Gambling in the United States is growing exponentially, and I expect it to continue to grow over the next few decades. USA gambling is already a huge industry, but that doesn’t mean it won’t grow further. According to the American Gaming Association, United States gambling has an annual economic impact of $261 billion, generates $41 billion in tax revenue each year, and supports 1.8 million jobs. 44 states now have some type of legal casino gambling now, too.
Gambling isn’t popular with everyone in the United States, though. Mental health professionals, for example, worry about compulsive gambling. Law enforcement sees higher crime rates in cities with casinos.
Types of Gambling in the United States
You can find all kinds of opinions on the internet about how to categorize gambling activities. For example, this website breaks gambling games into 14 different categories. What’s most interesting about that post is the analysis of HOW to categorize these games.
But when discussing gambling specific to a country, it might be best to consider the legal implications of such categories.
In the United States, different gambling activities and venues are handled legally in different ways. For example, commercial casinos are regulated differently from tribal casinos. Cardrooms are regulated differently from sportsbooks. And bingo halls don’t follow the same laws as state lotteries.
To add to this confusion, laws in the United States are changing rapidly. Until 2018, sports betting was illegal throughout the United States (with the exception of Nevada). But that year, the Supreme Court struck down PASPA, which made it the states’ responsibility to decide whether sports betting was legal. Prior to that, the federal government had banned sports betting. Since then, sports betting in the United States has become an economic powerhouse.
If you were to ask me to describe the legality of gambling in the United States, I’d say that it’s legal, but there are all kinds of legal restrictions in place throughout the country. Many of these are inconsistent because different states have different laws on their books related to gambling.
Commercial Casinos in the United States
For me, the most interesting type of gambling in the United States is the type that goes on in commercial casinos. When people use the term “commercial casino” in the USA, they’re talking about casinos run by corporations, public or private, that aren’t operating on tribal lands. Commercial casinos are only present in about half of the 50 United States; the other states with casinos only have tribal casinos.
Since 2005. the number of commercial casinos operating in the United States seems to remain consistently between 450 and 500 properties. The other casinos operating in the United States are tribal casinos.
Tribal Casinos in the United States
Tribal casinos are often managed by the same private and public companies which operate commercial casinos, but they’re located on land owned by Indian tribes. 29 states have Indian casinos, and there are about as many tribal casinos in the United States as there are commercial casinos.
Such casinos operate under a different set of legal regulations. Indian tribes govern the goings-on at their lands, but they also work in conjunction with state and federal governments via treaties called compacts. This is why you can find certain types of gambling in commercial casinos that might not also be available at Indian casinos.
A few years ago, for example, you couldn’t play blackjack at a casino in Oklahoma. And even now that you can, the casinos charge a 50-cent fee every time you play a hand. The casinos claim that this is a state charge, but it’s more complicated than that.
Also, some devices aren’t allowed to be used to generate results. For example, in some states, you can play craps, but you can’t use dice to determine the outcome. Instead, the outcomes are often determined by a deck of cards.
Conclusion
One of my goals with this site is to cover gambling issues related to specific countries throughout the world. You can expect this post to be expanded into a more detailed guide at some point in the future. You can also look forward to other posts about specific countries, too — I’m working on a post about Australia right now, and that’s a fascinating example. It turns out that people in Australia LOVE to gamble at casinos and play slot machines, only they call them pokies.
Asian countries love gambling, too. You might not even have heard of it, but a country named Macau has a bigger gambling scene than Las Vegas even.