The racetrack table games bill has caused the Legislature to revisit its 2001 decision to outlaw video poker "gray" machines and replace them with identical devices controlled by the state lottery.
As The Charleston Gazette reports from Monday's Senate floor action, several of the proposed amendments addressed the "limited video lottery" machines and the 1,701 bars and other locations statewide that host them.
The Gazette's Phil Kabler also offered context for this facet of the gambling issue in his weekend column. In highlighting the lawsuit challenging limited video lottery's advertising restrictions,
Kabler invokes the "bad old days" when the gray machines were everywhere __ virtually every bar in the state as well as gas stations, grocery stores, corner markets and even laundromats. And they all paid out illegally, while providing untold millions of dollars annually to the state's criminal underworld.
Concluding that the lawsuit lacks merit, Kabler refers to the plaintiffs as "the unsavory crew of the West Virginia Association of Club Owners and Fraternal Services." Ouch.
MetroNews' Hoppy Kercheval also raised questions about the lawsuit, the group filing it and possible unintended consequences in his Monday column.
06 March 2007
West Virginia's Other Gambling Issue
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2 comments:
Laundromats? Puh-leeze. In many, many decades in WV, as a person who did not hang out in bars but did visit at least a few hundred convenience stores and quite a few laundromats, I never saw a single "grey" gambling machine. They were not pervasive. That ploy was a scam -- and it worked.
Point two -- what "criminal underworld?" Could we have some names here? What grey-machine kingpin did the FBI investigate?
They used the same grey machine scam in Oregon to advance convenience gambling. What's done is done, but let's not repeat myth as fact.
This is so funny! Does the government think people are stupid? They think that if they call those video poker "gray" machines in another name no one would notice? what a scam!
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