'Little baby casinos': Huge growth in video gambling boosts Illinois gaming revenue to record levels

Full meals used to be on the menu at La Cabana Mexican Restaurant in Melrose Park, but now the small storefront sells only steak tacos. These days, many people come not to eat, but to gamble.no deposit bonus
Customers will typically spend two to four hours at a time at one of the video poker or slot machines at the strip mall business along Mannheim Road, and will often drop around $400, said operator Juventina Mesa, adding gambling now makes up the bulk of her receipts.A new state report says Mesa’s customers are far from unusual. It shows that Illinoisans lost a whopping $4 billion in total last year on legal gambling. And the big winner? Video gambling, whose revenues have grown by more than 75 percent in just the last three years.
Even with video gambling prohibited in the city of Chicago, there are now about 11,000 individual gaming machines in the metropolitan area — the equivalent of adding more than nine full-size casinos, according to the “Wagering in Illinois” report released last month by the state’s Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability. That’s only six years after the first legal pokers machines were rolled out in Illinois.
The driving force behind overall gambling revenues hitting an all-time record high last year in Illinois, video gambling terminals have sprouted up at bars, truck stops, doughnut shops, pizzerias and in storefront chains devoted expressly to the poker and slot machines.
“Oh my God, it’s so crazy down here,” said Mark Dixon, professor of behavior analysis and therapy at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale who treats people with gambling problems. “Instead of free alcohol (as at casinos), you get free doughnuts. I lived in Nevada, but this is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. You take establishments that don’t even fit a gambling culture, and now they have little baby casinos. And the people playing are definitely ones who can’t afford to lose.”And video gambling’s contributions to state tax coffers has offset what the report called “relatively stagnant performances” by the lottery, horseracing and river gambling.
Gambling revenue from the state’s riverboat casinos, in fact, has fallen more than 15 percent since video gaming machines were introduced in 2012, the report said, even with the state’s most lucrative gambling palace — Rivers Casino in Des Plaines — having opened just in 2011.
And while a trip to the casino is, for many players, more of an event, some video gamblers said they prefer something that’s more low-key and convenient.