State to pursue gambling device inspections

Local governments are unsure of guidelines for legality.

STAFF/WIRE REPORTS

COLUMBUS — The thousands of gambling machines cropping up across the state will be inspected to determine whether they are legal, the attorney general announced Wednesday.

The number of gambling games have swelled, including in the Mahoning Valley, because local governments are unsure of the guidelines that determine if the machines require skill and are therefore legal, or if they are illegal and reliant upon chance, Attorney General Marc Dann said.

These so-called skill game venues have tried their luck in Youngstown, Warren, Cortland, Salem, Brookfield, Hubbard, Lordstown, Leetonia, Austintown and Boardman, according to Vindicator files. Niles in 2006 took the position that it would not allow such machines.

“This explosion has occurred because there’s no clear standard as to what constitutes a game of skill that belongs at Cedar Point or Chuck E. Cheese’s or a game of chance that belongs in Las Vegas or one of the states that allows gambling,” Dann said at a news conference Wednesday.

The attorney general’s office plans to hire an independent expert to determine whether a game meets a legal threshold by being at least 51 percent skill based. The inspection cost will be paid by the games’ manufacturers.

Crackdown

The announcement came amid a state crackdown on illegal gambling machines called Tic Tac Fruit, a game in which a player inserts money into the console, bets on the game’s outcome, then uses a tic-tac-toe grid to try to align pieces of fruit in a row.

In November, Ohioans voted down a ballot issue that would have legalized slot machines at seven locations statewide.