Pennsylvania Skill Games Gone at 99.4% of Sites Visited

• Agency visits since Oct. 14 turned up no skill games at 12,134 locations out of 12,202, a rate the agency puts at 99.4%.
• Seizures so far total 14 machines along with $1,913, and the agency says investigations of the remaining locations are ongoing.
• Machines that take cards, mobile or cash-app payments instead of cash are slot machines too, according to the agency.
• The state Supreme Court’s majority opinion describes a device that takes cash and never uses the words cashless or sweepstakes.

HARRISBURG, Pa. – Skill games were gone at 12,134 locations out of 12,202 that Pennsylvania State Police visited after Oct. 14, 99.4% of the total, the agency said Nov. 10. Investigations continue at locations that did not give up machines on their own, and seizures so far total 14 machines along with $1,913.

Visits Follow Agreements With Six Operators

The visits began Oct. 14, the day the agency announced deals with six companies that operate or distribute skill games. Those companies agreed to disable their devices starting that day, take them out of host businesses in stages, hand over an inventory of every machine and its location, and report to the agency each week on removals. Deals with several more distributors had yet to be signed, the agency said then.

The Nov. 10 figures leave 68 of the 12,202 visited establishments outside the compliant count.

State Police Say Payment Method Does Not Change The Law

The release said agency staff have come across machines carrying operator or manufacturer signs that assert the devices are lawful because they take no cash and “operate more like a ‘sweepstakes’ than a slot machine.” Before the devices went into Pennsylvania businesses, the agency added, nobody who makes or runs them asked State Police whether they were legal.

In the agency’s reading, how a player pays is irrelevant. A machine that takes “any form of compensation” for slot-style play and can pay back cash, credit or reimbursement qualifies as “a slot machine and/or gambling device,” the release said. Its examples of such payment are “credit or debit card, mobile payment services, cash apps.”

Free play or free credits do not make a game legal, the release said, when the player can then keep playing on personal money. The agency reads the ruling as covering games of chance, games of skill and mixes of the two, no matter whether a game runs on “a random number generator or a finite pool of outcomes.”

State Police said they will seek to prosecute every distributor or manufacturer whose devices stay in operation, pointing to what the release called the “resolute and unambiguous holding” of the Supreme Court. Distributors, and the establishments where machines sit, risk being prosecuted on unlawful gambling charges if the machines keep running, the release said. It urged those establishments to arrange with their vendors or distributors to have the devices removed at once.

The release said the agency can seize devices, the equipment tied to them and the money they generate, and have all of it forfeited. On Oct. 14, the agency had already warned that newer machines taking cards or other non-cash payment would draw criminal investigation.

State Police read the court decision as confining such devices to places where the legislature has “expressly authorized gambling,” which the release identifies as premises holding a Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board license. A business lacking one that installs or keeps slot machines is also answerable under the state Gaming Act, the release said. That boundary separates the machines from legal gambling.

Court Ruled On A Cash-Fed Device, Not Cashless Play

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled June 15 that the Crimes Code’s gambling-device statute, 18 Pa.C.S. § 5513, and the Gaming Act each reach skill games. It reversed two Commonwealth Court decisions and stayed its order for 120 days, a window that closed before enforcement started Oct. 14. The Gaming Control Board licenses casinos and other persons and entities under the act, which the opinion says authorizes only “limited gaming.”

The majority opinion describes the device before the court as one in which “a player inserts cash,” and the words “cashless” and “sweepstakes” do not appear in it. The Gaming Act definition the court applied covers a machine available to play “upon payment of any consideration whatsoever, including the use of any electronic payment system except a credit card or debit card.” The State Police release lists credit and debit cards among the payments that make a device a slot machine and does not discuss that wording.

The release also invokes § 5513, describing it as barring businesses from hosting “electronic video monitors” that run gambling simulations for “direct or indirect consideration,” among them displays that send players to phone apps or QR codes for what it calls “sweepstakes” games. As the court quoted the section’s first subsection, “a misdemeanor of the first degree” applies to a person who “intentionally or knowingly” maintains a “slot machine or any device to be used for gambling purposes,” or who knowingly lets premises host unlawful gambling.

The release does not say whether any charges have been filed or when the investigations will conclude.