Pennsylvania’s Mad Skills

Rodger Morrow

Editor & Publisher, Beaver County Business

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Pennsylvania has developed a tremendous interest in skills. Not plumbing, welding, or carpentry, unfortunately. The skill in question involves sitting in front of a machine in a convenience store and persuading yourself that the money disappearing into it is a form of self-improvement.

I would welcome a statewide passion for plumbing. When water starts coming through the kitchen ceiling, nobody says, “Get me somebody who can remember twenty-five colored dots.” You want a person with a wrench who knows which pipe is to blame, preferably before the dining room becomes waterfront property.

What we have instead are “skill games,” cash-paying video terminals parked in taverns, clubs, gas stations, pizza shops, and laundromats. The attorney general’s office puts the number at roughly 70,000. That is a considerable investment in blinking.

The machines look like slot machines, take bets like slot machines, and pay cash like slot machines. Their defenders insist they are something else entirely. Almost anything becomes respectable once somebody finds a sufficiently complicated explanation for it.

The explanation, in this case, is memory.

On the machine the courts examined, an optional feature called “Follow Me” asks the player to repeat a lengthening sequence of colored lights through twenty-five rounds. Get it all right and you receive 105 percent of your bet. On four dollars, that comes to four dollars and twenty cents. This strikes me as modest pay for remembering a good deal more than I can manage between the kitchen and the spare bedroom.

Under the old legal test, a game in which skill predominated was not a gambling device per se. The base game might let you down, but the memory exercise stood ready to redeem you. It was a slot machine with homework.

In June the state Supreme Court ruled that the homework no longer saves the machines. A 2017 law had expressly written skill and hybrid slot machines into the statutory definition. The court insisted that the Legislature’s words meant something, which is an occasionally startling development in public life.

Beaver County helped get this business rolling. In 2013, in an arranged test case, a machine was seized at the American Italian Club in Aliquippa. The next year Judge Harry Knafelc found that skill predominated. A town known for making steel helped establish the legal credentials of a machine that makes twenty cents available to anyone with an exceptional memory. We used to have a different idea of skilled production along that stretch of the Ohio.

The court gave everyone 120 days. Starting October 14, unlicensed businesses that still have the machines risk seizure and prosecution. Unplugging them won’t do. A slot machine, it turns out, does not become furniture just because its lights go out.

The Legislature can change the law. Tavern owners and veterans’ posts say the money helps pay their bills. Keeping a neighborhood gathering place open is useful work, especially when the alternative is one more building with paper over the windows.

Still, needing the revenue does not settle what these machines are. The club’s electric bill is real. So is the customer’s grocery bill. A dollar does not buy more because it travels from one to the other under an uplifting name.

What bothers me most is the borrowing of the word “skill.”

Skill is welding a joint that will hold when something heavy is hanging from it. It is reading a roofline, fitting a cabinet, finding a leak, and fixing the repair somebody botched last Saturday. It takes practice, judgment, and a willingness to learn that the material does not care how confident you are.

A carpenter cannot argue a crooked staircase into being straight. Plumbing has an especially unforgiving appeals process. The water rules immediately, and it does not grant a 120-day stay.

After an afternoon of carpentry, a room may have shelves. After an afternoon at a skill machine, it still needs shelves.

For years we have steered children toward work in which the hands stay clean and the explanations grow elaborate. Then the furnace quits in February, and the whole household starts praying for somebody whose education included getting dirty. For one brief, glorious hour, the fellow who shows up with the tools is the most important person in western Pennsylvania.

Perhaps Harrisburg will eventually produce a workable system of licenses, taxes, and protections. Legislators have their own memory game: remembering what they meant when they passed the last law.

In the meantime, I have a suggestion. Put a workbench where the blinking machine stood. Teach people to sweat copper pipe, cut a proper joint, and lay down a sound weld bead.

The prize would be something Pennsylvania can actually use. And when the roof leaks, somebody in the room might know what to do.