This story is a collaboration between Capitol News Illinois and Illinois Answers Project.
Editor’s note: Some individuals in this story are identified only by first name and last initial at their request to allow them to speak openly about their addiction without fear of reprisal for actions taken when gambling.
CHICAGO — When Reeve L. was growing up, his babysitters were the horse tracks in Arlington Heights, Maywood and Stickney, where he’d watch his father bet for hours.
When his father won, life was good — or at least tolerable. But when his father lost, he’d beat Reeve and his mother, her so badly she’d be afraid to show up to work with her bruises. In his father’s life, gambling came first, family a distant second.
Reeve saw how gambling could ruin a man and his family, and it was the last life he wanted to lead.
And yet, after Illinois legalized sports gambling in 2019, Reeve saw a gambling promotion scroll across the bottom of a televised Cubs-Reds game offering a free $5 bet for new customers. A modest bet on the Cubs, his favorite team, cracked open the dam for Reeve, sending his life spiraling into the rapids of uncontrolled gambling for five years.
That first bet, placed with a few taps on his phone, led him to blow through about $450,000 in savings and $150,000 in loans. He drained the nest egg that he and his husband saved to buy a house. Along the way he alienated about two dozen friends and would have lost his husband had he not joined a local Gamblers Anonymous group, Reeve said.
If the state had stronger gambling guardrails in place, Reeve said, he may have never found himself falling headfirst into his father’s addiction.
“There’s a responsibility of the state to protect the people,” Reeve said. “I think there has to be a responsibility of the state to know how many lives are being destroyed, and not even that person, but the lives around them, the divorce rates, the people not going out and spending money at restaurants or anything that now is going to sports gambling. It’s a billion dollar industry — that money is being taken away from somewhere in Illinois.”
Gov. JB Pritzker expanded casinos and sports gambling in his first year in office and has encouraged people to gamble in Illinois casinos, building on more than three decades of elected officials dealing a favorable hand to gambling operators. Chicago, the last major holdout against slot machines, recently lifted its ban, setting the stage for possibly thousands of new machines to flood bars and restaurants.
The state raked in more than $2.6 billion in gambling tax revenues last year to help balance its budget, but that’s just a slice of the more than $7.7 billion that people in Illinois lost last year gambling at casinos, playing on regulated slot machines, betting on sports and buying lottery tickets. Of those losses, more than $4.1 billion went to sportsbooks, slot machines and casino operators.
The state dedicates less than 0.1% of the revenues generated by gambling back to treating the addiction it causes; for every $100 the state collected from gambling last year, it devoted less than $0.06 to treatment. Nationally, problem gamblers have one of the highest rates of suicide; the National Council on ProblemGambling estimates one in five have tried to take their own life.
The state last assessed problem gambling during the pandemic when sports gambling had yet to be fully implemented, estimating 383,000 Illinois adults to have a gambling problem, and another 761,000 as being at risk of developing one, though some clinicians consider the estimates an undercount. Pritzker’s Department of Human Services plans to publish a second assessment in 2027 and plans to do so every five years.
The governor’s office defended its handling of the issue, citing an overall increase in spending on the problem during his time in office.
“The Pritzker administration has made clear that gambling should be responsibly regulated with strong consumer protections and investments in treatment and prevention services,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement.
But the amount devoted to actual treatment has averaged around $1.5 million annually since 2020, even as the number of ways people can gamble has exploded. And gambling operators have only increased their tech savvy in luring people in and keeping them hooked, as the state appears to struggle with implementing high-tech help for problem gamblers.
“We are being thrown into the deep end of the pool, and we don’t know how to swim,” said Alyssa Wilson, a Fresno State University associate professor who studies gambling. “The technology moves faster than governments can keep up with trying to regulate it.”
For providers, the state’s small allocation for treatment means they run out of money to treat patients and the money does not cover the cost of care. There are only 58 certified gambling counselors in the state, few south of Chicago, and state efforts to certify more have faltered.
Gamblers have to sign up in person, sometimes hours from home, often in a casino. Indiana, along with a few other states, offers online enrollment and has exceeded Illinois’ self-exclusion numbers in recent years.
Riverboats, buses and beyond
There was a time when most forms of gambling in Illinois were relegated to the state lottery, horse racing, private card games and the neighborhood bookie.
That started to change when then-Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson legalized riverboat casinos, with the first leaving port in 1991, opening the doors to land-based casinos in the decades to follow. Casino gambling expanded to 17 licensed casinos that have generated nearly $13 billion in tax revenue for the state since opening their doors. Setting the amounts gamblers won versus lost, players are down almost $48 billion in that period.
The Gaming Board is also in the process of building out new technology for its self-exclusion program, which allows people to add their names to a list that blocks access to sportsbooks and casinos under the threat of a ticket for trespassing.
Nearly 16,000 people have enrolled on the list since 2002, but experts have called into question its efficacy as a prevention tool in its current form.
In practice, the list does not always prevent gamblers from placing bets, or even from collecting small wins, rather placing responsibility solely on the individual to abstain. Since the program began, state records show more than $3.2 million has been confiscated from people on the list and donated to two state nonprofits devoted to treating problem gambling. Illinois has a separate self-exclusion list for the lottery, which is run by the state, and crucially, neither of the two lists covers the state’s thousands of non-casino slot machines, which have made the most money of any non-lottery gambling enterprise in Illinois since 2019.
To enroll on the list, gamblers have to visit one of 32 sites in person, more than half of which are staffed by Gaming Board employees in casinos. The system is such that the nearest location is often a casino, akin to holding an intervention for an alcoholic in the drinker’s regular liquor store.
“People are embarrassed to go there. They’ve been going to that casino for six years, and the front people know their names,” said Mary D., a former casino gambler who has been in recovery for the last 15 years.
There are nearly 50,000 slot machines at almost 9,000 locations all across the state. Gov. Pat Quinn signed the law that allowed them outside of casinos in 2009. Quinn said in an interview that the slot machines were necessary to fund a capital bill to bring Illinois back from the Great Recession. “We came to the Rubicon, and that’s what governors do — you got to do hard things,” said Quinn, who said he did not regret his decision. The state’s network is now the largest of its kind in the world, according to the Illinois Gaming Board. Tucked away in the corners of gas stations and hotels, bars and restaurants, golf clubhouses and gambling cafes, these slot machines brought in nearly $3.3 billion in wagers in the month of March alone. To date, Chicago has been the largest holdout, with unregulated slot machines filling the void. But the promise of the buffet of slot machine money is enticing, and Chicago is grappling with the process of rolling out what will possibly be several thousand slot machines in locations citywide. While the City Council passed a budget last year approving slot machines, Mayor Brandon Johnson opposes the measure and continues to work against it. “Adding thousands of gambling machines to bars and restaurants across the city could worsen the devastating impacts of gambling addiction, particularly in vulnerable communities, while also increasing public safety concerns, including burglaries targeting cash-based machines,” Johnson’s spokesperson said. Outside of Chicago, most of the high-performing machines are concentrated in the more densely populated Cook County and collar counties. Illinois’ second-largest city, Aurora, which has less than a tenth of Chicago’s population, opted into slot machines and saw enough success that they raised the cap from five to six machines per establishment. People played more than $168 million on 174 machines in Aurora last year alone. The machines averaged about $968,000 in wagers per machine, about $2,650 per day. From those bets, gamblers lost nearly $16 million. Downstate, in Metropolis, the mythical home of Superman near the Kentucky border, there’s a 24-hour gas station that brings in gamblers around the clock. “The last thing our industry wants is to be fueling a problem and we know it is a problem, and we know we are some portion of that problem,” said Ivan Fernandez, the executive director of the Illinois Gaming Machine Operators Association. “We want to be part of the conversation as to the solution of any problem we are a part of. But we are not there yet.” Michelle Malkin, director of the Gambling Research and Policy Initiative at East Carolina University, where she teaches criminal justice and criminology, said self-exclusion can be a useful roadblock, but that it is ineffective without broader investment in education, prevention and treatment. “You’re saying that the person with a gambling addiction also needs to be responsible for whether they gamble, but their brain has been impacted by their gambling addiction,” Malkin said. Over half of sports bets, it found, were made by the less than 2% of Connecticut residents identified as compulsive gamblers. Online sports gambling allows people in Illinois to bet on sports at all hours of the day, on multiple applications, on a variety of sports — from Venezuelan men’s basketball to Bangladeshi women’s cricket. As bets have become more precise, an almost endless frontier of new opportunities — and temptations — has opened up. Allowing occasional wins at unpredictable times is part of what makes gambling addictive, according to gambling researchers, along with their ability to buzz users with push notifications and drop extra cash in their accounts to encourage betting right then and there. “Online companies are using sophisticated behavioral and psychological strategies to maximize engagement and spending,” Brent Van Ham, a counselor who specializes in addiction, said at a recent gambling conference. “They actually hire behavioral experts to help design these programs.” In response to requests for comment on this story, a spokesperson for Pritzker cited the growth in gambling treatment and prevention funding over the governor’s tenure as a “1,400% increase” from $1 million to $15 million. But at the same time, people’s losses have nearly doubled, from $4.1 billion to $7.8 billion, and the contracts awarded have fallen short of what lawmakers allocated, with $10.8 million spent last fiscal year on treatment, training, outreach, and a public awareness campaign that features billboards and advertisements for the state’s addiction hotline. A $4 million marketing campaign designed to get gamblers to call the 1-800-GAMBLER hotline resulted in about 3,200 treatment referrals, although the monthly referral numbers have stayed relatively flat. Spending on substance abuse dwarfs spending on gambling addiction, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling. Nationally, there are about 40.3 million people with a substance use disorder and $31.8 billion spent on treatment, compared to 5.7 million problem gamblers and $94 million spent on treatment, according to its study. That is, per person spending on substance use disorders was 46 times higher, around $789 per person, than per person spending on gambling addiction, around $17 per person. Even with the state spending $4 million on advertising about gambling resources, the message hasn’t totally broken through, according to Anita Pindiur, whose organization Way Back Inn oversees the campaign and treats problem gamblers. “People don’t know about it,” she said. “They want to seek treatment. And then when they seek treatment, it has to be available to them.” Jim Wilkerson, who directs the state’s gambling addiction treatment efforts, told an audience of counselors at a recent gambling addiction conference in southern Illinois that those seeking funds need simply ask. “We have funding available for you to treat individuals that have a gambling disorder, and it’s available now,” said Wilkerson. “You just need to give me a holler.” The governor has not signed the bill yet, and his office declined to indicate whether he planned to, saying it was “under review.” With the governor’s signature, the state could fund in-patient treatment from the money it sets aside for gambling treatment. Further complicating funding options is that gambling addiction is not recognized by the federal government and is not eligible for Medicaid payments; it’s harder for poor people to receive treatment, and there’s fewer incentives for gambling treatment centers to open independently, or for counselors to specialize in treating gambling addiction. Right now, there are only 58 counselors in Illinois certified in problem and compulsive gambling, and they’re scarce in Chicago’s Black, Latino, and Asian neighborhoods and areas outside Chicagoland. “They’re just few and far between,” said Elizabeth Thielen, senior director at Nicasa Behavioral Health Services, who has the certification. “So you’ve got a lot of people, in my opinion, practicing outside of the scope of their knowledge.” Thielen said she’d seen clients who felt discouraged after seeking treatment from counselors who advertised gambling competency without understanding basic prevention tools, including an app that blocks gambling on phones, the self-exclusion list and financial counseling. “There’s got to be a lot of people who gave up,” Thielen said. “And that’s not okay.” For counselors, the bar to entry remains high, including expensive test registration and biennial renewal fees and requirements for clinical experience that far exceed those of the international standards on which the state certification board’s are based. Gambling certified counselors praise the training but said it makes little financial sense for professionals in their field since few people seek care and most have difficulty getting reimbursed. The Illinois Council on Problem Gambling provides free access to the 30 training hours required for certification and will cover the cost of the test and certification, but has only covered the expenses five or six times in three years because of the lack of interest and incentives, according to Executive Director Dave Wohl. “Why should you jump through these hoops when there’s no carrot at the end?” Wohl said. COVER IMAGE: A man spends the last three dollars in his pocket playing a bar slot machine in downstate Golconda on June 4, and then leaves. (Credit: Julia Rendleman for Capitol News Illinois)
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