Gambling in America has reached almost epidemic proportions. More and more cities and towns are turning to legalized riverboat gambling to increase tax revenues and many bars and taverns are reaping more in profits from illegal poker machines than they are from alcohol sales.

In Bloomington, Illinois, there is a gentleman who buys bars and other drinking establishments, or invests a substantial amount with the owner for the sole rights of placing poker and other gambling video games in the establishment. Once procuring an establishment, he relinquishes ownership but maintains the machines so to produce untraceable income.

Long gone are the days of simple Cherry Master and Draw Poker machines. There are dozens of varieties of games these days. Blackjack, Texas Hold ‘Em, Stud Poker, and a variety of theme based machines offer gamblers the chance to pass some time and maybe win a little money.

Most machines require a minimum bet of $0.05 per line of play, with many machines requiring a minimum of 8 lines of play to be eligible for any type of bonus, thus costing a gambler a minimum of $0.40 per spin to play. Although this is not much, these machines can perform 7 spins per minute, thus costing a gambler $2.80 per minute of play. Assuming an hour of pure loss, which is unheard of, a gambler could lose $168 every hour of play while playing the minimum! Players desiring bigger payouts must play with higher stakes, usually a maximum of $0.40 per line, thus bringing the potential losses to $1344 per hour.

Most machines are programmed to payout a certain percentage of their income to the gamblers. However, even “loose” machines, which pay out a higher than normal percentage, generate huge profits for the owner as those percentages are typically paid out in small increments, thus inspiring the gambler to feed that money back into the machine in hopes of a larger jackpot.

Many bars will have as many as a dozen machines installed in their establishment. If those machines are played continuously for 6 hours every night, with an average of a 50% payout, the machine owner could net over $16,000 every night this activity occurred. All of this money is untaxed and unreported.

 With as much money as States are paying to support gambling addictions, they ought to invest a little into cracking down on these illegal machines which are generating millions of dollars of pure, untaxed profit every year.