South Carolina Had More Than 30,000 Video Poker Machines. On July 1, 2000, They Went Dark.
In 1986 a budget amendment deleted two words from a state law. By 1999 South Carolina had one of the largest machine gambling industries outside Nevada. A year later it was illegal to own one.
In 1986 a South Carolina budget bill picked up a small amendment that deleted two words, "or property," from an obscure law about coin-operated machines. It passed without debate. Nobody announced that it had legalized paying cash jackpots on video games, and by Slate's later account the state did not realize what had happened until 1989.
By 1999 South Carolina had more than 30,000 video poker machines, in truck stops, convenience stores and purpose-built parlors along the highways, and one of the largest machine gambling businesses anywhere outside Nevada. On July 1, 2000, all of it became illegal, including simply owning a machine.
That reversal is still the most useful thing to understand about gambling in South Carolina, because the state never really stopped reacting to it.
An industry that grew around its own limits
The legislature did try to rein it in before banning it. In 1993 it capped what a machine could pay a player at $125 a day.
Operators found the obvious workaround. A player who hit a large jackpot was paid $125, and then another $125 the next day, and the next, for as long as it took. The cap stayed on the books. The jackpots stayed in the parlors.
By the late 1990s the industry was estimated at around $3 billion a year and had become a political force. When Governor David Beasley pushed to ban the machines, video poker money went into the 1998 election against him. By Slate's count at the time, the industry spent at least $3 million to defeat him and supplied most of his challenger's campaign money. Beasley lost.
The referendum that was never held
The ban came anyway, in 1999, as Act 125. The legislature wrote it with an escape hatch: voters would get a referendum, and if they chose to keep video poker the machines could stay.
The industry challenged the act in court, and it won the argument it made and lost everything else. In October 1999 the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that the referendum was unconstitutional, because the General Assembly cannot hand its lawmaking power to voters that way. But the court found that part of the act severable. The referendum was struck, and the ban it was supposed to decide on was left standing, with its July 1, 2000 date intact.
So the machines went dark on schedule, and tens of thousands of them were hauled away and destroyed. A multibillion-dollar business closed overnight on a date set about a year in advance.
Where the standard advice is wrong
The ban is usually told as a morality story, a conservative state rejecting gambling. That version does not survive the facts of what happened next. In November 2000, four months after the machines were switched off, South Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment for a state lottery with 54% of the vote. It started selling tickets in January 2002.
A state that had rejected gambling does not vote for a lottery four months later. What South Carolina rejected was an industry that ignored its payout limits, spent millions to remove a governor, and grew from a two-word budget amendment nobody had debated. That is a narrower and more durable objection, and it explains why proposals since have struggled even when they look modest. In 2025 a bill for a casino along Interstate 95 near Santee drew new Republican support and still did not pass. In 2026 that measure and a separate online sports betting bill both stalled in committee, facing a governor, Henry McMaster, who has opposed gambling expansion throughout his time in office.
People who lived through the parlor years are still voting.
Where South Carolina players go now
The nearest casino for most of the state is run by a tribe from South Carolina, just over the line in North Carolina. The Catawba Nation's 1993 land settlement allowed it only bingo halls in South Carolina, so the tribe built its casino in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. Catawba Two Kings Casino opened the first phase of its permanent building in May 2026, with 1,350 slot machines and 22 table games, and a second phase is under construction.
From Greenville it is about 69 miles in a straight line, and from Columbia about 102. For the Upstate, Harrah's Cherokee is about the same distance, 68 miles. Our North Carolina casino list covers both, and casinos near Columbia has the distances from the capital.
The coast has it worst. From Charleston, Two Kings is still the nearest land casino in our data, at about 203 miles.
Topics
- south-carolina
- video-poker
- gambling-law
- legality
- history