Is McLuck Blocked in Tennessee? Only 2 of 3 Lists Say Yes

Two of the three state lists McLuck publishes still name Tennessee as blocked. The third does not: the signup help article McLuck and three sister sweepstakes casinos rewrote late on August 10, 2026 cuts the block list to 13 states, leaves Tennessee off it and demotes the state to a trailing parenthetical about purchases. The main availability article in the same help centre blocks 17 states and names Tennessee among them, and California moves the same way in the same sentence.

We read all six B-Two Operations help centres through Zendesk's public API at 02:15 UTC on August 11. Four of them had been edited inside a 59-minute window the night before, and the article the operator touched first was the one a new player reads before signing up.

Which states does McLuck say it blocks?

Three different answers, all live this morning, and none of them is the state-by-state legal position.

The signup article, at McLuck, Hello Millions, PlayFame and SpinBlitz alike, now reads: "Currently, we do not operate in: Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Washington, and West Virginia. (Please note: Our platform will also cease operations in Indiana on July 1, 2026, and in Maine on July 15, 2026. Promotional contests are no longer offered in California, or in connection with a purchase in Tennessee)."

Both of those cessation dates, July 1 and July 15, 2026, had already passed when the operator rewrote the article on August 10.

The gap between the 13 and the 17 is exactly four states: California, Indiana, Maine and Tennessee. PlayFame's version of the 17-state article runs to 16 and drops Tennessee, the PlayFame state-list error we reported on August 9, which is still there.

An operator publishing lists that disagree with each other is not rare in this market - Spree runs four restricted-state lists that contradict one another - but California, Tennessee and Maine, three of the four states in this gap, carry statutes with penalties attached.

Does Tennessee's ban have a no-purchase exception?

No, and this is the sentence that should worry a Tennessee player: "Promotional contests are no longer offered in California, or in connection with a purchase in Tennessee."

Tennessee's statute does not turn on purchase. Public Chapter 1117, the enrolled text of SB 2136, defines an "online sweepstakes game" as one that "Utilizes a virtual-currency, dual currency, or multi-currency system allowing a player to: (i) Play or participate with a currency, such as a virtual coin, token, or other representation of value, that is directly purchased, received through a bonus or promotion, or received for free with the purchase of another type of currency or related product, service, or activity."

Read the middle of that clause. A coin "received through a bonus or promotion" or "received for free" is inside the definition, not outside it. The free daily Sweeps Coins that sit alongside purchasable Gold Coins are the exact thing the drafters described. Section 47-18-5902(a) then declares the operating, conducting or commercial promoting of online sweepstakes games unlawful in Tennessee, and subsection (b) sets out the acts that expose a person to the remedies in the part: operating, conducting or commercially promoting such a game at (b)(2), and separately, at (b)(5), anyone who "supports, facilitates, or assists in the operation of online sweepstakes games or other gambling within this state." Section 47-18-5903(a) makes a violation an unfair or deceptive act under the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act of 1977.

There is one true way out of the Tennessee definition, and the operator's sentence does not claim it. The definition also requires the currency to be exchangeable for "a prize, award, cash, or cash equivalent, or the chance to win a prize, award, cash, or cash equivalent." A product that awards nothing redeemable, and offers no chance at anything redeemable, falls outside. Dropping the purchase link does not.

Why is California different from Tennessee?

California is genuinely different, which is what makes the same sentence readable two ways.

Penal Code Section 337o, added by AB 831 and in force since January 1, 2026, defines an "online sweepstakes game" through four conditions that must all be met, and the fourth is that the game "Awards cash or cash equivalents." A free-play product with no cash-redeemable prize does not meet it. So "Promotional contests are no longer offered in California" could describe a lawful arrangement rather than a gap in the blocklist, in the same way Louisiana players were left with a Gold-Coin-only tier after Louisiana's own deadline passed.

The problem is that the same help centre also states flatly that the brand "is not available in California." Those are different products with different answers to "can I sign up today," and the operator publishes both. Section 337o(a) makes operating, conducting or offering an online sweepstakes game in California a misdemeanour carrying a fine of $1,000 to $25,000, up to a year in county jail, or both, and subsection (b) reaches payment processors, geolocation providers, content suppliers and media affiliates who knowingly support one. That is why our California state page carries no offers.

What changed in the McLuck help centres on August 10?

The same seven-article set at each brand, brand by brand, no overlap:

Signup, account creation failures, blocked accounts, account verification, document rejection, why documents are required at all, and site troubleshooting, in that order each time. It is the same rollout pattern as the August 6 rewrite that put a 30-day verification clock on these accounts.

Most of it was tidying up after that rewrite. Three brands deleted the stale duplicate articles the August batch had left stranded, including an old refer-a-friend article superseded on August 6. Hello Millions and PlayFame fixed a headline that had been published as ".Why was my document upload rejected?" with a stray full stop on the front. Hello Millions and PlayFame also renamed their signup articles to add ".com" to the brand name.

What the cleanup pass did not fix: McLuck's and Hello Millions' refer-a-friend article still tells the reader the programme "lets you earn rewards by inviting eligible friends to join PlayFame."

One limit on what we can claim. Our snapshot of the previous version of each article stores a hash of the body, not the body itself, so we can confirm that the text changed and when, and we can show you what it says now, but we cannot tell you which sentences moved. The last Internet Archive capture of McLuck's signup article, from September 17, 2025, carried no state list at all. Neither does Mega Bonanza's equivalent article, whose body has not changed since January 13, 2026 and was left out of both August passes. Its Zendesk record was touched at 00:50 UTC this morning, but that is an updated_at movement with the body hash unchanged, which is exactly the distinction this piece turns on. The 13-state paragraph came in with the shared August template.

What should you do if you play at McLuck or a sister brand?

Read the longer list, not the shorter one. That is the same advice we gave two days ago and the new document has not changed it.

1. Treat the 17-state article as the operative one. It is internally consistent: excluded states plus available states sum to 50. The 13-state paragraph does not add up, and it describes two exits as forthcoming that happened weeks ago. One exception, and it lands on the state this article is about: PlayFame's version of that same article excludes 16 and counts Tennessee among the 34 it calls open. A PlayFame player in Tennessee has no document from this operator worth relying on.
2. In Tennessee, do not read "not in connection with a purchase" as permission. Public Chapter 1117 has no purchase trigger to switch off. Its definition reaches coins "received through a bonus or promotion, or received for free," and its prohibition reaches operating, commercially promoting and assisting alike. Maine's Chapter 645, approved by the governor on April 6, 2026 and enforceable in Maine since July 29, is drafted the same broad way: it makes it a civil violation, carrying a fine of $10,000 to $100,000, for "a person that operates or promotes an online sweepstakes game or supports the operation or promotion of an online sweepstakes game."
3. Move a balance before you test a boundary. If a state you play from starts appearing and disappearing across an operator's own documents, that is the point to cash out rather than accumulate. Our redemption walkthrough covers the order to do it in, and past state exits have given players redemption windows as short as 14 days.

One update on our own file. On August 9 we said our excluded-state data for this family was wrong on every brand and put it on the correction queue. That queue has moved since: we rechecked all six against their help centres this morning, and five now match exactly, McLuck and Hello Millions at 17 states, SpinBlitz at 17, Mega Bonanza and Jackpota at 18. One did not, and it is the brand this piece has already singled out. Our PlayFame review listed 16 excluded states with Tennessee in and California out. Tennessee belongs there and we kept it. California belonged there too, and that page of ours was wrong about a state where operating this model is a misdemeanour. It has since been added, later the same day, so all six now match the help centres. How we check operator documents sets out the method, and the brands whose paperwork we can actually follow are the ones we rank. The full picture of which states are closed to sweeps play is the page we would send a reader to before any operator's own list.

Sources & documents

• McLuck help centre API - article 9059515878173 "How do I sign up to McLuck?", body last edited 2026-08-11T10:23:48Z, having read 2026-08-10T22:13:32Z when this piece published; article 8837446177693 "Can I play from anywhere?", body last edited 2026-07-13T21:28:05Z
• Hello Millions help centre API - article 13867366347421, body last edited 2026-08-10T22:28:31Z
• SpinBlitz help centre API - article 11537361138717, body last edited 2026-08-10T22:42:38Z
• PlayFame help centre API - article 15639552637085, body last edited 2026-08-10T23:01:00Z
• Mega Bonanza help centre API - article 32439282237721, body last edited 2026-01-13T08:54:23Z, no state list
• Jackpota help centre API
• Hello Millions site access notice, PlayFame, SpinBlitz, Mega Bonanza - the notices served to an out-of-area visitor, read August 11, 2026
• Tennessee Public Chapter 1117 (SB 2136), enrolled act - definitions at 47-18-5901, prohibition at 47-18-5902, penalties at 47-18-5903
• California AB 831, chaptered text adding Penal Code 337o - Chapter 623, Statutes of 2025, approved October 11, 2025
• Maine LD 2007, Public Law Chapter 645 - approved April 6, 2026
• McLuck "How do I sign up to McLuck?", archived September 17, 2025 - the same Zendesk article, with no state list in it

Every help-centre quotation above is verbatim from each brand's public Zendesk API, pulled on August 11, 2026, because the browser-facing help pages sit behind a bot challenge from this machine. Timestamps are the API's edited_at field, which records the last change to the article body, rather than updated_at, which also moves for metadata-only edits. McLuck's own domain refused our request today, so its site access notice is the one we read on August 9 rather than this morning; the other three we re-read. We hold the previous version of each changed article only as a hash of its text, which lets us confirm that a body changed and when, but not which sentences. Statute text comes from the Tennessee Secretary of State's published act, the California Legislature's chaptered bill text and the Maine Legislature's enacted chapter law. This article makes no allegation of wrongdoing against any operator: it reports what four sweepstakes casinos published about their own availability overnight, and what three state statutes say. We could not read the terms of service for any of the six brands, and we did not put these questions to the company before publishing. If it responds, this piece gets updated.

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