Across Va., Bingo Calls Big Spenders to Pony Up

'Legalized Gambling' Feeds Community Groups' Budgets and Fanatics' Habits

PHOTOS
Bingo!
While politicians argue over morals and road money, one form of legal gambling has been steadily expanding in the Old Dominion, little by little, one fire house and moose lodge at a time.

Virginia has long been considered something of a wasteland for the wagering public. It has zero casinos and no slot machines. A recent push to bring video horse racing to the state failed, despite lawmakers' desperation for new sources of transportation funding.

But while the politicians argue over morals and road money, one form of legal gambling has been steadily expanding in the Old Dominion anyway, little by little, one firehouse and Moose lodge at a time: bingo.

Not the cardboard-and-chips kind played in grade school and summer camp, but one on which state residents spent $318 million on last year, nearly twice the amount spent on horseracing. All across Virginia, fire departments, fraternal organizations and community groups have gradually built bingo nights into quasi-casino affairs, where players can wager hundreds of dollars on touch-screen terminals and instant-bingo "pull-tab" cards.

No one -- not the firemen nor the bingo industry nor state regulators -- pretend anymore that bingo games aren't gambling. But in Virginia and many other states where most betting games are banned, an odd symbiosis has evolved to entwine the fortunes of certain critical public services and community groups with the wagering habits of the betting faithful.

The Annandale Volunteer Fire Department, for instance, makes $400,000 a year from its twice-weekly bingo operation, which accounts for more than 70 percent of its annual budget. It's a formula repeated across Virginia, where fire and rescue departments garnered $55 million from bingo last year.

"At the end of the day, this is legalized gambling," said volunteer fireman Raju Khemani, a Wachovia executive who runs the Annandale game. "But if we didn't have this, we wouldn't be able to support our two stations."

The Mount Vernon Knights of Columbus scored the biggest bingo jackpot in Northern Virginia last year, taking in $2.1 million.

Richmond pockets a small share of the action: charitable-gaming operators pay a 1.125 percent administrative fee on their receipts, which added up to about $3 million. Fire and rescue departments are exempt.

Large amounts are also spent on bingo in Maryland, which leaves regulation to local authorities and allows commercial bingo operations, some of which are famous for running shuttle buses through the District to scoop up loyal customers.

Almost all of bingo's growth in Virginia, where gross receipts have risen 27 percent in the past eight years, comes from a spike in the popularity of pull-tab cards, according to the Virginia Department of Charitable Gaming. While paper bingo receipts have remained constant, revenue from pull-tab cards increased 68 percent during that period, from $92 million in 1999 to $155 million in 2006.

A pull-tab card resembles an Advent calendar -- with little paper doors hiding combinations of numbers and symbols worth $5, $50 or, most often, zilch. With few exceptions, they can only be sold by licensed operators on bingo nights, and players buy stacks of the $1 ticket-size cards, chasing payouts of $600 and more. Some players call them "paper slot machines," and in practice they differ little from scratch-off lottery tickets, although the odds are typically more favorable than the gas station variety.

Last Thursday at the Annandale firehouse, Gail Jones, a 45-year-old Alexandria resident, was playing 21 cards at a time, inking them up and down with an arsenal of bright, carrot-size squeezable markers known as "daubers."