According to this Marketwatch article, Illinois is gearing up to broaden its gambling appeal, and looking toward the money losing slot machine players to plug a whole in its budget.

Under the measure, bars, restaurants that serve liquor, social clubs and truck stops can have up to five machines. The state gets 30% of the take, which some estimates put at $300 million a year once in place. The Illinois Gaming Board has about two months to come up with regulations.


Meanwhile, across the world, Russia has taken a different approach, outlawing gambling completely, except for in special zones which do not yet exist.

Russia’s casinos are getting the boot, but the specially designated zones where they are to move are not ready. Casino owners say they are ready to leave the country, while millions of Russians lament the savings they lost in cheap casinos and slot machines. Will the new law help?

In the days of the USSR, the authorities strictly forbade any games of chance: even the word “chance” was excluded from the Soviet dictionary.

The first gambling establishments appeared after the collapse of the Soviet system. The casinos became a kind of symbol of a new era, when money could be conjured out of the air and just as easily lost at the roulette wheel. The number of gambling es-tablishments in the country grew steadily, from about 800 in the mid-1990s to more than 60,000 by the beginning of the new century.

At the same time, respectable casinos with luxurious rooms and high stakes were in the minority. For the most part it was about gaming machines, which started appearing in just about every baker’s shop. Any pensioner or schoolchild could easily try their luck.

No one even suspected the existence of “gambling addic-tion”. According to Vladimir, founder of the Moscow Gamblers Anonymous society, neither he nor those close to him could imagine that he was seriously ill.

“I would lose my money, then other people’s money; I borrowed money from banks and lost that too. It got to the point where I’d gambled away all the furniture from my flat. One day, I was so ‘drunk’ on gambling, I carried the fridge out of the flat, sold it to the first taxi driver who came along, and within 15 minutes I’d put all the money into a slot machine. My friends and family couldn’t understand why I couldn’t stop gambling.”

According to Russia’s Ministry of Health, in Moscow alone approximately 300,000 people suffer from gambling addiction. Gamblers Anonymous puts the overall number of gambling addicts in Russia at about three million.

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