India’s Supreme Court has dismissed a review petition filed by Flutter Entertainment-owned Junglee Games, closing off the operator’s last realistic route to overturning state-level bans on real-money gaming. The ruling leaves Flutter’s roughly $200 million investment in the business with no path back to market, reinforcing a prohibition that has already cost the company hundreds of jobs.
What happened to Junglee Games
A batch of ten review petitions, led by Junglee Games India, was dismissed by the Supreme Court, with the petitions challenging the court’s 27 May 2026 judgment upholding Tamil Nadu and Karnataka laws that ban online games played for stakes, and a bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan dismissing the petitions on October 15 without an open-court hearing
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The companies’ applications for an oral hearing were also rejected
.
The judges stated that they had carefully gone through the review petitions and found no merit in them, so the petitions were dismissed
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The Supreme Court had originally set aside Madras and Karnataka High Court rulings that struck down the state bans, and held that states can prohibit online games played for money or other stakes, including games of skill such as rummy and poker
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Junglee Games was joined in the litigation by other skill-gaming companies including Play Games24x7 and Head Digital Works, along with industry bodies the All India Gaming Federation
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Even a successful review would not have let Junglee resume operations, since the national Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act 2025 already prohibits real-money gaming, and a separate constitutional challenge to that law remains pending before the Supreme Court
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Why it matters
Flutter owns 95% of Junglee after paying more than $200 million for its stake, and had already suspended the business in August 2025 and cut 350 jobs
. The exhausted review petition confirms that write-down was not premature caution but an accurate read of where Indian law was heading, with no further domestic legal avenue left for Flutter to pursue on the state-level question.
For operators and suppliers eyeing emerging real-money markets, the case underlines how quickly a favourable legal environment can reverse once legislatures and courts align against an industry. High Court rulings that initially protected skill-gaming businesses were overturned at Supreme Court level, showing that early-stage regulatory wins cannot be treated as durable without national-level legislative backing.
The ban, approved by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in August 2025, effectively wiped out the country’s nascent gaming sector overnight when it came into force on 1 May 2026
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Affiliates and performance marketers who had built India-facing funnels around skill-gaming brands such as Junglee’s products now have definitive confirmation that there is no near-term route back into that traffic, barring success in the separate constitutional challenge to the national Act still pending before the court.
The bigger picture
The Junglee Games ruling arrives as the global industry watches a near-identical dynamic unfold in Brazil, where courts and the executive are similarly tightening restrictions on regulated betting following President Lula’s re-election. Flutter itself is managing both situations simultaneously, having wound down Betfair’s Italian operations earlier this month while now absorbing a second definitive market loss in India.
The pattern suggests that large multinational operators can no longer rely on a single favourable jurisdiction ruling to secure a market; national legislation and apex-court review are increasingly the deciding factors, and both are moving in a more restrictive direction across several major geographies. Readers following Flutter’s broader exposure to these shifts may find useful context in our coverage of Stake’s challenge to the Brazil court reversal, which tracks a parallel legal fight over market access.
Sources
- GamblingNews – Flutter’s Junglee Games Fails to Appeal India’s Gaming Ban
- Next.io – India’s Supreme Court rejects Flutter bid to overturn landmark ruling
- MediaNama – Supreme Court upholds TN, Karnataka gaming bans; Junglee plea rejected
- AffPapa – India Supreme Court dismisses Flutter’s review petitions
- SiGMA – Indian Supreme Court reject petitions against state gaming bans
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