Gaming Today at 50: What a Half-Century of Gambling Journalism Says About the US Market Evolution
Fifty years is a long runway in any editorial category, and it is an especially long one in gambling journalism, where the regulatory landscape, the product catalogue, and the audience have all been rewritten more than once across the same span. A US gambling trade publication that has been in continuous operation since 1976 has watched the category evolve from a Nevada-only print era, through the Atlantic City expansion of the late 1970s and 1980s, through the tribal gaming build-out of the 1990s, through the offshore online-poker boom of the 2000s, through the 2018 PASPA repeal that opened sports betting to the states, and into the regulated iGaming era that has taken hold in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, West Virginia, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island across the current decade.
The arc is worth reading closely because it reveals something about how the US consumer gambling market actually changes. It does not change in a straight line. It changes in bursts, triggered by court rulings, by state legislation, by technology, and by the audience itself catching up to a product that has been sitting on the shelf in some form for years. The retrospective below traces the half-century of US gambling journalism as a proxy for the market it has covered, and it draws on the editorial record of a publication that has kept the lights on through every one of those transitions.
The reference publication for this retrospective is Gaming Today, which began in 1976 as a Nevada-focused weekly under the Sports Form masthead and has been covering the US gambling industry in continuous weekly and then daily publication since. Its 50-year archive is one of the few long-running editorial records that spans the entire modern era of US commercial gambling, from the pre-Atlantic City period through the post-PASPA sports-betting expansion and the current regulated iGaming footprint. That kind of continuity matters for a retrospective, because it lets the reader compare coverage written in the moment against coverage written with the benefit of three or four decades of hindsight.
1976 to 1978: A Nevada-Only Market and the Birth of the Print Trade Weekly
The US commercial gambling market in 1976 was, for practical purposes, Nevada and nothing else. Las Vegas ran the Strip and downtown properties that had grown out of the postwar boom, Reno and Lake Tahoe ran the northern Nevada circuits, and the rest of the country had legal pari-mutuel racing and state lotteries in a handful of states but no legal casino product. Into that environment the publication launched as Sports Form in 1976, initially as a tabloid-sized weekly distributed inside casinos, card rooms, and racetracks. The editorial scope was narrow by modern standards. It covered race handicapping, sports-handicapping columns written for Nevada bettors who could legally bet on games inside a Nevada sportsbook, and the Nevada casino operator beat. Atlantic City’s first casino, Resorts International, opened in May 1978, and the market’s second market opened with it. The weekly trade press covered that opening as a structural change, not an incremental one.
The 1980s: Atlantic City, Corporate Ownership, and the Slow Build of a National Beat
Across the 1980s the US commercial gambling market slowly stopped being a Nevada-only story. Atlantic City’s resort casinos built out through the early part of the decade, with Bally’s, Caesars, Harrah’s, and the Trump properties opening in succession, and the New Jersey Casino Control Commission established the regulatory template that other states would later borrow. Nevada itself transitioned from the private-operator era into the corporate ownership era, with Hilton, Holiday Inn, and MGM Grand expanding their Las Vegas footprints. The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, signed into law by President Reagan, created the federal framework that allowed tribal nations to operate gaming on sovereign land, and the early tribal casinos in Connecticut, California, and Minnesota opened across the late 1980s and early 1990s. The trade press of the period covered each of these shifts as they happened, and the long-running Nevada weekly broadened its beat to include Atlantic City operator news, tribal gaming expansion, and the regulatory architecture that underwrote both.
The 1990s: Foxwoods, Riverboats, and the Post-IGRA National Build-Out
The 1990s saw the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act translate into real casino rooms. Foxwoods opened in Connecticut in 1992 and quickly became the largest casino in the United States by square footage, followed by Mohegan Sun in 1996. Riverboat casinos launched in Iowa, Illinois, Mississippi, Indiana, Louisiana, and Missouri across the decade under state-specific regulatory frameworks. Detroit’s commercial casinos opened in 1999 and 2000. The Mirage’s 1989 opening had already kicked off the mega-resort era on the Las Vegas Strip, and Bellagio in 1998, Venetian in 1999, and Wynn Las Vegas in 2005 carried that template forward. The trade weekly kept pace by widening the state-by-state operator coverage and by running the race-handicapping and sports-column verticals that had been core to the publication since the beginning. The reader in 1999 could pick up the same masthead that had launched in 1976 and read an updated industry inside it.
The 2000s: Online Poker, the UIGEA, and the Offshore Era
The 2000s were shaped by a product the US trade press had to learn how to cover without endorsing: offshore online poker. The 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event, won by Chris Moneymaker who had qualified through a 40-dollar online satellite, set off a multi-year poker boom that drew the general consumer audience into the category for the first time. PartyPoker, Full Tilt, and PokerStars ran the offshore-licensed market into US players. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 cut the payment rails and pushed most public operators out of the US market, and the April 2011 Black Friday indictments ended what remained of offshore poker’s US presence for a period. The trade press reported these as the regulatory events they were, and it carried the operator news and the poker-room coverage that remained. The product catalogue visible to a US reader in 2010 was narrower than it had been in 2005, and the editorial record captured that contraction.
The video poker machines that sat beside the card rooms across the same period had their own much longer story. A concise account of how video poker evolved from the Sittman and Pitt drum machines of the 1890s through the Dale Electronics Poker-Matic of 1970 and the Si Redd SIRCOMA launch of the mid-1970s is available in the Casino Player Magazine’s brief history of video poker, and that adjacent editorial record is worth reading alongside the broader retrospective because video poker is one of the few casino products whose commercial arc predates the modern US gambling-journalism era itself. The trade press that launched in 1976 was already reporting on a product that had been maturing for more than a decade before it got there.
2012 to 2017: The First Regulated iGaming States
New Jersey, Delaware, and Nevada launched the first three regulated online gambling markets in the US across 2013, with Nevada limited to poker, Delaware operating through the state lottery, and New Jersey running a full online casino product under state-issued internet gaming licences tied to Atlantic City partners. Pennsylvania legalised iGaming in 2017 and launched in 2019. The revenue numbers during this period were modest by later standards, but the regulatory architecture built across the 2013 to 2017 window is the template that every subsequent state has adapted. The trade press covered these launches operator by operator, and the reader gained a working vocabulary for licensing, geolocation, and payment-rail mechanics that had been invisible in the offshore era. State-level revenue reports began publishing monthly and the trade press tracked them closely, and that monthly cadence is still the rhythm the sector’s editorial calendar runs on.
May 14, 2018: Murphy v. NCAA and the PASPA Repeal
The single largest structural event in US gambling journalism since the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act arrived on May 14, 2018, when a 6-to-3 federal ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association that the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 violated the anti-commandeering doctrine of the Tenth Amendment. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that PASPA’s prohibition on state authorisation of sports wagering unconstitutionally placed state legislatures under the direct control of Congress. The practical effect was to return the sports-betting question to the states. New Jersey, which had driven the litigation, opened its first retail sportsbook at Monmouth Park in June 2018. Delaware launched single-game wagering the same month. The reader who had been following the trade press through the preceding decade watched the category reshape in real time, and the archive of that coverage is one of the clearest records of how rapidly a regulated US consumer market can stand up when the federal overlay is removed.
2018 to 2026: Sports Betting Reaches 38-Plus States and the Tax-Revenue Story
The post-PASPA sports-betting expansion has been the dominant US gambling-industry story since 2018, and the scale of the shift is now visible in the public tax data. The ESPN report on the 2025 US sports betting revenue record documents that state sales-tax revenue tied to sports betting rose from 190 million dollars in the third quarter of 2021 to 917 million dollars in the second quarter of 2025, a 382 percent increase across the four-year window. More than 38 states plus the District of Columbia now authorise some form of sports wagering under state licensing, and the 2025 gross revenue across the US legal market reached roughly 17 billion dollars on a handle of approximately 167 billion dollars. The trade press has covered each state launch, each operator entry, and each quarterly revenue report across the window, and the cumulative archive is the most complete editorial record of a regulated US consumer market standing up from scratch in the modern era.
Regulated iGaming in 2026: Seven States and a Growing Template
The regulated iGaming footprint in the US as of April 2026 covers seven states: New Jersey under its Atlantic City partner-licensee framework, Pennsylvania under its 2017 iGaming statute, Michigan under its 2019 iGaming framework, West Virginia under its state lottery framework, Connecticut under the tribal compact framework with Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, Delaware through the state lottery, and Rhode Island through the Bally Bet platform that launched in March 2024. Gross iGaming revenue across those seven states reached more than 8 billion dollars in calendar year 2025, with New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan producing the majority of that total. The operator list in each state is a mix of land-based partners running their own branded online platforms and out-of-state operators that have secured state licensing through partnership with an in-state casino. The trade press tracks the monthly state revenue reports and the quarterly operator earnings, and the cumulative coverage shows a sector that has matured substantially since the first New Jersey launches in 2013.
From Print to Digital: How the Editorial Product Itself Changed
The editorial product has changed alongside the market. Gaming Today began as a print-only weekly distributed inside the casino and racetrack channel, launched a standalone website in the mid-1990s during the early commercial-internet period, moved much of its daily operator coverage online across the 2000s, and under the Catena Media ownership that acquired the title in 2021 transitioned to a digital-first model with daily news cycles, state-by-state landing pages, and operator-review coverage alongside the legacy handicapping columns. Bill Paulos, a veteran Nevada casino operator, acquired the publication again more recently and has guided it through the most recent editorial evolution. The print archive of the 1976 to 2020 period remains one of the richest long-run editorial sources on US commercial gambling, and the digital archive since carries the state-by-state expansion story the category has been running through. The reader who wants to understand how the US gambling market got to its 2026 configuration has a usable 50-year record to work through.
What the Half-Century Archive Says About the Next Few Years
Reading across the archive, a handful of patterns emerge that are worth noting as forward signals. The first is that the US commercial gambling market has expanded geographically in waves, with Nevada in the 1970s, Atlantic City in the 1980s, tribal and riverboat expansion in the 1990s, the regulated iGaming pilots in the 2010s, and the post-PASPA sports-betting wave across the current decade, and the pattern suggests further waves are likely rather than a terminal configuration. The second is that the technology has consistently led the regulation by several years, with offshore online poker preceding the UIGEA, mobile sports betting preceding Murphy v. NCAA in practice, and live-dealer and social-casino products currently running ahead of formal state frameworks in several jurisdictions. The third is that the editorial record itself has been one of the more stable elements of the sector, with a trade press that has covered each transition in close to real time and whose archive is increasingly the primary source for anyone writing a retrospective on the period. A half-century archive is a useful thing to have when the next regulatory wave arrives.
The views and opinions expressed by the writers and columnists of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Casinocenter.com do not necessarily reflect those of the magazine’s management. All content is intended solely for entertainment and informational purposes. Gambling may be illegal in some jurisdictions—it is the responsibility of each visitor to check and comply with local laws before participating in online gaming. Always read the terms and conditions, and gamble responsibly.
