category of "special games of chance" under the Law on Games of Chance, regulated by the Games of Chance Administration, with licensees required to keep technical infrastructure inside the country and accessible to the regulator. It also exempts winnings from licensed games from personal income tax — as clean a position as a poker player will find in Europe.
**Slovenia** goes the other way and closes the market: there is no standalone online licence at all, and online operations are permitted only as an extension of an existing land-based concession, of which there are about five. Foreign licences do not convert into access.
**Uruguay** keeps gambling state-controlled and has not opened online licensing to private operators, while hosting one of the continent's best live circuits at Punta del Este.
Three small countries, three completely different answers, and one that answers nothing at all while lending its name to the industry. Their player pages — including Serbia's two WSOP Main Event final-tablists, Slovenia's 2025 High Roller bracelet winner and Uruguay's $15.7m online earner — are now live.