Ban on Video Poker
September 23, 2009
Naperville City Council has decided to ban video poker. The state has
made video poker legal, but has left it up to the individual counties and
cities to decide whether or not they want to bring it in. Obviously they are
hoping for a large number of cities to allow poker to come in because it
will make for much more revenue for the various infrastructure projects that
they have going on.
However so far the state has discovered that there are many more counties
looking to ban video poker then there are looking to bring it in. One of the
biggest problems is that the counties are not going to be getting enough
revenue from the poker sources. If the state had been looking to offer them
more for that “hassle” then the counties may have viewed it differently.
Naperville has decided that the amount of money that would come in from the
video poker games would probably not be enough to pay for the additional
police that they would have to hire do to machines. They are only the latest
county to ban video poker, as DuPage County, Rosemont County, and Elburn
have all already banned it.
After checking with their residents, out of 226 respondents more than 89%
said that they oppose the addition of poker into the county. They said that
it was not the proper solution to the state’s money woes, and in fact it
would actually bring in more hassle than it was worth. The state says that
so little of the revenue would come into the counties because of the large
programs that need to be funded.
