FOCUS: GAMBLING
Moxie Mania is in town — but is it legal?
Deciding the fate of the bar video game is up to state’s liquor authority
Moxie Mania is here. The blinking, beeping video gaming machines have been installed in hundreds of bars in the Buffalo area over the last couple of months.
The makers of Moxie call it the “ultimate game of skill.”
Critics, though, deride the game devices as slot machines in disguise.
“It is . . . my view that the game, as I understand it to operate, represents an activity involving gambling, and not skill, and as such is prohibited,” wrote Sen. Frank Padavan, a Queens Republican, in a June letter to Daniel B. Boyle, head of the State Liquor Authority.
The SLA board is getting ready to decide whether the devices are, in fact, gambling machines. If they are, they would be considered illegal and would have to be pulled out.
For now, the machines are still legal, and bar patrons across the region continue to try their luck at the game.
The devices do, in fact, look an awful lot like slot machines.
They also pay out, sometimes in the hundreds of dollars for the most adept — or is it luckiest? — players.
But you don’t just put money in, push a button and hope for a jackpot.
Moxie Mania requires players to play what amounts to a lightning-paced and complicated version of tictac- toe.
Users can wager from a quarter to $2 per game, but the machines take $20, $50 and even $100 bills.
Winnings are printed out on tickets that are redeemed at the bar. Bar owners are then reimbursed by Georgia-based Pace-O-Matic.
Pace-O-Matic rents space from the bars to install the machines; bar owners don’t make any money off the games themselves.
Earlier this year, Thomas J. Donohue, the State Liquor Authority’s counsel, issued an opinion saying that Moxie Mania is a game of skill in which chance doesn’t play a role in the outcome.
But Padavan, a Queens Republican and the State Legislature’s most vocal gambling critic, disagreed with the opinion and demanded the SLA’s board issue a formal position on whether the game can legally be played in the 27,000 bars, restaurants and nightclubs across the state that are licensed by the agency.
He called for a full review and ruling by the agency and not just an opinion from the agency’s lawyer based on a demonstration by the company marketing the game.
The board was supposed to take up the issue earlier this month but punted on the matter. Meanwhile Pace-O-Matic is acting as if the devices have passed legal muster.
The company opened its New York office in Buffalo earlier this year and has installed 300 machines in the Buffalo area and another 200 in other upstate areas.
It also hired , for $5,000 a month, a lobbying firm run by former U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato.
One of the lobbying firm’s partners, former Erie County Executive Joel A. Giambra, attended the SLA meeting earlier this month in Manhattan and even used some muscle to help set up a demonstration of the game at the board meeting.
Payoffs in the pennies
So far, the game is being met with a mixed response in Western New York.
Among its most proficient users is Mark DuMond, a retired mechanic from North Buffalo, who won more than $350 Thursday night playing Moxie Mania at one of the two machines at MT Pockets on Hertel Avenue.
But even with his big win, DuMond said he thinks the machines spell trouble — and the state should ban them from bars.
“The game is addictive, at least it is for me,” said DuMond, who has been playing Moxie Mania at least several nights a week at taverns along Hertel since the machines were installed a couple of months ago.
“The sounds are addictive,” he said of the game. “It’s like being in a casino.”
DuMond said he is pretty sure he is breaking even overall. But, he added, “I don’t count what I put in.”
DuMond agreed that the game does require a level of skill — skill that diminishes the more drinks you have.
“If you’re bombed, you ain’t gonna follow it,” he said.
Glenda Pichette, a Tonawanda bookkeeper, said she tried the game a couple of times — and lost money.
She was surprised that the devices are legal. She said she had never heard of the distinction between games of skill versus those of chance.
“I wondered how they were able to do it,” she said.
Bill Bateman, a sheet metal fabricator, called the game “a bigger rip-off than scratch-off [lottery tickets].”
Bateman said he has paid $15 or $20 to win a few cents at the most.
“It’s embarrassing to have to take the ticket up to the bar and ask for 13 cents,” he said, pointing out that most people just throw away their tickets.
At Devlin’s Deuce on Sheridan Drive in the Town of Tonawanda, several patrons said they have given Moxie Mania a whirl — and decided it was a waste of time and money.
“It robs you no matter how fast you are,” complained Dan Priester, a construction worker from the Town of Tonawanda. “You spend $30 and get 21 cents back.”
He scoffed at the idea that the game isn’t considered gambling.
“Of course it’s gambling,” he said.
“It’s just a money taker,” said Fred Germain, a corrections officer. “I’d rather go to the casino.”
‘A bad precedent’
SLA chairman Boyle, a former top police official in several upstate cities, openly worries that a “bad precedent” is being set for the board by being asked to decide if the machines are illegal gambling devices.
“We do liquor licenses,” Boyle said, “We don’t do licenses when it comes to gambling.”
He said he wants Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo to weigh in on the matter. The board’s other members want more time to study the issue, and set Nov. 20 for a possible final decision.
A similar version of Moxie Mania was banned last year in Ohio, where that state’s attorney general’s office estimated that Pace-O-Matic was bringing in an estimated $10,000 per machine.
In New York, the machines appear to be in direct competition with the state-run Quick Draw, dubbed “Crack Draw” by gambling treatment counselors because of its addictiveness. Quick Draw, an electronic keno- like game, is in thousands of bars and restaurants across the state. It collected $444 million for the state last year.
John Charlson, a lottery spokesman, said the agency is aware of the pending SLA action about Moxie Mania. Asked if the agency is concerned about a loss of business to Moxie Mania, he declined to comment.
But Pace-O-Matic executives insist they are barely making money with the machines they have in New York. Pace told the SLA that the machines in New York are seeing only about $44 a week in earnings.
“I really don’t understand why there’s a problem because it certainly doesn’t compete with gambling interests,” said Michael Pace, founder and president of the company.
mbecker@buffnews.com and tprecious@buffnews.com
