Prague’s City Council Approves Ban on Slot Machines and VLTs

Lawmakers in the Czech Republic have voted to okay a decree that officially bans all forms of technical gambling games in Prague. This blanket ban was given the green light last week by the city council of Prague to prohibit all electronic, mechanical, and electromechanical gambling games, which includes video lottery terminals (VLTs) and slot machines.

The decree will effectively be enforceable starting 1st January 2021, but it will honor all the licenses that currently exist, with the last ones expiring three years later in 2024. This decree however will not affect any forms of traditional live gaming which will be allowed to be conducted legally across brick-and-mortar gaming facilities across Prague’s 16 city districts where such types of gambling are allowed.

Fallout From the Blanket Ban of Technical Gaming Machines

After the shocking decree was voted in, opposition parties in Prague heavily criticized the move indicating that the city will end up losing a ton of money in gambling taxes. In 2019 for instance, Czech’s capital accrued over $34 million in taxes from all gambling verticals, wherein electronic machines that will be prohibited starting next year brought in around $17.7 million of that tax revenue. At least half of the tax money collected from gambling in the capital city is usually used to fund initiatives such as social programs, culture, education, and sports in the respective districts.

To defend the city council’s position Prague’s Councilor Hana Kordová Marvanová expressed the concerns that eventually led to the drastic measures in the capital city in the following statement;

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“In Prague, we decided to follow the path of a blanket ban on slot machines throughout the city, because we set ourselves the goal of reducing the most dangerous forms of gambling, which include playing slot machines. Statistics show that limiting the availability of gambling has a significant positive impact in the area of negative social phenomena, such as pathological gambling or non-payment.”

For a long time, gambling in Prague has been linked to different crimes including tax evasion by the gaming bars and of course the negative impact of gambling addiction especially for communities that aren’t financially stable.   

In her statement, the Prague Councilor also explained that the capital city’s districts shouldn’t be worried about the lost funding from gambling machines’ revenue. Councilor Marvanová disclosed that the city council had simultaneously approved a compensation scheme that would meet the financial needs of the crucial public activities for the districts to ensure that they do not suffer from the new gambling prohibition.

A Relentless Bid to Clamp Down on Compulsive Gambling in Prague

The latest decree is essentially a continuation of the fight that the city council has relentlessly fought to deal with an alarming gambling addiction in the capital city. It all started in 2007 when Prague’s officials approved a decree that effectively limited the locations where gambling was allowed within the city. Time limitations for gambling were also specified in the 2007 decree, and only 16 of the 57 districts in Czech’s capital chose to continue authorizing gambling from then on.

As a result, the number of officially licensed gambling venues in Prague drastically slid to 101 from an initial 1,422 casino gaming locations. Likewise, the number of gaming machines also plunged to just under 4,000 as of 31st August 2020, from nearly 16,000 a decade ago. Outside the country’s capital, most of the main cities already enforced an outright ban on technical gambling including Kyjov, Brno, České Budějovice, Ostrava, Břeclav, and Klatovy.

For the country at large, the Gambling Act of the Czech Republic was established in 2016 and the law introduced a selection of strict measures including the addition of new industry taxes and a ban on gambling ads. The veto on technical machines in Prague comes at a time when the country is readying for the unveiling of a new gambling exclusion register to offer additional protection for the most vulnerable players.