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Illinois wants to stop chasing people the moment they walk away from its self-exclusion list.
The Illinois Gaming Board voted unanimously Sept. 3 to advance a package of three rule changes, and the one getting attention is a marketing exclusion list, as Legal Sports Report first reported.
Under it, anyone who completes Illinois’ self-exclusion program stays off casino and sportsbook marketing lists for a minimum of 12 months after they exit. They can still gamble. They can still accept a promotion if they seek one out. What they won’t get anymore is a text, an email or a mailer trying to pull them back in.
No other state has put that specific restriction into its rules. Regulators in Illinois are borrowing the idea from responsible gambling programs already running in the United Kingdom and Australia.
Illinois expands its self-exclusion program
The marketing list is one piece of a larger rewrite. Illinois currently offers exactly one way to self-exclude: an in-person sign-up at one of 32 sites around the state that takes 30 to 45 minutes and requires a photo ID. Sixteen of those 32 sites are casinos. Only five sit outside the Chicago area.
The board wants to add:
- A notarized-mail option
- A referral pathway through treatment providers
- An online portal, pending further legislative review
It’s also proposing shorter exclusion terms, six months, one year or three years, alongside the five-year-or-longer term that is currently the only option on the books.
Marcus Fruchter, the board’s administrator, said the friction built into the current system is part of the problem.
“Research shows that shame, embarrassment, stigma and procedural friction at the point of entry are among the barriers most consistently reported by persons who considered but did not complete self-exclusion enrollment,” Fruchter said.
Alyssa Wilson, an associate professor at Fresno State University who studies gambling behavior, was more blunt about the five-year floor specifically. Cutting it, she said, is where “Illinois could really do a lot.”
The numbers behind Illinois’ responsible gambling push
Nearly 16,000 people are currently enrolled in Illinois’ self-exclusion program. That’s against an estimated 383,000 adults in the state with a gambling problem and another 761,000 considered at risk. Statewide gambling losses have more than tripled since 2002, from $2.5 billion to $7.8 billion last year. Of every $100 Illinois collects in gambling tax revenue, less than 6 cents goes to addiction treatment.
Here’s the gap the new rules don’t touch. Illinois has more than 50,000 video gaming terminals sitting in bars, restaurants and truck stops statewide, and none of them currently check a player’s ID against the self-exclusion list.
LNW Gaming, the state’s video gaming terminal operator, is working under a $162 million, 10-year contract that sets a Dec. 31, 2027, deadline to install ID readers at 9,000 of those locations, with financial penalties built in for missing it. That’s the machine category driving most of the state’s gambling losses, and it’s not on the same timeline as anything the board approved this week.
None of this is final yet. The three proposals now head to the General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules for public comment, a review the board itself expects to take six months to a year, starting from this week’s vote. That puts final adoption somewhere between March and September of 2027, at the earliest.
Illinois wants to be first in the country on this. It’ll be a while before it’s first in its own bars.
