With the 2026 session of the General Assembly convening in January, we anticipate a bill being presented to legalize iGaming, a bill that could have a severe negative impact on Southwest Virginia and its residents.
What is iGaming? Simply put, it is a casino on your smartphone or laptop that offers the same games as a bricks and mortar casino including slots, blackjack, roulette, craps and all the rest.
Online gambling or iGaming is highly addictive. Problem gaming disorders have skyrocketed in the seven states where it has been legalized. Having a casino available on your smartphone 24/7 makes casino gambling way too accessible and creates a situation where you can wipe out your entire bank account and max out your credit cards in just minutes, without ever leaving your house.
And talking about never leaving your house, how does iGaming affect Virginia’s land-based casinos? The first thing to know is that Del. Marcus Simon’s failed iGaming bill from 2025, the same bill we expect to be proposed this year, states that only our five existing land-based casinos would be authorized to operate these iGaming platforms. Each casino could have up to three licenses. Industry lobbyists will try to convince you iGaming will complement their affiliated casinos and increase business at their bricks and mortar facilities, but that is just not true. Data from numerous sources shows that after players find out they can play the same games on their phones or laptop and not have to travel to the casino, foot traffic decreases between 15 and 25%.
One of the biggest arguments in favor when casino gambling was approved in 2020 was the promise that it would create jobs. If we take the middle ground and see a 20% decrease in visitors to the Bristol casino, it would mean a corresponding 20% decrease in the number of employees needed to service their customers. That would mean fewer slot attendants, cleaning persons, security personnel, dealers, table game supervisors, hotel staff, housekeepers, valets, restaurant waitstaff, bartenders and so on and so forth would be needed. In comparison, these iGaming sites are able to be managed by less than a handful of people. IGaming is a job killer, not a job creator.
Local businesses would suffer also, places like gas stations, restaurants and local suppliers of goods and services to the casino. In addition, there would be no incentive to expand land-based casinos or build new businesses around them if people are instead gambling at home.
As it stands today, each casino is mandated by law to contribute a portion of their profits to the locality where they are located. Delegate Simon’s bill appropriates all the tax revenue from iGaming directly to the state, meaning that the communities where the casinos are located would be left out of the equation and take a substantial hit. This would be most egregious in regard to Bristol, who has an agreement to divide their local tax revenue with 12 surrounding counties and two cities in Southwest Virginia that would all suffer a decrease in revenue. Portsmouth, Danville, Norfolk, and Petersburg would all take hits also.
Lastly, the giant elephant in the room is how the lobbying group that represents the iGaming industry, the Sports Betting Alliance, has donated an obscene amount of money to our legislators to buy political influence, so far to the tune of $2.8 million in 2025 alone. This begs the question if iGaming is such a good thing for Virginia, why the need to contribute upwards of $3 million to our legislators to convince them to see things their way. That alone illustrates how much the iGaming industry stands to make in profit at the expense of our fellow Virginians and the cities where our casinos are located.
So far, Rivers casino in Portsmouth and the owners of the now-under-construction Live Casino & Hotel in Petersburg have both publicly announced their opposition to iGaming and the detrimental effects it would have on the communities where they are located. Let’s hope the owners of the Hard Rock Bristol, Caesars casino in Danville, and the future Norfolk casino follow suit and put the welfare of the people in their respective communities above the temptation to increase their profits at the expense of the citizens who live there.
Tad Berman is a founder of Virginians for Integrity in Horse Racing and Casino Gambling and was an appointed liason to the Joint Subcommittee to Study the Feasibility of Establishing the Virginia Gaming Commission. He lives in Richmond.
