Pace-O-Matic Confident Court Ruling Re Skill Games Won’t Be Overturned

As cries about an unlevel playing field between PA online casinos, retail casinos and skill games continue, Pace-O-Matic remains unshaken in the belief that its games will never be classified as gambling.

In an interview with Allied News, Michael Barley, Pace-O-Matic’s chief public affairs officer, stated that the company had never lost a court case in Pennsylvania or anywhere “on the legality of our game and it being determined a skill game”. Pace-O-Matic is the leading distributor of skill game terminals across the Keystone State

Council on Compulsive Gambling: They’re Betting Devices

The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania had already ruled in November that Pace-O-Matic’s terminals are skill games, not slot machines. However, the company has been facing considerable backlash from operators, some of which want to see the games taxed in the same manner as slots.

And they’re not alone. Within the same Allied News feature, Josh Ercole, executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania, disagrees, goes as far to call the games “betting devices”. He described the terminals as being “so similar to what we see on the gaming floor in casinos across the state, with slot machines and that type of game”, adding that the decision that they shouldn’t be constituted as gambling simply because they include an element of skill is “dangerous”.

Pace-O-Matic has consistently focused on the fact that the games require a level of skill, with Barley saying that the results of the game are based on “how people play”. Drawing a comparison to the RNG process of casino games, he added that the terminals contain no   “compensating algorithm involved in determining a win or a loss, as there is with programmed slot machines”.