In a ruling that should surprise absolutely zero people on the planet Earth, the California Supreme Court ruled last Thursday that the “sweepstakes” games offered by many storefront shops are illegal.
For some reason, there had been a question about these sweepstakes gambling parlors, as if there was some technicality that made them legal. It seems silly that it had to take a Supreme Court ruling to settle the matter, but it did. The games are setup in a store, usually in some cheap strip shopping center, and are typically setup to look like video slots and other games of chance. Customers come in, play for a chance to win money, and that’s that. Pretty clearly gambling. Specifically, these are forms of slot machines, which are illegal in the state. The way they were structured, though, left the slot machine definition slightly open to interpretation.
The stores partially get around (or try to get around) the strict definition of gambling by not having customers directly pay for the games, but rather by selling them something else. In most cases, the stores sell internet time or phone minutes. As a bonus reward for buying the internet time or phone minutes, customers receive points that can be used for entries in the “sweepstakes” machines. The machines are designed to look like video slots and the like that one might see in a casino, but the results are pre-determined and the animations and “game” on the screen are just for show. Before the customer plays, all the sweepstakes draws are decided by a computer and put in order. When a customer uses an entry, he just gets the next draw in line. The fancy-looking animations aren’t even necessary – a customer can just ask a clerk for the results. It’s like entering a sweepstakes where you win if you pick a face card from the top of a deck of cards. The deck has already been shuffled and arranged; whatever card is on the top of the deck is yours, regardless of whether you just turn it over, as someone else to read it to you, or David Blaine makes it materialize in a beer bottle.
Of course, it is all gambling. Barely anybody is actually using the internet time or phone minutes (time spent playing the sweepstakes doesn’t even count against someone’s internet time) – they just patronize the parlors for the gambling. Hell, who even buys internet time by the hour or phone cards anymore, anyway? This isn’t 1999.
The parlor owners argued that they weren’t actually operating slot machines because the winning entries were pre-determined based on a computer program. The spinning wheels on the screens were meaningless, resulting in the combination that had already been decided before the “spin.”
The Supreme Court decided it was all bullshit, though, and upheld an earlier ruling by the Court of Appeal. Amazingly, according to the American Gaming Association, these sorts of shops operate in a dozen states and bring in more than $10 billion per year.
