Editor's note: Este artículo está traducido al español.
When Light & Wonder acquired Grover Gaming’s charitable gaming assets last year, the Las Vegas gaming giant wasn’t chasing jackpots — it was chasing bingo halls.
It’s a quieter corner of the industry, one built on community fundraisers rather than casino floors. The staples are familiar: bingo, raffles and paper pull tabs, those little perforated tickets that for decades have funded everything from youth sports leagues to food pantries.
But the space is changing.
Electronic pull tabs — the digital, more dynamic evolution of their paper predecessors — are giving charities a low-cost, low-maintenance way to modernize revenue without overhauling their entire operation.
“The charities themselves, they obviously use every single one of these lanes to be able to build revenue, to really provide different aspects of their mission-driven purposes to their communities,” said Brian Brown, Light & Wonder’s CEO of Charitable Gaming, who oversaw Grover Gaming’s business units before the acquisition.
The latest frontier: Indiana, one of the newest states to legalize electronic pull tabs and the sixth state where the company now operates.
For Brown, it’s a sign of where things are headed. “We see this as an opportunity of continued growth,” he said. “We see the need for charities to desire the modernization across all jurisdictions. And, of course, we want to help facilitate that wherever we can, and grow alongside of any of that expansion that takes place in a meaningful way, in a controlled way.”
The landscape is anything but uniform.
Gregory Gemignani, an attorney at Dickinson Wright and a lecturer at UNLV’s International Center for Gaming Regulation, describes charitable gaming as fundamentally state-sanctioned—a system designed specifically to benefit the organizations doing the fundraising. But where one state draws the lines, another may draw them very differently.
Nevada, for instance, requires that net proceeds from charitable gaming stay within the state. Most states also cap what promoters can earn and how much gaming can actually take place. For a company looking to expand nationally, that patchwork of rules is simply part of the terrain.
“Because, historically, if you don’t put limits on it, what you end up finding is somebody that runs a casino in a semi, where they pull up and they’ll just move from church to church to church each week,” Gemignani said. “We have a business that’s running all the time and just finding different charities.”
Brown calls it “gaming with a purpose” — and the mission is a specific one. Grover Gaming’s partners aren’t casinos or resorts. They’re Moose and Elks lodges, Veterans of Foreign Wars posts and similar community organizations trying to keep their doors open and their programs running.
That sense of mission, Brown believes, is part of what kept the team intact through the transition. All approximately 120 charitable gaming staff from Grover Gaming stayed on after the acquisition.
“It showed they believe in the mission,” he said. “They believed that Light & Wonder was going to continue to help us get to a place that we could really grow what we were doing, and really lean in on the mission that we get to support with our charities.”
What the acquisition brought, Brown said, was an influx of research and development resources, for both hardware and content, that Grover Gaming simply didn’t have on its own. The goal now is to channel that into better technology, better games and, ultimately, better outcomes for the charities depending on them.
Grover Gaming provides the games at no cost to the charities, deploying a free gaming device inside the charitable location so they immediately can start earning revenue to support their mission.
As charities consider how to modernize their offerings and grow revenue to maintain their missions, they are going to their state legislators and advocating for the benefit of charitable gaming — particularly electronic pull tabs, Brown said.
“It’s highly regulated,” he said. “So it’s a great opportunity for states to feel incredibly comfortable about the product that’s going into these charitable locations, that it’s a great environment, it’s a great gaming experience and it’s a great way for these clubs to make meaningful revenue.”
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