Politicians, experts try to keep up with gambling’s meteoric rise in Wyoming

On Tuesday afternoon, 13 horses started their run at a racetrack outside Valparaiso, Chile, hooves pounding the dirt on what in that hemisphere was a 52-degree winter day. 

Some 5,500 miles to the north, a WyoFile reporter making his first bet on a horse race sat within the cool interior of a former diner in Laramie, watching the horses run on television. He hit on a $10 bet on a horse named Viene Puelche, named after a warm Chilean wind. After collecting from the teller, he walked into the heat of the Wyoming summer $6 richer. 

In the grand sums of money changing hands in Wyoming’s horse-race betting industry, the paltry bet was a snowflake in a blizzard. 

In 2024, the total “handle,” or sum of bets placed in the state’s burgeoning horse-based gambling industry, was more than $2.1 billion, according to a report compiled by the Wyoming Legislative Service Office. Each Wyoming adult would have had to bet more than $4,500 that year, if the gambling load was distributed equally and not swelled by tourists. 

And it’s a figure that has ballooned over the last decade. In 2013, the first year machine gambling based on horse races was legalized, the industry’s total handle was just $8.3 million. 

That growth has come with a proliferation of gaming facilities, like the converted diner in Laramie, in most Wyoming towns. And it’s increasingly drawn the attention of state legislators, who after years of letting the industry largely grow under its own momentum, this month decided to draft legislation that would increase its tax burden and strengthen regulatory authority for local government officials, who say they’ve been handicapped in controlling the growth of gambling within city limits. 

Local elected officials around the state are fielding growing complaints from their constituents, Dr. Mark Rinne, the president of Cheyenne’s city council, told WyoFile. His city, in particular, has seen heavy growth of gambling facilities, but Rinne said the Legislature left the city council little ability to weigh in on where they can and can’t be established. 

“We’re the ones getting the grief, but we had no input in the decision,” Rinne said, adding that his constituents have asked, “‘Don’t we have enough of these?’” 

Also lurking beneath the industry’s growth is an uncertain impact on the financial well-being of people and communities. Over two legislative committee meetings this past month, testimony from gaming industry regulators and questions from lawmakers made clear the state does not have a clear grasp on whether problem gambling was sharply on the rise, alongside the proliferation of gaming machines. There was some evidence to believe that it remains low, officials from the gaming commission said.

The state has a program that allows people to ban themselves from online sports betting, or horse-based betting, if they feel they’re out of control. Since that program began in 2021, 20 Wyomingites have exercised that option, Sara Beth Lyon, the Wyoming Gaming Commission’s responsible gaming liaison, told WyoFile. 

But, she said, it’s clear that doesn’t really capture the problem. “It’s not the best metric,” Lyons said, but “it is what we have right now.” The Wyoming Responsible Gambling Commission, which receives funding from the Wyoming Lottery, is launching a study this summer to both try and assess whether gambling addictions are on the rise, and study the best ways for Wyoming to treat them.

Another, albeit anecdotal, marker comes from Adelaide Wilson in Buffalo, the head of the Wyoming chapter of the National Council on Problem Gambling. The group is a nonprofit that receives some funding from the industry — mainly through sports betting giant Fanduel — but otherwise seeks money from donors and government programs.

She didn’t have data on how many calls to her office, or Wyoming’s other self-help lines for mental health and addiction issues writ large, have increased, she said. But based on Wilson’s voicemail inbox, it feels like problem gambling in Wyoming is on the rise, she said. 

In the last few days, someone had called to say he’d confessed his damaging gambling habits to his wife and was now looking for help, Wilson told WyoFile on Friday. Another person called to say they’d learned their spouse had lost $40,000 betting over a recent weekend — it wasn’t clear on what — and they didn’t know what to do.

“Those calls are increasing,” she said. “The reality is where there is gambling, there is going to be a problem at some point.” 

Wilson’s group stays neutral on whether gambling should be legal, she said. National studies suggest the majority of people play without developing a problem, and also attribute more problem gambling to the proliferation of online sports betting than machine gaming. 

But one frightening statistic for Wyoming, which has grappled for years with a high suicide rate, is the link between gambling addiction and people taking their lives. Around 7% to 30% of people in treatment for gambling addictions have made suicide attempts, according to the National Institute of Health. “Suicidality … appears to increase alongside the severity of gambling related problems,” the NIH website reads. 

Industry officials say they’re committed to combating gambling addiction in the state. The biggest existing program for raising awareness of resources for problem gamblers, for example, is likely one funded by the Wyoming Lottery, through a portion of its unclaimed prize money.

Live races and slot machines that aren’t 

What’s driving betting’s rocket-like growth trend in Wyoming isn’t live horse races in Chile, or those at three tracks in Wyoming that draw in, alongside gamblers, equine enthusiasts and citizens looking for a fun weekend activity. 

It’s the gambling machines that support those races. 

On Tuesday, the handful of before-noon gamblers inside the converted diner weren’t watching the television screens. Instead, they were seated in front of the glowing, pleasantly chiming screens of what look distinctly like modern-day Las Vegas slot machines. But under Wyoming law, it’s not quite a slot machine. It is, instead, a terminal for placing a bet on a historic horse race.  

That distinction can be difficult to make out. Put money into the machine, press the button, and a reel of images rotates until they align into a winning combination. Just like a slot machine. The result, however, is not random. Instead, it’s dictated by the results of a real horse race run sometime in the past. Gamblers can handicap the games based on anonymized stats about the horses and jockeys, according to industry officials. 

On some machines, however, the handicapping option is more complicated than on others. On a machine in Laramie reviewed by a WyoFile reporter, for example, the player had to toggle between screens and evaluate those stats to pick winners for 10 races. He had to do so before a two-minute timer ran out. Far simpler to just hit the button and spin the wheel.  

Of the roughly $2.1 billion handle in 2024, only $6.6 million was bet on live horse races, whether at Wyoming’s tracks or on the races broadcast from tracks around the world, according to the Wyoming Gaming Commission’s annual report. The rest of the money circulated in the 2,939 historic horse racing machines located in 45 off-track betting facilities around the state. As the numbers imply, some of those gambling locations hold large numbers of machines, and inside they look like a small casino floor. Larger facilities can look like a casino from the outside, too, at least according to photographs on the website for the big Horse Palace Swan Ranch facility, near the Colorado border in Laramie County.

“The historic horse racing industry props up and allows live horse racing to exist,” University of Wyoming economics professor Alex Sprecht told WyoFile. “It’s helped bring horse breeders, trainers and others in the industry to Wyoming who may not have come otherwise.”  

In 2018, two Wyoming horse racing companies commissioned an economic impact study that suggested the industry had brought 454 jobs — both direct employment and through economic ripple effects — to the Equality State. 

For decades, there have been three tracks in Wyoming, near Evanston, Rock Springs and Gillette. But for a long time before historic horse racing was legal, those tracks were somewhat listless. There were no races run in 2010, and just four days of racing in both 2011 and 2012, according to the LSO’s memo. With revenues from the gaming machines, race operators have invested in the facilities, increased the prize purses and revved the sport into a much higher gear. 

This summer, the state will see 54 days of live racing, if all go off as scheduled. Energy Downs in Gillette runs races on weekends from mid-May through the end of June. When that track wraps up, Wyoming Downs outside Evanston takes over, running races into mid-August. Sweetwater Downs, outside Rock Springs, then holds races until the end of September. 

Wyoming will soon host a fourth race track. A much-hyped new facility outside Cheyenne, Thunder Plains, is nearing completion. 

The Legislature legalized historic horse racing with the intention of propping up the state’s horse-breeding and racing industry. That’s been successful. The question lawmakers are grappling with now, as local officials begin to raise concerns about machine gambling facilities proliferating rapidly and widely, is how far they should let the industry go. 

“Horse racing is getting better and better, purses are going up, dollars are going up, everything is going up,” Sen. Mike Gierau, a Jackson Democrat, said at the Legislature’s Capital Financing Committee on June 12. “But what also is happening is we’re getting machines everywhere in our communities.”

That committee voted to draft bills that would double the tax on companies collecting online sports bets from Wyomingites, from 10% to 20%. Wyoming’s tax is lower than that of many states today. Separately, the committee also voted to draft a bill to add another 1% tax to the total handle of historic and live horse racing — that $2.1 billion figure. Today, the state collects 1.5% of that handle — while operators are also required to pay another 0.4% into a fund to boost the state’s racehorse breeders. 

Most of that tax goes to local governments, with the money remaining over a certain amount directed into the state’s savings accounts. In 2024, the state pocketed more than $5.2 million. Cities and towns received nearly $10 million and counties a little more than $11 million. 

Lawmakers on the committee voted to raise the state’s tax rate to 2.5%. A representative for one of the companies behind horse-based gambling’s rise in Wyoming spoke against the measure in the committee, and the industry’s resistance is likely to grow.

Though Wyoming’s Legislature is famously tax-adverse, and perhaps more so now than at any moment in recent memory, increasing taxes on gambling companies could generate interesting discussion, the economist Sprecht said. Many gamblers are likely visitors to the state, he said, though it’s not clear how many. And plenty of Wyomingites aren’t gambling. 

“The tax isn’t going to impact a large portion of Wyoming taxpayers, which is going to make it more politically attractive than a property or sales tax,” Sprecht said. Wyoming lawmakers are doing what state politicians do from time to time, he said — which is to allow an industry to grow with low regulatory and tax burdens, but then squeeze it for revenue once companies have established themselves and made investments. 

“I think the state of Wyoming has been quite generous to the players in this space,” the finance committee’s Senate chairwoman, Cheyenne Republican Tara Nethercott, said before the votes to introduce tax increases. 

Lawmakers on the Select Committee on Capital Finance and Investments discussed earmarking funds from increased taxes on gambling for highway maintenance, as well as substance abuse and mental health treatment — including gambling addiction. 

Who is gambling, and at what cost to themselves?

Because it’s the state’s largest city, or because of its proximity to the Colorado front range, Cheyenne is emerging as a hotbed of gambling’s growth in Wyoming. The capital city’s coffers have benefited from that activity — Cheyenne collected $1.8 million in revenue from historic horse racing in 2023, and Laramie County collected $2.36 million. That year, the county saw around $416 million in betting on historic horse racing, according to a study by the Wyoming Institute of Population Health, a public health division of Cheyenne Regional Medical Center. 

The study sought to get a sense of whether that revenue was coming at a cost to people’s lives and well-being.

The public health study found that gambling is widespread in Laramie County — around 43% of survey respondents said they participate in the growing gaming industry. Researchers did not survey the extent to which problematic gambling was growing or not in Laramie County alongside the number of historic horse racing machines. Instead, they applied national studies on the prevalence of gambling to the county’s population. 

That data suggests around 12% of gamblers are problem gamblers to some degree. The problems are most prevalent among young adults ages 18-29, and online betting is proving more problematic than in-person gambling on machines. 

In Laramie County, such gambling venues were “disproportionately concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods,” the study found. That appears consistent with the socioeconomic realities of problem gambling, the problem-gambling council’s Wilson said. 

Those who can least afford to lose are often those most enraptured by the possibility of winning, she said. For people on the financial edge already, it appears that “if they get that big win, it will solve their problems,” she said. 

Correction: This story has been updated to note that it is the Wyoming Responsible Gambling Commission launching a study this summer to assess gambling addictions in the state. -Ed.