General Casino News

Chuck Chancey knew he had a gambling problem. Not a bad one, he says, but "I was just going way too often, and I was spending way too much time, and it was getting kind of out of hand."

So, to get control of it, the Orland Park business owner started going to Gamblers Anonymous meetings. He signed a form that required Illinois casinos to ban him. If he did get in and win, he agreed to have any winnings turned over to charity.

Then, one day late last month, he felt like playing poker.

So he headed across the state line to Harrah's Casino in East Chicago on Nov. 22 and settled in at the poker tables. Poker wasn't going so well, so he headed to the slots, where -- bingo -- one chance came up a $4,000 winner.

A casino employee asked for his ID before paying him. His name popped up on a list of banned gamblers because he had signed up for the Illinois Gaming Board's "self-exclusion" program.

Harrah's staff told him his winnings would go to a Downers Grove charity, the Outreach Foundation for Problem and Compulsive Gamblers.

Chancey wasn't happy.

"I thought they were kind of being jerks about it," he said. "It was my right to have that money."

He got a lawyer, William Borah of Homewood, who wrote and called Harrah's demanding Chancey's money.

Borah argued that the Illinois board had no legal force in Indiana.

It worked. With one catch.

"They responded with a letter and said, here's your money, and you will be considered a trespasser, and you will be arrested if you come on the property again," Borah said.

Harrah's lawyer Tom Thanas wouldn't talk about Chancey. But he said it's casino policy that any gambler who asks to be excluded from one Harrah's casino because of a gambling problem is excluded from all of them.

"If you've admitted to that problem, we want to make sure we don't provide patrons with an opportunity to compound that problem," Thanas said.