I’m not too up to speed on the UK’s gambling laws, but from what I’ve seen it looks as if it’s a free for all. Anyone can put a slot machine anywhere, casinois can open up on any corner, etc, Putting aside small potatoes like lotteries and charitable bingo and what have you, I imagine at least half, or not more, of the US population lives in a place where going to a casino is at least an afternoon’s drive.
As noted upthread. 
Every city, town and many villages in the UK have betting shops. These are licensed premises, often a unit in a row of shops and often in the poorer part.
Betting shops are primarily for the public (no membership required) to place bets on horse races. Originally, that’s all they did, and they were very limited in what they could do (no slot machines, for example) and had no furniture – very depressing, I recall. Over the years they have added slots, TVs showing current races, and you can place bets on just about anything the owner can make a book on. Football is very popular, I believe.
I have a friend that is a commercial diver. For a few years (back in the 90’s) he worked for a company that removed the silt that built up underneath the riverboat casinos that never moved. Apparantly the “boats” were floating in the river and the silt would naturally build up under them from the river currents (or lack of current) and eventually the boat would no longer be floating. State inspectors required the casinos to remove that silt regularly to ensure that the boats were actually being boats.
Since there’s no shortage of “riverboat” casinos in or with a half hour’s drive of St. Louis, it’s not uncommon for casino chips to wind up in the collection baskets of Catholic churches in and around town. Since it would be time-consuming and possibly unseemly for each parish priest to go from casino to casino, redeeming chips, each priest just records which chips he got this week, from which casino, and then sends them off to a nearby monastery. There, each week a low-level friar sorts the chips, takes them casino to casino and redeems them, and then has his superiors distrubute the money as necessary.
His job title? The Chip Monk.
It’s the fact that as I understand it, it’s because the tribes are considered sovereign in some sense, and the applicable Federal laws allow for casino gambling.
And states apparently can’t refuse to allow it, and are required to negotiate a sort of agreement to regulate it, and can retain some percentage of the profits. And IIRC the Feds require the tribes to allocate some sizeable portion of the proceeds to the tribe itself, not just to enriching individual members.
From your or my point of view, your right. But according to 1988’s Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, tribal casinos don’t pay state taxes.
On the contrary, the stereotype of the casino gambler has always been grandma feeding slot machines with her Social Security payments.
- Montana is loaded with crummy little casinos, mostly video machines but some have sports betting and even live card games on occasion. I’m almost positive these aren’t all tribal-owned and they most definitely aren’t all on Reservations.
- I grew up in Nebraska. I remember in the 80s, maybe early 90s that a riverboat casino was about to start operating out of Council Bluffs, in the Missouri River across from Omaha. Some people were in a tizzy because they’d measured, I guess, and determined that at certain points when the riverboat turned around, parts of it would cross the border into Nebraska where gambling was not legal. I don’t remember how or if this was ever resolved.
Anyway
It depends, but mostly Vegas is the place where the “glamour” casinos are. And they have prices to match, like table games that start at $25 or more per hand and tight drink specials. Expensive fine dining.
But off the Strip you can find seedy, and places in between that are “value” (as in the house always wins in the long run, but get your drink comps going). Reno has more of the value-fancy, expensive spas and restaurants but also more casual fare. Every small town of some size has a casino that smells of cigarettes and you can find old men on COPD oxygen tanks smoking while playing penny slots. But that doesn’t make them inherently seedy, it’s just an element. Plus places including chains like Dotty’s that specialize in mostly slots and non-table games. Outside of NV, places like Atlantic City have a seedy reputation but I can’t comment on 2026. Some California tribal casinos try to invest in musical venues to make it a destination.
And games like poker attract a high-roller and/or poor impulse control crowd compared to penny slots.
tldr: there are all kinds, but few who want to attract only rich clientele. Either that or the drunk redneck in the middle of NV is a miner making $250,000 a year and blowing off steam on his day off, so he’s rich by objective measures but drinking a Coors.
Not quite the same thing but, I kinda don’t see the point of operating a riverboat casino when your state also allows land-based commercial casinos (like Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana and a couple others on that list above somewhere).
Because if you’re a for-profit casino operator, and you want to operate in a state which only allows land-based casinos to be owned by tribes, then a riverboat is your only choice if you want to put a casino in that state.
It may also be a matter of location; the riverboat casinos may not be near any of the land-based tribal casinos, and the riverboats would still have a semi-captive local audience.
It the casino companies weren’t able to turn a profit with a riverboat in that state, they either (a) wouldn’t build one there at all, or (b) would pretty quickly shut down the operation.
But on that list of various states and types of casinos you mentioned 4 or 5 states (Indiana being one) that allowed both commercial land-based casinos and riverboat casinos. I was saying why do a riverboat when commercial land-based is legal too?
Because land casinos were authorized later, and you’ve already got a perfectly good casino that used to be a boat, and it’s on the shores of a largish body of water, which by the non-coincidence of urban geography is also where a large city is.
I would suspect that they first allowed riverboats, and then later allowed land-based commercial casinos. They likely never made the riverboats illegal, and some companies that originally opened riverboat casinos kept them open, as they were making money, and were a sunk cost at that point.
Illinois is that way (and I think that Indiana is, too); we still have a few riverboat casinos in the state, but I don’t think anyone has opened a new one since they legalized land-based commercial casinos.
Makes sense.
So long as we’re on the topic of casinos, and I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, what’s the deal with Texas and Indian casinos, or, rather, lack thereof?
I know that Texas is kind of weird when it comes to Native American sovereignty issues (and I think there was even a “King of the Hill” episode that touched on this), which is why no Indian casinos operate in the state. But does anyone here know the details of why that is?
This is apparently not entirely true. There are, it looks like, three tribal casinos in Texas, though it appears that they are limited in what sorts of games they are allowed to offer (mostly electronic gambling, and not most table games).
The issue is that Texas law prohibits casinos, but does allow bingo and some other gaming; the tribal “casinos” in the state offer types of gambling which are legal, broadly, in the state.
While looking into things, I learned that Hawaii and Utah are the only states that don’t allow any forms of gambling.
It looks like the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which established the legal framework for tribal gambling requires that the tribe and the state have a contract which is approved by the Department of the Interior. The LDS dominated legislature will never a contract allowing gambling.
Although a few steamboats have operated on the Great Salt Lake, both that lake and Hell will have to freeze over before gambling is permitted.
It is (or was) only on rivers (such as the Mississippi) that run between states, and so the river is technically not in either state that it separates, and the river is extremely wide. At the end of the river in New Orleans, the river would be in Louisiana and subject to that state’s laws, but north of there, it mostly runs between states instead of in them.
My understanding, and granted it has been decades since I thought about such things
Navigable rivers themselves, are not considered state territory, due to interstate commerce considerations.
Why casinos are allowed there and not other federal areas, I do not know