Sydney’s licensed casino, the games it runs, and the offshore sites the ACMA has warned over

The “best casino in Sydney” question has a simpler answer than the search results suggest, and a longer one. The short version: there are two licensed casinos in Sydney — The Star Sydney in Pyrmont and Crown Sydney at Barangaroo — and no online casino may lawfully be offered to a person in Australia. The longer version, which this page works through, is the comparison between those venues on games, accommodation and access, the regulatory frame that keeps offshore sites off the menu, and the ACMA’s running list of formal warnings to operators who have tried anyway.

This page was written as of 28 October 2026 and checked against the ACMA’s register of formal warnings and blocking actions.

The two Sydney venues, and how they actually compare

A Sydneysider comparing the two licensed venues is weighing two different buildings and two different owners. The Star Sydney is the larger gaming operation and the older of the two — a complex that sits at the western edge of Darling Harbour in Pyrmont, with two gaming floors, 351 hotel rooms, the 2,000-seat Sydney Lyric theatre next door and a 3,000-seat Event Centre on site. It is owned by Star Entertainment Group and is the second-largest casino in Australia by gaming footprint after Crown Melbourne.

Crown Sydney is the newer, taller and smaller gaming operation — a 75-storey, 271.3 m residential and hotel tower at Barangaroo that is the tallest building in Sydney. It opened to the public in December 2020 and runs a casino among its hotel and residential floors, with its licensed premises sitting inside a tower that is otherwise apartments and a hotel.

The two have not been a combined profile for some time. The Star Sydney has spent the last several years under NSW Independent Casino Commission supervision after the regulator found it unsuitable to hold its casino licence, on 13 September 2022, over conduct relating to money-laundering risks. The operator was fined A$100 million in October 2022 and the licence was suspended, with operations placed under a government-appointed special manager, Nicholas Weeks, with supervision expected to continue through at least September 2025. In February 2025 ASIC sued members of The Star’s former board over the same set of failures to track money-laundering risk. Crown Sydney has carried no comparable mark against its NSW licence over the period this page draws on.

For a reader choosing between them, that record matters. A casino licence carries anti-money-laundering duties that the venue itself is responsible for. The Star’s special-manager arrangement is the formal answer to a finding that those duties were not met; it is not a marketing line, and it is the kind of thing a player can check before walking in.

The games that each floor runs

The catalogue behind the search for the best casino in Sydney splits into the standard table games, gaming machines the venue calls pokies, and the electronic and live-dealer variants of those games. Both venues run a full Sydney casino baccarat, blackjack and roulette offer, with craps as the fourth main table game in NSW.

A reader who has searched for “sydney casino baccarat” or “sydney casino craps” is, in practice, asking whether the floor carries the games that match a Las Vegas or Macau expectation. The licensed Sydney floors run those games, and they also run the more specifically Australian category that no Las Vegas floor matches: pokies on the floor in numbers that a smaller property outside Australia does not approach. The Star Sydney’s two gaming floors are configured around a high-volume electronic gaming footprint in addition to the table games. Crown Sydney’s gaming floors sit inside a much smaller footprint inside the tower and run a tighter premium-floor offer.

A reader who has searched “sydney casino online pokies” is asking a different question. That search phrase lands a lot of offshore sites in the results, and the right answer to the question itself is that there is no such thing as a licensed online pokie offered to a person in Australia. The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 prohibits offering online casino games and online pokies to anyone in Australia, and no state or territory issues a licence for them. Any site advertising “sydney casino pokies” or “sydney casino slots” for play over the internet is operating against the IGA, not alongside it. The slot machines on the Sydney casino floors are real cabinets in real rooms, and the search phrase “sydney casino slots” only matches them if the player is physically at the venue.

The roulette and blackjack floors operate in the conventional way: minimum and maximum stakes at each table are set by the floor for the relevant time of day, and the Sydney properties run both American and European roulette where space permits. The live-dealer concept a reader may know from offshore sites has no Australian counterpart online; on the floor, every dealer is live and the cameras are for surveillance rather than streaming.

The rooftop bar question, and what each venue actually offers

A specific slice of the comparison cluster — “sydney casino rooftop bar” — names the part of the two properties that sits above the gaming floor. Crown Sydney’s tower, at 271.3 m and 75 floors, runs several upper-floor bars and dining rooms whose windows put the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and the harbour on the plate. The Star Sydney, sitting at grade beside Darling Harbour, runs outdoor terraces and bars at level with the water rather than above it; the casino bar options there are part of the building’s podium-level hospitality rather than a rooftop in the strict sense.

The honest reading of the search term is that “rooftop” is a description Crown Sydney can claim and The Star Sydney cannot, because The Star is not a tall building. A reader who specifically wants the rooftop experience is making a building choice rather than a gambling one; a reader who wants the larger gaming floor is making a different building choice. The wider cluster (“sydney casino bar”, “sydney casino bars”) lines up with whatever the visitor is actually after: a cocktail with the harbour in view (Crown), a casual bar next to the gaming floor (either), or a Sydney Lyric show before or after the tables (The Star).

Staying on site, eating on site, and what sits within walking distance

The accommodation cluster splits into on-site and near-site. On-site rooms at Crown Sydney are inside the tower the casino is in; on-site rooms at The Star Sydney are in the hotel block of the Pyrmont complex. Near-site, the Darling Harbour precinct surrounds The Star with the standard hotel belt — chains and independent properties within a short walk — and Barangaroo puts Crown within walking distance of the Wynyard and Circular Quay hotel belt on its harbour side.

Dining follows the same split: The Star’s Pyrmont complex has multiple restaurants and bars running under the one roof, including the formal dining options the complex has carried for years. Crown’s tower hosts the higher-end restaurants and cocktail bars that ride the tower’s upper floors. The “restaurants in sydney casino” cluster maps to both, with the choice being whether the visitor wants the precinct-resort feel of The Star’s Pyrmont or the harbour-and-tower feel of Crown’s Barangaroo.

Hotels in Sydney near the casino are not a shortage. Darling Harbour on the Pyrmont side and the Wynyard/Circular Quay/CBD belt on the Barangaroo side both run dense accommodation, and the practical visitor rarely books more than a few weeks ahead. The comparison between The Star and Crown on accommodation is whether the visitor wants the convenience of staying on site in a complex that is also where the gaming and entertainment happens, or staying near a venue and walking over.

The ACMA record, and what the blocking-rate says about the offshore market

The Australian Communications and Media Authority is the regulator that enforces the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 online. Its record, as reported in June 2026, is the cleanest window into what is happening on the supply side: a running total of 1,751 illegal gambling and affiliate-marketing websites blocked since the first blocking request in November 2019, and more than 230 unlicensed services that left the Australian market after the 2017 strengthening of the IGA.

Run that against the years the data covers. 1,751 sites blocked from November 2019 through the snapshot in June 2026 is roughly 79 months, or about six and a half years. Divided across that span, the average rate lands around 22 sites blocked per month — and that is an average over a period that started with single-digit monthly blocks and is now running at higher totals. A single round reported on 26 June 2026 alone asked Australian ISPs to block another 12 sites: 7Signs, ChromaBet, Donbet, Duospin, Freshbet, Slots Gem, Jacks Club, Lucky Start, Pointsbetz.com, Spinrise, Vinyl Casino and Wildsino. That one round added a full year of blocking at the early-programme pace.

The economic side of the same picture comes from a 2025 industry report: Australians lose about A$3.9 billion a year to illegal gambling sites, and the share of gambling going through legal channels fell from 74% in 2021 to 64%. The blocking-rate and the loss-rate are two readings of the same market from different angles — the regulator’s count of the supply, and the analyst’s estimate of the demand — and they point in the same direction. The legal share of gambling spend has been falling while the blocking caseload has been growing, and the explanation that report gives is the offshore industry being more aggressive inside Australia precisely because the consumer has nowhere to go for a licensed alternative.

For a reader weighing “the best casino in Sydney” against the offshore sites that show up in the same search, the ACMA’s blocking-rate is the operative number. The legal alternative sits in Pyrmont and Barangaroo; everything else the search returns is being acted against, and the rate at which it is being acted against has been climbing.

What the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 actually prohibits

The IGA, as 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 in Australia. No state or territory licenses any of them. What is licensable is wagering on races and sport placed before the event, lotteries and keno — in practice licensed by the Northern Territory Racing and Wagering Commission (NTRWC), which regulates 52 of Australia’s online bookmakers including Sportsbet, Bet365 and Ladbrokes, for tax reasons. The commission has no full-time staff and meets once a month in Darwin. That arrangement is unusual on its face and is the subject of an NT reform bill reported in April 2026.

The individual player is not prosecuted under the IGA — the law targets the provider. The consequence for the player is different: an offshore site gives no Australian consumer protection, no complaints body and no recourse if a withdrawal is refused. A site can be blocked while a balance is still on it, and the player has no Australian channel to recover it.

Credit cards, credit-related products and digital currency have been banned as payment for licensed online wagering since 11 June 2024, with penalties of up to A$247,500 for operators who breach the rule. Legal deposit routes for licensed wagering are debit card, bank transfer, PayID/Osko and BPAY. A site asking an Australian for a credit card or a crypto deposit is operating outside the Australian rules and outside the protections that come with them.

The reform line that the page must record without overstating is the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, which passed Parliament on 19 August 2026. Its advertising and inducement measures commence on 1 January 2027 — law with a start date, not yet in force on a 2026 page, and so relevant to the period ahead rather than the one the page covers.

The 11 operators the ACMA has warned over

The ACMA’s register of formal warnings reads as a Who’s Who of offshore sites that marketed into Australia. The table below lines up the brands the ACMA has acted against directly or through the company behind them. Every one of these is operating against the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, and none is licensed to offer online casino games to a person in Australia whatever licence the site itself displays — Curaçao, Kahnawake, Anjouan and similar offshore licences are not recognised in Australia for the supply of online casino games.

“Listings-only” in the right-hand column means that the only places this brand surfaces are the general-purpose listing and aggregator sites that exist to funnel readers into offshore operators. They are not the brand’s own claims, and the audit treats them as exactly that.

A point worth stating once, plainly: the brands in this table share the same legal status in Australia. The ACMA record shows that the regulator has acted against every one of them, and none has held an Australian licence for online casino games — because no such licence exists. The differences between them are matters of branding, ownership and the date of the ACMA action, not of legality. A reader comparing them is comparing brands that are all equally outside Australian consumer protection.

The Star Sydney in Pyrmont — what the venue is, and what the regulator found

The Star Sydney is the larger of the two Sydney venues and the older. It overlooks Darling Harbour from Pyrmont and runs two gaming floors, 351 hotel rooms, the 2,000-seat Sydney Lyric theatre next door and a 3,000-seat Event Centre on site. The venue carries the standard Sydney table-game spread — baccarat, blackjack, roulette, craps — and a large electronic gaming footprint.

The finding the NSW Independent Casino Commission made against the venue on 13 September 2022 is the part of the picture that does not appear on a tourism brochure. The Commission found The Star unsuitable to hold its casino licence over conduct relating to money-laundering risks; in October 2022 the operator was fined A$100 million; the licence was suspended and operations placed under a government-appointed special manager, Nicholas Weeks, with supervision expected to continue through at least September 2025. On 10 February 2025, ASIC sued members of The Star’s former board over failures to track money-laundering risk at The Star Sydney.

For the visitor the practical question is what the special-manager arrangement has meant for day-to-day play. The venue has stayed open and the gaming floors have continued to operate, but the licence and the management of the venue are under supervision the operator itself does not control. A player walking in over the period this page covers is playing at a venue whose licence has been formally questioned and whose governance has been replaced for the duration.

The Star Entertainment Group was also found unsuitable to hold its Queensland casino licences in late 2022 after an independent review by former Court of Appeal judge Robert Gotterson concluded the company had misled regulators and failed its anti-money-laundering duties; Star was fined A$100 million on 9 December 2022, with a 90-day suspension of the Treasury Brisbane and Star Gold Coast licences deferred to 1 December 2023 to allow remediation. The Star Brisbane began a staged opening at the A$3.6 billion Queen’s Wharf Brisbane precinct on 29 August 2024, with the main casino floor and premium gaming rooms opening first, and the lead-up to the opening was dominated by concerns about the licence position of its lead partner, Star Entertainment Group. That is the company that also runs The Star Sydney.

Crown Sydney at Barangaroo — what the venue is, and where it sits in the picture

Crown Sydney opened to the public in December 2020 and runs a casino inside a 271.3 m, 75-floor tower at Barangaroo — the tallest building in Sydney. The gaming floor sits inside a residential and hotel tower, with the licensed premises forming one part of a much larger mixed-use building, and the rooftop bars and restaurants at the upper end of the tower are the principal non-gaming draw.

Crown Resorts has carried its own regulator history at the state level in Victoria, where the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation and a separate Royal Commission into Crown Melbourne ran through 2020 and 2021 and led to findings that Crown was unsuitable to hold the Melbourne licence, with remediation required before the licence could continue. Crown Sydney’s NSW licence has not been the subject of a comparable finding on this page’s reading of the public record, and the venue’s operation has continued without the supervisory arrangement The Star Sydney is under.

For a visitor comparing the two, the choice between Crown and The Star is partly a building choice (tower versus precinct) and partly a record choice. A reader who wants the upper-floor harbour view and a venue with no recent mark on its licence lands at Crown; a reader who wants the larger gaming floor, the larger entertainment complex, and is comfortable playing at a venue under special-manager supervision lands at The Star.

What a reader comparing the two should weigh

The comparison the search results avoid is the one that matters most: the difference between the two venues on the things the regulator has actually acted on. The Star Sydney is open and trading, but its licence is under a special manager, and the venue carries a record the reader can find on the NSW Independent Casino Commission’s public register. Crown Sydney carries no comparable mark against its NSW licence over the period this page covers.

Everything else — gaming floor size, hotel rooms, restaurants, location — is a matter of preference. The Star’s Darling Harbour address puts it in the middle of the tourism belt, with public-transport access and a wide choice of nearby hotels. Crown’s Barangaroo address puts it on the western edge of the CBD, with the Wynyard/Circular Quay hotel belt a short walk away and the harbour between the venue and the rest of the city.

A reader who wants the larger gaming operation and the entertainment-precinct format should weigh The Star, accepting that the venue is operating under supervision and that the regulator’s finding is part of its history. A reader who wants the tower experience and a venue with a clean regulator history on the NSW file should weigh Crown, accepting that the gaming floor is smaller and that the venue sits inside a residential-and-hotel tower rather than a precinct.

What the rest of Australia looks like for the reader comparing Sydney

The Australian casino landscape is a state-by-state set of licences, and a reader asking the best-casino-in-Sydney question is sometimes asking the comparison-the-states question by accident. The relevant comparators in the rest of the country are Crown Melbourne (the largest casino in Australia), Adelaide Casino in South Australia, the Star Brisbane at Queen’s Wharf in Queensland, and the Star Gold Coast, both operated by Star Entertainment Group.

Adelaide Casino sits in the heritage-listed Adelaide railway station building on North Terrace, runs 90 gaming tables and 950 gaming machines, and is the sole licensed casino in South Australia under the Casino Act 1997. The casino opened on 12 December 1985 under South Australia’s state-owned Lotteries Commission, was sold to SkyCity Entertainment Group in June 2000, was renamed SkyCity Adelaide in April 2001, then reverted to the Adelaide Casino name in 2009. A 2015–2021 Riverbank precinct redevelopment worth about A$330 million added the EOS by SkyCity tower, which opened in 2021 with 120 hotel rooms and expanded gaming space. Adelaide Casino’s table-game monopoly in South Australia was extended to 30 June 2035 under a licence formalised on 11 October 2013, which also allows the casino to expand to up to 200 gaming tables and 1,500 gaming machines subject to redevelopment. The casino is regulated by South Australia’s Independent Gambling Authority and Liquor and Gambling Commissioner; in the 2007–08 financial year it paid more than A$41 million in taxes and charges to the state.

South Australian gaming-machine losses outside Adelaide Casino totalled about A$0.92 billion in 2022-23, equivalent to about A$497 per adult. South Australia sets a minimum gaming-machine return-to-player rate of 87.5% and a general maximum bet of A$5.00 outside the casino, while Adelaide Casino itself has no maximum-bet limit.

Brisbane’s Treasury Casino, in the city’s historic Treasury Building, opened refurbished as a casino in April 1995 and, before its August 2024 closure, occupied a three-level gaming emporium of 80 gaming tables and over 1,300 gaming machines, plus a hotel, six restaurants, five bars and a nightclub. It closed on 25 August 2024 to make way for the new Star casino at Queen’s Wharf, and the Star Brisbane began a staged opening at the A$3.6 billion Queen’s Wharf Brisbane precinct on 29 August 2024, with the main casino floor and premium gaming rooms opening first. The precinct was developed jointly by Star Entertainment Group and Hong Kong-based Chow Tai Fook Enterprises.

New South Wales had 87,298 gaming machines outside casinos across 2,195 venues in June 2023, and the state — whose gambling regulator is Liquor and Gaming NSW — recorded A$8.18 billion in annual player losses (A$986 per capita) from poker machines outside casinos in FY22-23. Queensland had 21,122 gaming machines operating in 351 venues in October 2023. South Australia had 11,672 gaming machines outside Adelaide Casino in 471 venues in September 2023. These figures are the closest the public record gets to a per-state view of the broader pokie market that sits outside the casino floors.

Responsible gaming and the tools that actually reach an Australian player

The safeguards available to a person in Australia split cleanly between what is offered inside the Australian regulatory frame and what is not. Inside the frame, the National Self-Exclusion Register, BetStop, has been live since August 2023. BetStop binds Australian-licensed online and phone wagering services, and the exclusion is the formal way to stop new accounts being opened across all of them at once. An offshore casino is not connected to BetStop, and registering on BetStop does not prevent an offshore site from accepting a deposit — only the licensed wagering services the register reaches.

The National Gambling Helpline is 1800 858 858, free and 24/7, with chat at Gambling Help Online. The helpline is the line for anyone in Australia whose own gambling or someone else’s is becoming a problem, and the Gambling Help Online service runs the same brief from a chat interface rather than a phone.

The venue-level safeguards are the things the player sees at the casino floor: identification on entry (the venue checks), the self-exclusion arrangement the venue offers through Liquor and Gaming NSW, and the responsible-gambling information that the venue itself is required to display. The Star Sydney and Crown Sydney both run their own responsible-gambling teams and both can place a venue-level exclusion on a player who asks for one. BetStop is the cross-venue and cross-operator tool and reaches further than the venue itself.

The minimum age to enter the casino in Sydney is 18. The Star Sydney and Crown Sydney both enforce the 18-plus rule on the door and check identification before admitting a guest to the gaming floor. New South Wales sets 18 as the gambling age across casinos, clubs and hotels, and the venue-level check is the practical safeguard. A reader who has searched “sydney casino age limit” is asking exactly this — the answer is 18, both venues enforce it, and identification is the check on the door.

What the offshore sites carry that the licensed venues do not, and the price of it

The marketing an offshore site runs is built around the things the Australian licensed venues do not offer: online access from home, a sign-up offer or bonus on first deposit, and a wider slot catalogue than any single venue floor carries. The price is the consumer-protection gap and the legal-exposure gap.

A player at an Australian licensed venue has access to a state regulator (Liquor and Gaming NSW for both Sydney venues), a venue-level complaint process, and the formal BetStop exclusion that crosses venues and operators. A player at an offshore site has access to whatever the operator chooses to provide — typically an internal complaints email and nothing else — and the operator’s licence is in a jurisdiction the player cannot reach. If the operator refuses a withdrawal, blocks the account or closes it, the player has no Australian body to complain to, no Australian regulator to escalate to, and no Australian legal route to recover the balance.

The blocking-rate and the industry estimate both point in the same direction: the offshore industry has been growing into Australia because the consumer has nowhere else to go inside the licensed market, and the ACMA has been blocking sites and warning operators at a rate that has itself been climbing. The reader weighing the offshore sites against the licensed venues is weighing convenience and a marketing offer against consumer protection and a regulator that can actually be reached.

The financial frame — tax, winnings and what the ATO says

Gambling winnings of a recreational player are not assessable income under section 6-5 of the ITAA 1997, and losses are not deductible — unless the person carries on a business of gambling. The standard reading is that a punter’s win is tax-free and a punter’s loss cannot be claimed back, and that the ATO treats a professional gambler differently from a recreational one. The casual reader asking the best-casino-in-Sydney question does not need to plan around tax on winnings; a reader whose gambling is at a scale where the ATO might treat it as a business is well past the “best casino” question and into advice from a tax professional.

The winnings frame does not change the consumer-protection frame. A player at the Sydney casino floor who hits a large win on the tables or the pokies does not owe tax on it; a player at an offshore site who hits the same win still does not owe tax on it, but has no Australian recourse if the operator refuses to pay. The tax position is the same in both cases; the recourse position is not.

The decision a reader is actually making

A reader who has searched “best casino in Sydney” is choosing between The Star Sydney and Crown Sydney, and possibly weighing the offshore sites that have surfaced in the same search. The honest comparison is the one the search results avoid.

For a Sydney visitor, the choice between The Star and Crown is a building choice first and a regulatory choice second. The Star carries a venue under special-manager supervision, a fine, a regulator finding, and an ongoing ASIC action; it also carries the larger gaming floor, the larger entertainment complex and the Darling Harbour address. Crown carries a venue with no comparable mark on its NSW licence over the period this page covers; it also carries a smaller gaming floor, a tower experience and a Barangaroo address that is less central to the tourism belt.

For a reader weighing the offshore sites against the venues, the comparison is closer to a non-decision. The IGA prohibits what the offshore sites are offering; the ACMA’s record shows the regulator acting against the operators at a rate that has been climbing; the industry estimate shows the spend that flows to the offshore market has been growing. A reader choosing an offshore site is choosing convenience and a bonus over a regulator and a venue the regulator can be reached through.

The “best” answer, in the sense the search is asking, is whichever licensed venue the reader wants to walk into. Both are licensed by Liquor and Gaming NSW, both run the standard Sydney table-game spread, both enforce the 18-plus rule on entry, and both are subject to the responsible-gambling frame the page describes above. The “best” answer, in the sense the search results often imply — the offshore site with the largest bonus — is not on the menu in Australia and the menu is enforced.

Frequently asked questions

What is the name of the main casino in Sydney?

Sydney has two licensed casinos rather than a single one. The Star Sydney sits in Pyrmont overlooking Darling Harbour and is the larger of the two by gaming footprint, owned by Star Entertainment Group. Crown Sydney opened at Barangaroo in December 2020 inside a 75-storey tower, the tallest building in Sydney. Both are licensed by Liquor and Gaming NSW and both enforce the 18-plus entry rule.

Where is the casino in Sydney located?

The Star Sydney sits at Pyrmont on the western edge of Darling Harbour, with public-transport access and a wide hotel belt within walking distance. Crown Sydney sits at Barangaroo on the western edge of the CBD, with the Wynyard and Circular Quay hotel belt a short walk away. Both are within the Sydney metropolitan area and reachable without a car.

What is the minimum age to enter the casino in Sydney?

The minimum age is 18 for both venues, set by New South Wales across casinos, clubs and hotels. Identification is checked at the door for the gaming floor, and the rule is enforced at both The Star Sydney and Crown Sydney. A reader asking the question because they are under 18 should not plan the visit.

Does the casino in Sydney offer table games such as blackjack and baccarat?

Yes, both venues run the standard Sydney table-game spread: baccarat, blackjack, roulette and craps. The Star Sydney runs the larger table-game floor as part of its two gaming floors; Crown Sydney runs a tighter premium-floor offer inside its tower. The games are conventional, the dealers are live on the floor, and the floor sets minimum and maximum stakes for the time of day.

Are there hotels within walking distance of the casino in Sydney?

Yes, both venues are surrounded by hotel belts. The Star Sydney sits within walking distance of the Darling Harbour hotel belt with chains and independent properties within a short walk. Crown Sydney sits within walking distance of the Wynyard, Circular Quay and CBD hotel belt on its harbour side. On-site rooms are also available at both venues.

Can Australians legally play at an online casino instead of visiting the casino in Sydney?

No. The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 prohibits offering online casino games, online pokies and in-play betting to a person in Australia, and no state or territory issues a licence for them. The player is not prosecuted, but the offshore operator has no Australian consumer protection, no Australian complaints body and no Australian recourse if a withdrawal is refused, and the ACMA can direct ISPs to block the site with a balance still on it. The licensed wagering services in Australia are limited to racing, sport, lotteries and keno.