Sabong

The Short Answer: Online Sabong Is Still Suspended

Online sabong — e-sabong — is suspended nationwide in the Philippines and has been since 3 May 2022. The suspension was put on a permanent footing by Executive Order No. 9, signed by President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. on 28 December 2022, and it is still in force. There are no licensed e-sabong operators. Every platform still taking online sabong bets is doing so outside the law, outside the tax system, and outside any regulator that a losing customer could complain to.

Sabong itself is a different matter. Traditional cockfighting in a licensed cockpit was deliberately left alone by the order, in one explicit sentence. That distinction is the whole answer to the question most people are actually asking, and this page sets it out properly — along with something no guide to sabong publishes: what the betting actually costs.

What Executive Order No. 9 Actually Says

The order is short and its operative section is worth reading rather than paraphrasing. Section 1 suspends two things:

• Live-streaming or broadcasting of live cockfights outside cockpits, cockfighting arenas, or the premises where cockfights are being held.
• Online, remote or off-cockpit wagering on live cockfighting matches that are streamed or broadcast live — and this one carries a clause most summaries drop: “regardless of the location of the betting platform, including but not limited to betting platforms that may be situated inside the cockpit or cockfighting arenas.”

That second clause closes the obvious workaround. It is not enough to move the betting terminal into the arena; if the wager is placed on a stream rather than at the pit, it falls inside the suspension.

And then the sentence that answers the question people are really asking:

“The operations of traditional cockfights authorized or licensed under existing laws shall not be covered by the foregoing suspension.”

So a licensed cockpit running a licensed derby on a fiesta afternoon is untouched. What was switched off is the version you watch and bet on from your phone.

The Ban Has No Expiry Date

People keep expecting e-sabong to come back, and the text explains why it has not. Executive Order No. 9 contains a separability clause, a repealing clause and an effectivity clause reading “This Order shall take effect immediately”. There is no sunset provision and no review date. It stands until a president repeals it.

Nothing has. As recently as February 2026 the Philippine National Police announced an intensified campaign against a resurgence of illegal e-sabong, with commanders down to city and municipal level directed to help the Anti-Cybercrime Group trace the sources of live-stream feeds. That is the opposite of a ban quietly lapsing.

Why It Was Banned

The suspension was not a policy disagreement about gambling revenue. It followed the disappearance of dozens of cockfighting participants — sabungeros — connected to alleged game-fixing. The Presidential Communications Office’s own coverage refers to the government’s investigation into the case of 34 missing cockfighters. E-sabong at its peak was a very large business, and it was shut down while that case was live.

That history matters for a practical reason as well as a moral one. The specific harm alleged was fixing — and a fixed fight is exactly the risk you cannot price. Every number further down this page assumes the two birds have the chances the market says they have. On an unlicensed platform with no regulator, no audit and no one to appeal to, that assumption is doing an enormous amount of work.

An Offshore Site Is Not a Loophole

The order’s own recitals cite Executive Order No. 13 of 2017, which declared as illegal gambling all activities “directly or indirectly related to gambling, conducted beyond the territorial jurisdiction of the government authority which issued the license”.

In plain terms: a licence issued somewhere else does not make a bet legal here. A site hosted abroad, holding a foreign permit, taking sabong bets from a Filipino is not operating in a grey area created by distance. It is covered, and so is the customer’s lack of protection.

The other laws named in the order are worth knowing too, because they long predate e-sabong: PD 449, the Cockfighting Law of 1974, which prohibits cockfights in unlicensed cockpits and other gambling inside a cockpit; PD 483 of 1974, against game-fixing and betting on fixed contests; and PD 1602 of 1978, which sets the stiffer penalties for illegal cockfighting. Licensing of the cockpits themselves sits with local government units under the Local Government Code.

How Sabong Betting Works at a Licensed Cockpit

There is no cashier and no printed slip. Betting is handled by the kristo, the bet-taker who stands in the crowd with his arms outstretched — the name comes from the posture — taking wagers by hand signal and holding them all in his head. Bets are matched between spectators; the arena is not the counterparty.

The two birds are the llamado, the favourite, and the dehado, the underdog. The price is called as a ratio rather than as odds. The standard opening call is sampu-siyam — “ten-nine” — meaning a backer of the favourite risks 10 to win 9, and a backer of the underdog risks 9 to win 10. If the money is lopsided the call widens: ten-eight, ten-seven, and on down.

Out of the winnings the house takes the plasada, its commission, commonly quoted at 10%.

The Finding: the Quoted Ratio Is a Fair Market. The Plasada Is the Entire Margin.

Take sampu-siyam at face value. The favourite’s backer risks 10 to win 9, so the price implies a favourite win probability of 10 ÷ 19 = 52.63%. The underdog’s backer risks 9 to win 10, implying 9 ÷ 19 = 47.37%.

Those add to exactly 100.00%.

That is not a rounding coincidence, and it is genuinely unusual. A bookmaker’s prices never add to 100 — the gap above it is the margin. A sabong call adds to precisely 100 because the two sides are simply matched against each other; nobody has built a margin into the number. Everything the house earns comes from the plasada, and nothing at all comes from the price. Remove the commission and the market is mathematically fair.

Put the 10% commission back and the picture changes:

A 10% plasada turns a fair market into a 105.25% book — the same shape as a bookmaker’s overround, and roughly the same size as the margin on a two-way football market. Each side has to win about 2.6 percentage points more often than the called ratio suggests, just to stand still.

One number in that table is worth pausing on. At the usual commission, a backer of the underdog needs the dehado to win exactly half the time — a coin flip — even though the price says the dehado is the worse bird. That is the plasada, not the birds.

Backing the Underdog Costs More, and the Gap Widens as the Odds Do

Here is the part that is genuinely counter-intuitive. Because the commission is charged on winnings, and the underdog’s winnings are large relative to the stake, the plasada bites harder on the dehado backer. Measured as expected cost per peso risked, taking the called ratio as the true chances:

At the standard call the two sides are close: 4.74% against 5.26%. By the time the call has widened to ten-five, backing the underdog costs exactly twice as much per peso as backing the favourite — 6.67% against 3.33%. The romance of the dehado is real and the arithmetic is not on its side.

The same figures describe the arena’s earnings, because they are the same money. The house does not keep a fixed percentage of a sabong fight. What it keeps depends on which bird wins: 4.74% of everything staked if the favourite takes it, 5.26% if the underdog does. At ten-five the swing runs from 3.33% to 6.67%. An arena’s income from a single fight is therefore partly a gamble of its own — which is not true of a casino table, where the edge is the same whatever happens.

How That Compares With Everything Else

A ~5% take on a licensed cockpit fight is, by the standards of the games around it, not expensive.

Two honest caveats sit under that comparison. The first is that the sabong figure assumes the called ratio reflects the birds’ real chances — and unlike a deck of cards or a set of dice, nobody can verify that. The second is that it assumes a 10% plasada; where a house takes 15%, the cost rises to 7.11% and 7.89% and sabong stops being the cheap option.

If You Are Reading This Because You Want to Bet Online

Then the honest answer is that there is nothing lawful for you to use. There is no licensed e-sabong operator in the Philippines, so there is no version of this that is regulated, taxed, audited, or backed by anyone who has to pay you.

What that costs a customer in practice is worth being specific about. On a suspended, unlicensed platform there is no regulator to complain to about a withheld withdrawal; no rule requiring the odds or the commission to be what was displayed; no audit of the stream you are betting into, which may not even be live; and no recourse at all if the platform simply closes. The reason the industry was shut down in the first place was an allegation of fixing — and fixing is precisely the thing that no amount of studying the birds can protect you against.

If what you want is the sport, licensed cockpits operate lawfully under local-government licences and were deliberately excluded from the suspension. Cockfighting is a blood sport, which some readers will weigh differently from others; that is a judgement this page leaves to them rather than pretending the question is not there.

Betting Sensibly on Anything

• Ask what the plasada is before you bet, not after. It is the entire margin. Between 5% and 15% the cost of the same wager triples.
• The called ratio is not the price. It is a fair market; the price is what the commission does to it.
• The dehado costs more, not less. The wider the call, the bigger the gap — up to double at ten-five.
• Nothing here applies to an unlicensed platform, because nothing there is verifiable in the first place.
• Licensed gambling in the Philippines is 21 and over, and the money you bring should be money you have already decided to spend.

If gambling has stopped being an afternoon out and started being a problem, free and confidential help exists. That is worth doing before the next derby, not after it.

Related Reading

• Perya — every betting stall in a Filipino fairground priced on one scale.
• Jueteng — the illegal numbers game whose odds are fixed by the statute that bans it.
• Sakla and Color Game — the two perya games whose prices can be proved exactly.
• Lucky 9, Tongits, Pusoy and Pusoy Dos — the Filipino card games, house-banked and player-versus-player.
• GCash — how the e-wallet works, and what it is and is not permitted to fund.

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