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Comment by tonystubblebine | Hacker News Reader

I spent some time in Montana and was shocked to see how many businesses have "casinos" attached to them. I never got to look inside but I think these are basically a small room with a few slot machines. They were everywhere. For example, I ate at a chinese restaurant and there was a side room advertising poker and keno.

I came away feeling like there was a web that would catch every single person in the state who had a predilection for gambling addiction.

The weirdest sign I saw was attached to a gas station casino: "Weekly grand prize jackpot: $50." That was hard to parse coming from tech salaries that a $50 grand prize would motivate anyone.

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Growing up in Las Vegas, it was common for me to see a slot machine room in grocery stores and gas stations. Most movie theaters, bowling alleys, restaurants, etc were in the casinos. I've known a few people with gambling addictions, and it's definitely not easy with slot machines every where you go. But the casinos pay the State's bills, so it's easy to see why regulation is hard to come by.

Cook county IL (the county that encompasses Chicago) legalized some forms of gambling (not in Chicago). Gas stations, bars & even hair salons now have game rooms in them.

I find it pretty sad as there is no glamor at all in dunking dollars into bad slot machines at a shell station. But I didn’t find the scratch off tickets they sold at the counter glamorous either.

https://features.propublica.org/the-bad-bet/how-illinois-bet...

https://www.propublica.org/article/illinois-video-gambling-w...

These are interesting reads regarding slot parlors in Illinois. It gets repeated in every locale that legalizes slots. Big promises of increased tax revenues, then the actuals are 10%-30% of the forecasts, but by then the horse is already out of the barn. I've looked at a few state level gaming commission data sets and backed out the math, and even in backwoods areas, penny slot machines generate $20/hr average ($240/day) in gross income (even though they're called penny slots, you can easily lose $20 in under 60 seconds based on speed of play, number of lines and bet sizing-- all of which are heavily optimized to trigger reward centers in the brain), so even with expensive $5-10k machines, the recovery time is pretty low, so they'll just metastasize as much as legally allowed.

Oregon and Louisiana too

I was just visiting Louisiana this weekend and it was insane to me that they have so many ads (and news piece advertising) for online sports betting on broadcast television.

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