“Gaming Concepts Unlimited” sounds a lot like “Gaming Concepts Poorly Thought Through”
IMO sports fantasy gambling will gut the casino industry which will die off as its patrons age out.
Unlike e.g. horse racing, there’s an endless supply of artificial, but not fake, props on which to bet.
Pssst…that was a link to an Onion article. Satire. 
Further to the subject of Missouri, if you think St. Louis’ biggest casino is “on the river” or “a boat” in any meaningful sense of the word, think again.
Similarly, the one in Columbia (OK Boonville, 12 miles west) is a boat on the river, in the sense that it is neither a boat nor is it on the river.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/8GeUTUnWayHDFSrk8
It bears noting that, in the case of both casinos, you could throw a rock and it would land in the river (if you threw it pretty hard in St. Louis). I have no idea what is happening in Kansas City or any other Missouri cities that may or may not have a “riverboat casino.”
There’s also the matter of are-they-or-aren’t-they legal slot machines in bars and head shops and some gas stations. I’m not dumb enough to put my money into one of those, but I assume they pay cash and not, say, tickets like the quasi-legal machine at the Eagles Club does, and which the patrons absolutely do not (wink wink) redeem them for cash. They went pretty much unchecked until about a week ago, when cops started cracking down on them. Why now? Couldn’t tell you.
Finally, Missouri loves those quarter-pusher machines, into which I poured quarter after quarter after quarter when I was 10, before I realized what gambling is and that the House Always Wins. Those things are basically everywhere, and at least when I was a lad playing them in the Bagnell Dam area (at the time a regional tourism destination with a “strip” with casinos, arcades, etc.), they didn’t stop kids from playing them.
That’s what I get for posting on my phone. Following links and interpreting icons is just too hard.
Thank you! I hope some folks enjoyed a laugh at my expense.
I’m from the area and remember the watery pit loophole Rivers in Des Plaines had to go through at the time they opened. This later got overturned as explained in this 2019 article:
Casinos were introduced to Illinois waterways in 1991 under a law that required gambling to take place on a moving boat. State lawmakers gradually eased restrictions over the years, allowing for Illinois’ 10 riverboat casinos to operate while docked or even permanently moored.
To sail through that loophole, architects worked a 44,000-square-foot, 6-inch-deep water pit into the foundation of Rivers Casino, allowing it to open in Des Plaines in 2011
which is what happened as a result of MO blue laws
There’s lots of nuance about gambling laws. One thing NV doesn’t have is a lottery, casinos don’t want the competition. But there are border business specializing in selling lotto tickets, often the floor plan spills over into adjacent states so you just need to go to the other side of the building to buy them. California has a lot of tribal casinos but also “card rooms” where only specific games are played. The state also thinks dice are bad(?) so even in tribal casinos the game of craps is played with cards that are only in A-2-3-4-5-6 values in lieu of dice.
Montana also has a pretty well-established gambling normalization. Design of casino games is actually a rather complex industry, and involves makign games for specific markets based on laws.
I wonder if he has to have an appropriate navigation license and training (or whatever its called).
Do they have life jackets? Prolly don’t need them of course, i just wonder if any superfluous regulations like that apply.
I’ve been on a handful of riverboat casinos in Missouri and Illinois. I think the “cruise” I went on at a Peoria casino in, oh, 1998???, actually sailed a few hundred yards down the river and back. I think. And I think I saw lifejackets. But this memory is decades old and all I really remember about that day was losing my shirt.
These days Illinois and Missouri have both done away with this legal fiction.
I believe that Iowa is the same way. When the boats were first introduced, they had to actually cruise around on the Mississippi river occasionally, but that rule was dropped some time ago. Now I doubt that they are even capable of going anywhere.
I thought it odd that the list of eighteen states your link provided omitted Connecticut and California, which both have casinos but a later sentence from that page says, “Native American tribes in various states operate their own casinos and card rooms. This includes California as well.”
Edit: googling tells me that California and Connecticut allow tribal casinos, but not commercial ones, which is why they weren’t listed in the article to which I linked.
From my point of view, I don’t see a difference between a commercial casino and a tribal one.
Fair. From the POV of state governments, they are treated differently, and that’s why the industry classifies them separately.
As a gambler or a visitor, the difference may be non-existent. From a licensing, legality, and (as @HeyHomie notes, profit) standpoint, they differ.
In the former, the proceeds go to the shareholders. In the latter, they go to the tribe.
Ideally.
Iowa, FWIW, also has land-based tribal casinos. I’ve been to the Meskwaki one in Tama. Lost my shirt there, too. Seems to be a trend…
The impression given in the USA is that it’s wealthy, or at least solvent, people who are gambling. In the UK, the concern seems to be that gambling is largely making poor people poorer.
No, gambling in the US is impoverishing people regardless of how poor they were when they started. It’s gotten worse since legalized sports betting.
Exactly this. The ads make it seem glamorous, and one sees lots of media coverage about “high rollers,” but the large majority of U.S. gamblers – regardless of which type of gambling – are lower-income, and are often gambling away money that they really can’t afford to lose.
Joliet used to have a Riverboat casino. They satisfied the law by actually leaving the dock and going out onto the water where, because of the structure of the law as it was written at the time, they could gamble. They would stay out there 3 hours, cease gambling operations, and come back to the dock where time was given for people to disembark and board as they saw fit. Then the process was repeated.