Follow the Money: Who’s Really Driving Pennsylvania’s Push to Kill Skill Games
Every fight in Harrisburg has a story on the surface and a money trail underneath. The skill games fight is no different. On the surface, the push for a punishing 52 percent tax is dressed up as consumer protection and fair policy. Underneath, follow the money, and you arrive somewhere far less noble: the bottom line of Pennsylvania’s biggest casino companies.
Start with what the casinos have actually done. A dozen of them went to court arguing that the taxes they pay on slot machines are unconstitutional as long as skill games operate under different rules. Their preferred outcomes were telling: either force skill games into the same crushing tax bracket they pay, or use the disparity to lower their own bill. Either way, the goal was never a healthier marketplace. It was removing or hobbling a competitor.
That competitive motive got said out loud recently. The CEO of Parx Casino published an op-ed tying skill games to crime and compulsive gambling and demanding they follow casino rules. The response from the skill games industry cut straight to the point: “I’m not surprised to hear Parx Casino has zero interest or concern for the future of small businesses, veterans groups, or volunteer fire companies.” When a casino giant suddenly discovers deep concern for the public welfare, it is worth asking who benefits if its argument wins. The answer is the casino.
Here is the part the casino lobby would rather you not examine: the claim that skill games are bleeding the casinos dry does not hold up. Pennsylvania’s casino industry reported roughly $6.8 billion in revenue in 2025, continued growth, not collapse. Independent analysis of the industry’s own data finds that skill games and casinos serve two different customers. As one industry public affairs official put it, “players who go to a bar to play skill games and those who travel to a casino to gamble are looking for two very different experiences.” To the extent brick-and-mortar casinos are seeing any softness, the culprit is the explosion of online gambling, a competitor the casinos themselves helped create, not a few terminals in a corner store.
So why the relentless campaign against skill games? Because a 52 percent tax does something a lawsuit could not. It does not regulate skill games. It eliminates them. Set the rate high enough and the small venues that host them (the taverns, the fire halls, the family stores) pull the machines out because the economics no longer work. The casinos don’t need to win the argument that skill games are harmful. They just need the tax rate high enough to clear the field. Crushing taxation isn’t a side effect of the casino position. It is the entire point.
This is what makes the “fairness” framing so slippery. Taxing a corner store’s two machines at the same rate as a casino’s thousands is not fairness. It is a rule written by the large to crush the small, then sold to the public as good government.
There is an honest alternative on the table, and it is worth contrasting. A bipartisan proposal would charge a flat $500-per-month fee per machine, cap the number of terminals statewide, fund enforcement and public programs, and let the small operators survive. It raises real revenue. It imposes real oversight. What it does not do is hand the casino lobby the outcome it has spent millions chasing: a Pennsylvania where the only legal place to play is a building the casino owns.
The Supreme Court has decided that skill games will be regulated. Good. But “regulated” and “extinguished” are not the same word, and the difference between them is being written right now in a tax rate. When lawmakers pick that number, they should be clear-eyed about who is whispering in their ear, and whose balance sheet improves if Main Street’s machines go dark.
Follow the money. It doesn’t lead to a VFW canteen.
