The number of people banning themselves from gambling activities in Pennsylvania has been surging, according to the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board.
This has been particularly true since the first online casino opened in 2019. It’s not just changing how many people are banning themselves – it’s changing who is banning themselves and where, according to a Public Source analysis of the board’s publicly available data.
Prior to the first online casinos opening, the people banning themselves largely lived in and around counties where in-person casinos operated.
But that’s no longer the case. Some of the counties with the highest problem gambling rates are a long drive from a casino.
The map uses yearly ACS population estimates for each county. The total of self-exclusions does not include out-of-state self-exclusions. (Map by Oliver Morrison and Alexander Morrison/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
For example, there was no casino located in Blair County or in any bordering county before this year. Prior to 2019, it had one of the commonwealth’s lowest rates of people banning themselves from gambling, with only six residents of Blair County having banned themselves from gambling across the previous decade.
That changed with online gambling. Last year Blair County had the state’s third-highest concentration of people banning themselves from a gambling activity, with 115 people, or just below one in every thousand residents, self-excluding in a single year.
“A lot of those people just didn’t gamble on a regular basis until the online gambling came and now they have access to it 24/7,” said Elizabeth Lanza, director of the Office of Compulsive and Problem Gambling at the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board.
She also said the rising numbers reflect that the Gaming Control Board made it easier to sign up for self-exclusions when online gambling was introduced, by allowing everyone to sign-up online, rather than having to sign up at a casino.
Matthew Mullis, a graduate student at West Virginia University’s Center for Gaming Research and Development, said Pennsylvania and West Virginia are two of only eight states in the country that have legalized online casino games – what are often referred to collectively as “iGaming.” The losses from these games, Mullis said, are greater on average than online sports gambling. That’s in part, he said, because people play more rapidly and the odds of winning are worse.
“You can spend hours just in your bed doing the slots,” Mullis said. “And it’s pretty anti-social.”
What is gambling self-exclusion and how does it work?
Pennsylvania gamblers used to have to go to a casino and ask directly to ban themselves from gambling for one year, five years or life. If they wanted to start gambling at the end of that period, they had to go back to the casino and request to be removed. But with the legalization of online gambling, Pennsylvanians can now enroll in the program online.
The program only applies to the commonwealth’s licensed gambling platforms. Prediction markets, like Kalshi, are regulated at the federal level, because they are considered financial derivatives, rather than gambling, even though many people use them similarly.
If a person who has self-excluded is caught trying to gamble in-person, casino operators will call the police and the person can be cited for trespassing and have any winnings confiscated. People are most commonly reported by staff who know them well, Lanza said.
When people ban themselves online, the technology effectively prevents them from gambling again using their own information. Some try to gamble using other people’s identities and get caught, Lanza said, so typically the people who violate their self-exclusion online are reported to the authorities for fraud. Online gamblers don’t need to ask for permission to start gambling again at the end of their exclusion period, when they are automatically removed from the exclusion list.
Self-exclusion programs have helped more than 30,000 people suffering from a gambling problem, Lanza said in a June podcast. “It is not a cure-all. It is not treatment,” she said. “We always do recommend that individuals seek some type of either self-help or more formal treatment when they enroll in self-exclusion. But it has been a very successful tool.”
Academic research conducted in other states and countries has shown that problem gamblers are less likely to gamble during their exclusion period if they are receiving formal help as well. But regardless of whether they get help, the people who use self-exclusion tools report fewer financial problems and improved quality of life. And some surveys suggest gamblers find bans more useful than therapy or group counseling.
Illegal gambling websites may limit their effectiveness: One study in Sweden found that between 38% and 49% of people who banned themselves from gambling continued to gamble.
The number of people who ban themselves is much smaller than the number of people suffering from a gambling problem, according to several studies. Research finds that anywhere from 1-in-200 to 1-in-6 people with a gambling problem enroll.
Gambling ban list gets whiter, younger, more male
The people banning themselves from gambling have come from increasingly rural places, and perhaps unsurprisingly they have also increasingly identified as caucasian.
Young adults have taken up an even larger share of the people banning themselves from gambling since online wagering was legalized. People 55 and over began to make up a much smaller share since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, though their share has started to rebound.
That doesn’t necessarily mean young people are losing the most money. In West Virginia, Mullis said that younger players bet less often than older players. The 21-to-30-year olds made up about one-third of the people with accounts at the casino he analyzed, but they placed only about 1 in 7 of the bets.
In the course of reporting this article, Public Source discovered a mistake in how the Gaming Control Board was reporting people’s ages, which, for some early years, made it look like there were no young people banning themselves and more older people doing so. The problem has since been fixed.
In the first five years casinos were legalized, men and women were banning themselves from casinos at similar rates. But by 2020 there were about five men banning themselves for every two women who did, and that ratio held even as the total number of self-exclusions spiked.
It’s not just Pennsylvanians who are banning themselves from commonwealth casinos and online platforms. Hundreds of residents in places like New Jersey, New York and Delaware have also opted into Pennsylvania’s self-exclusion system. It’s not clear how many of these are people who enter Pennsylvania to gamble on their phone or at a casino.
These out-of-state gamblers aren’t clearly identified on the Gaming Control Board’s website but Public Source discovered their existence after noticing a discrepancy between the total number of people who had banned themselves (about 53,000) and the total number of Pennsylvania residents who had (about 46,000).
Lanza said the Gaming Control Board regularly finds gamblers who are banning themselves, not just in Pennsylvania, but in all the states that they live in or near. And during big gambling days, like the Super Bowl, the board can see a live online map of gamblers from out-of-state who are stopping at one truck stop after the next, until they can access Pennsylvania’s online gaming.
How to stop the problem gambling
Lanza said self-limits, such as self-exclusions, are important because they put the responsibility in the hands of individuals. “I’m very big on giving individuals choices, not too many choices, but I think individuals need to take responsibility for their choices as well.”
Lanza said that she is paying attention to experts who are trying to grapple with the problem. One of the most promising ideas, she thinks, is to give the gambling data from casinos and online casinos to researchers who study addiction at Penn State University. “I think that that would be very helpful, to see those numbers broken down,” she said.
That’s exactly what is happening in West Virginia, which passed a law in 2024, requiring casino operators to provide data to WVU researchers, including Mullis.
Mullis has begun studying the roughly 43 million monthly bets made at one of West Virginia’s largest online casinos and his initial findings suggest a small number of gamblers, which he referred to as “whales,” are the source of the majority of the revenue. Just 5% of the roughly 16,500 people who were gambling, during the period he looked at, were the source of 70% of the bets and 90% of the revenue.
The top 1% of gamblers – about 165 gamblers at that casino – were the source of about 50% of the casino’s total revenue. This suggests problem gamblers are a large source of revenue for casinos, Mullins said, though more study will be needed.
“That’s the whole conundrum of my position,” Lanza said. “I want our operators to do the most responsible thing possible, but I also have to realize they’re still operating a business.”
Editor’s note: All self-exclusion data in this story was pulled from the Pennsylvania Gaming Commission website in October and then fact-checked on November 4, 2026. Artificial intelligence tools were used to generate code to scrape data and design the map in this story. The map was fact-checked by a human.
Oliver Morrison is the health and environment reporter at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at oliver@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Octavia Liku.
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