How to Stop Playing the Slot Machines in Illinois Bars: A Therapist’s Guide to Video Gaming Terminals
You stop for a drink after work.
You put $20 into one of the machines in the corner.
Twenty minutes later, the $20 is gone. You put in another $20.
Then another.
At some point, you stop playing for entertainment and start playing to get the money back.
Maybe you leave down $100. Maybe $500. Maybe you hit an ATM, tell yourself you are going to make one last withdrawal, and end up staying until the bar closes.
The next morning, you promise yourself you are done.
Then a few days later you pass another bar, gas station, gaming café, restaurant, or truck stop with the same glowing machines inside.
For people struggling with video gambling in Illinois, this cycle can be extraordinarily difficult to break.
And one reason is simple: the machines are everywhere.
The Illinois Gaming Board describes approximately 49,000 video gaming terminals in operation at approximately 9,000 licensed locations across the state — what the Board itself calls the largest distributed video gaming network of its kind in the world. Those machines took in more than $3.086 billion in net terminal income in fiscal year 2025, a 5% increase over the $2.932 billion the year before. Where that money comes from, which towns lose the most per adult, and how the totals compare with casinos and sports betting are all laid out on our Illinois video gambling data page, which is rebuilt from the Gaming Board's own monthly reports.
Unlike casino gambling, these machines are woven into ordinary daily life: neighborhood bars, restaurants, gas stations, truck stops and gaming cafés.
That accessibility changes the recovery problem.
You do not necessarily have to make a deliberate decision to drive to a casino. Gambling may be sitting three blocks from your apartment, next to the grocery store, across from work, or inside the bar where you meet friends.
If you have tried repeatedly to stop playing Illinois video gaming terminals and keep returning to them, this article is for you.
I am an addiction therapist in Chicago who works extensively with gambling problems. What follows is the approach I would use with someone who told me:
"These machines are taking over my life. I need to stop."
First: These Are Slot Machines, Even If Illinois Calls Them Video Gaming Terminals
Illinois officially calls these machines video gaming terminals, or VGTs.
Most people simply call them slots.
A licensed Illinois location can contain machines offering games that resemble traditional casino slots, video poker and similar forms of electronic gambling.
From a recovery perspective, the terminology matters much less than the behavior.
If you find yourself:
repeatedly losing more money than you intended;
staying longer than planned;
withdrawing additional cash;
chasing losses;
hiding gambling from your spouse or family;
returning to win back money;
borrowing money because of gambling;
gambling with money needed for bills;
or repeatedly promising yourself you will stop and then going back,
the question is no longer whether the machine is technically a "slot machine" or a "video gaming terminal."
The question is whether gambling has become difficult for you to control.
It is also worth knowing that you are not dealing with a rare problem. A large international review published in 2024 estimated that about 1.41% of adults meet criteria for problem gambling. Among people who gamble specifically on online casino games and slots, the estimate rose to 15.8%. The product matters. Machine-style gambling carries a markedly higher rate than gambling in general.
Why Illinois Video Gambling Can Be So Difficult to Stop
People often assume gambling addiction is primarily about wanting money.
Usually it is more complicated than that.
The machine may provide excitement, escape, stimulation, relief from boredom, relief from anxiety, or simply a place where your attention becomes completely absorbed.
For some people, the gambling session becomes a kind of tunnel.
Work disappears.
Relationship problems disappear.
Financial anxiety temporarily disappears.
You stop thinking about tomorrow.
There is only the machine, the next spin and the possibility that the next outcome changes everything.
Researchers have names for this. The anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, who spent years studying machine gamblers, called it the machine zone — a state in which the play itself, rather than winning, becomes the point. More recent laboratory work has tried to measure it, sometimes under the label dark flow. What that research can say is that during absorbed machine play people report more on-task thought and less mind-wandering. What it cannot yet say is whether that absorbed state is a benign kind of enjoyment or a marker of disordered play. Both readings remain live in the literature.
What I can tell you clinically is that people describe it constantly, and that it is one of the reasons "just stop" is not useful advice.
The feedback loop is fast
There is very little time between making a wager and learning whether you won.
You can therefore make a large number of gambling decisions in a relatively short period.
Compare that with betting on a football game. You might place a wager and wait three hours for the outcome.
A slot-style machine allows the cycle to repeat almost immediately:
Bet → result → emotion → next bet.
A 2018 review of the research on speed of play found this consistently produces one thing: more games played in a session. Whether faster play also produces bigger losses is a more mixed picture, and most of the evidence is correlational rather than experimental. So I would not tell you that speed alone empties your account.
What I would tell you is that speed removes the pauses. Reflection happens in gaps, and a machine is built not to leave any.
When someone is chasing losses, that matters enormously.
Near misses are not almost-wins
Two matching symbols land. The third stops just above or just below the line.
It feels like you nearly won.
You did not nearly win. On a machine, outcomes are generated independently — the Illinois Gaming Board's own technical standards for video gaming terminals require that each outcome be produced by a random number generator independent of what came before. A near miss is a loss that has been arranged to look like a close call.
The research here is worth being precise about, because it is often overstated. Studies going back to 2009, and replicated as recently as 2024, consistently find that near misses increase the desire to keep playing. Studies testing whether near misses actually make people persist longer have produced much weaker and often null results.
So the honest version is: a near miss reliably makes you want to continue. Whether it makes you continue is up to what you do next.
That is actually the more useful finding, because wanting to continue is something you can plan for.
Losses disguised as wins
You bet $2. The machine returns $0.40. Lights flash. Music plays. A number climbs on the screen.
You lost $1.60.
These are called losses disguised as wins, and they are a standard feature of modern machine design. One analysis drawing on roughly 17 million plays from more than 42,000 gamblers found their effect is not uniform — it changes, and can reverse, depending on the size of the outcome. Another study of around 940 players found similar complexity.
I am not going to tell you the science is settled on exactly how these events act on a player. It isn't.
But you do not need the science to be settled to use the practical point, which is this: money coming back is not the same thing as winning money. A session can feel like it went reasonably well and still have taken $300 out of your account. If you only track how the night felt, you will systematically underestimate what it cost.
Track the number, not the feeling.
The machines are unusually accessible in Illinois
Accessibility matters.
If your gambling problem involves casinos, you may be able to make casinos geographically inconvenient.
Video gambling is different.
Roughly 9,000 licensed locations are scattered throughout communities across the state. In calendar 2025 those locations took about $3.2 billion from players — more than all 17 Illinois casinos combined — and the municipality-by-municipality breakdown shows the heaviest losses landing in ordinary suburbs and small towns, not tourist destinations.
That means recovery often requires more than deciding not to gamble.
You may need to redesign parts of your daily routine.
Alcohol can make the problem worse
Many video gaming terminals are located in places where alcohol is being served.
That combination can be particularly difficult.
You may walk into the bar planning not to gamble.
After two or three drinks, the decision feels different.
Your ability to tolerate an urge decreases. Your willingness to take financial risks may increase. The promise you made to yourself six hours earlier becomes easier to renegotiate.
For some people I work with, stopping machine gambling eventually requires temporarily changing their relationship with alcohol as well.
Not because everyone with a gambling problem has an alcohol problem.
Because alcohol may reliably precede the gambling.
That distinction matters.
The Most Dangerous Thought: "I Just Need to Get Back to Even"
If there is one pattern I would want someone struggling with these machines to recognize, it is chasing losses.
You lose $100.
Now the goal becomes winning back $100.
You lose another $100.
Now you need $200.
Eventually you are no longer making decisions based on whether a wager makes sense.
You are trying to erase what already happened.
That is the trap.
The money you lost on the previous spin is gone.
The next spin does not know that you are behind.
There is no mechanism forcing the machine to return you to even because you have been losing. That is not a matter of opinion — it is what independent outcome generation means.
But psychologically, the losses create urgency.
You may start thinking:
I can't go home down $600.
So you continue gambling.
Then you are down $900.
Now going home feels even more intolerable.
This is how a relatively small gambling session can become a financial emergency.
One of the most important recovery skills is learning to treat money already lost as gone, rather than as money that needs to be recovered through more gambling.
It is painful.
It is also one of the decisions that stops a $500 loss from becoming a $5,000 loss.
Step 1: Decide Whether You Are Actually Trying to Stop
This sounds obvious, but it is important.
Many people tell themselves:
"I need to cut back."
What they actually mean is:
"I want to keep gambling, but I want the consequences to stop."
Those are not the same goal.
There are certainly people who can gamble recreationally and maintain limits.
But if you have repeatedly tried limits such as:
only $100;
only on weekends;
only after bills are paid;
only when drinking socially;
only winnings;
only once per month;
and you repeatedly break those rules once you begin gambling, moderation may no longer be the most realistic strategy.
I often ask clients a simple question:
What happens after the first bet?
If the first $20 regularly turns into $300, $800 or $2,000, then controlling the first bet may be much easier than controlling the twentieth.
For someone in that position, a period of complete abstinence can simplify the problem considerably.
You are no longer asking:
How much can I gamble tonight?
You are answering:
I'm not gambling tonight.
Step 2: Make the Machines Harder to Reach
Willpower is useful.
Environment is usually more reliable.
If the same bar is where you gamble three nights every week, continuing to sit next to the machines and relying on self-control is making recovery unnecessarily difficult.
For at least the early stages of stopping, change the environment.
That might mean:
going to a different bar;
avoiding gaming cafés entirely;
changing the gas station you use;
changing the route you drive home;
meeting friends somewhere without machines;
ordering food instead of walking into a gambling location;
temporarily avoiding establishments where you know you routinely gamble.
This may feel excessive.
It isn't.
Someone stopping drinking does not need to prove recovery by sitting at a bar staring at a glass of whiskey.
Someone stopping gambling does not need to prove anything by sitting ten feet from a machine while carrying cash.
The goal is not to demonstrate exceptional self-control.
The goal is to stop gambling.
Step 3: Put Barriers Between an Urge and Your Money
A gambling urge becomes much more dangerous when money is immediately available.
This is why financial barriers are so important.
Depending on your situation, you might:
reduce ATM withdrawal limits;
stop carrying large amounts of cash;
remove credit cards from your wallet;
disable cash advances;
move excess money into an account that is less immediately accessible;
turn on banking notifications;
give a spouse or trusted person visibility into accounts;
arrange automatic bill payment immediately after payday;
keep only a limited amount of spending money available.
Cash deserves particular attention with these machines. Today, Illinois terminals do not hand you cash when you cash out — you take a printed ticket to a redemption terminal — but they still accept cash to play. Walking in with $400 in your pocket is walking in with $400 of exposure. That may change eventually, for reasons covered below, but it has not changed yet.
If you want a step-by-step version of this — bank gambling blocks, credit freezes, stored payment methods — the 24-hour betting shutdown plan covers the money side in detail.
For some people, temporarily giving another person greater control over finances is appropriate.
That does not mean you should permanently surrender financial independence.
It means you are creating friction during a period when access to money has repeatedly led to serious consequences.
A good barrier does not make gambling theoretically impossible.
It creates enough time between urge and action for another part of your brain to re-enter the decision.
That is often enough.
Step 4: Stop Gambling in Secret
Gambling problems grow extremely well in secrecy.
A person can appear completely functional from the outside while hiding enormous losses.
You go to work.
You pay enough of the bills to keep things moving.
You answer texts.
You show up for dinner.
Meanwhile you are transferring money between accounts, hiding withdrawals, deleting banking notifications or trying to replace money before anyone discovers what happened.
That secrecy increases pressure.
And the pressure can create more gambling.
You may eventually think:
If I can just win the money back before my spouse sees the account, none of this has to come out.
Now gambling becomes the imagined solution to the problem gambling created.
If possible, tell at least one person the truth.
Not every person in your life needs your financial history.
But recovery becomes much easier when someone else knows what you are trying to do.
You might say:
"I have been losing control with the machines. I am trying to stop completely. If I tell you I'm going to the bar where I usually gamble, I want you to call me on it."
Accountability reduces the number of decisions you have to make alone.
Step 5: Learn What Happens Right Before You Gamble
The machine is rarely the entire story.
Ask yourself what typically happens during the hour before you gamble.
Common patterns include:
Boredom → bar → machine
Stressful day → drink → machine
Argument with spouse → leave house → gamble
Payday → extra money available → gamble
Previous loss → think about getting it back → gamble
Loneliness → neighborhood bar → gamble
Alcohol → inhibition drops → gamble
Seeing the machine → urge → cash withdrawal → gamble
You are trying to identify the sequence.
In therapy, I often care more about the first step in that sequence than the last one.
If we only focus on the moment you are sitting in front of the machine, we are intervening very late.
If gambling usually happens after drinking alone on Friday evenings, Friday evening is the treatment target.
If gambling happens after fights with your spouse, emotional regulation becomes part of gambling treatment.
If gambling occurs whenever money enters your checking account, payday needs a plan.
Recovery becomes much easier when you stop treating every relapse as random.
Step 6: Expect Gambling Urges Instead of Being Surprised by Them
Stopping gambling does not immediately eliminate the desire to gamble.
You may go several days feeling fine and suddenly find yourself thinking about the machines constantly.
That does not mean your recovery is failing.
It means you are experiencing an urge.
Urges rise and fall.
A useful rule is:
Do not make gambling decisions at the peak of an urge.
Create delay.
Leave the location.
Call someone.
Walk around the block.
Eat.
Go home.
Go to the gym.
Do almost anything that creates distance between the thought and the behavior.
You do not need to convince yourself that gambling is terrible forever.
You need to avoid gambling during the next 20 minutes.
Then you deal with the next 20 minutes.
Over time, many urges become less frequent and less intense because you stop reinforcing them through gambling.
Step 7: Understand the Current Illinois Self-Exclusion Gap
This is one of the most important things Illinois gamblers should understand.
Illinois has a voluntary Self-Exclusion Program administered by the Illinois Gaming Board, established in 2002 and among the first such programs in the United States. (The full enrollment process, including the Lottery's separate program, is in our Illinois gambling self-exclusion guide.)
In the Gaming Board's own words, the program "covers only casino gambling and sports wagering."
It does not cover video gaming.
That means someone could take the significant step of putting themselves on the Illinois self-exclusion list and still walk into a neighborhood bar or gas station and play the machines.
That is a major gap in the state's gambling-protection system — and it is the gap that sits closest to where most Illinois machine gambling actually happens.
Illinois has now committed to changing this — but the change is not active yet
At its September 2026 meeting, the Illinois Gaming Board adopted a resolution affirming that it is the public policy of the Board to incorporate video gaming into the Self-Exclusion Program.
The endorsed method is to install identity card readers on the video gaming redemption terminals already present in licensed establishments, and to use ticket-in-ticket-out technology. Once fully implemented, the Board says, video gaming terminals "will no longer accept or store cash directly and, instead, patrons will use TITO at the redemption device to both initiate play and redeem winnings."
That would be a significant change. It would close the gap and, separately, take cash out of the machines.
But the Board was also explicit about the present tense:
"No changes took effect today."
What still has to happen: technical standards must be written, implementing rules must be drafted and go through the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules public rulemaking process, and the technology has to be deployed across roughly 9,000 establishments. The vendor's contractual deadline to complete that transition runs to December 31, 2027. The rulemaking alone is generally expected to take somewhere between six months and a year.
For someone trying to stop gambling today, this distinction is critical.
Do not assume enrolling in Illinois self-exclusion currently prevents you from playing the machines in bars or gas stations.
It does not yet provide that protection.
That may change.
It has not changed yet.
Should You Still Self-Exclude From Illinois Casinos and Sportsbooks?
For many people, yes.
Removing one gambling outlet can help prevent substitution.
Someone who stops playing machines may begin thinking:
I'll just bet sports instead.
Or:
I'll only go to the casino occasionally.
That can quickly recreate the same problem in another form. It is worth noting that the Board has also moved to bring fantasy contests under the Self-Exclusion Program, with a 21-and-over minimum age — another route that is being closed.
Illinois' current self-exclusion program can still create meaningful barriers around casinos and sports wagering even though the VGT gap remains.
Enrollment currently requires appearing in person at one of approximately 41 Gaming Board–sanctioned enrollment sites, including the state's 17 casinos. The Board says the process takes about 30 to 45 minutes, and you must bring a valid driver's license or state-issued identification card.
The enrollment term is also changing. The Board voted to replace the current five-year-minimum structure with tiered options — six months, one year, three years, five years, or indefinite — specifically to reduce the friction of committing to a long ban at the moment of signing up. Like the video gaming integration, that amendment still has to clear the rulemaking process before it takes effect.
If you know you are vulnerable to multiple forms of gambling, reducing access across as many forms as possible usually makes more sense than trying to preserve a backup form of gambling. Our Illinois gambling resources page lists the enrollment sites, blocking software and support groups in one place.
Chicago Is About to Make This Issue More Relevant
For years, Chicago was a major exception to Illinois' video gambling landscape.
That is changing — though more slowly than most people assume.
The City Council ended Chicago's long-standing ban as part of the 2026 budget, and the Illinois Gaming Board approved the first Chicago establishment licenses in June 2026. But a state license is not enough on its own. Under the city ordinance added in December 2025, an establishment also needs both a city location license and a city terminal license, on top of a qualifying liquor license.
As of this writing, the city had not issued them. In August 2026, Ald. Brendan Reilly stated publicly that "not a single video gambling license has been issued by the city," and reporting later that month described the administration as having yet to license any of the bars and restaurants that already hold state approval. The Gaming Board's own public revenue data, which lists every municipality where terminals are generating income, still contains no entry for Chicago.
So the machines are coming, but for most Chicago neighborhoods they are not here yet. (For the current picture of gambling addiction help in Chicago, including what self-exclusion covers today, see that guide.)
I think that window is worth paying attention to rather than waiting out.
If you live in Chicago and you already know that accessible machine gambling is a problem for you, the time to put barriers in place is before the bar on your corner has terminals in it — not after. Financial barriers, self-exclusion from the forms currently covered, and treatment are all easier to arrange when you are not already in the middle of it.
The public-health question is not simply whether Chicago should collect revenue from video gaming.
It is what happens when rapid, electronic gambling becomes part of the ordinary neighborhood environment — and whether the protections arrive before the machines do.
Right now, for video gaming, they have not.
What If You Already Lost a Lot of Money?
Stop trying to fix gambling losses through gambling.
This may be the hardest recommendation in this article.
You may have credit-card debt.
You may have drained savings.
You may owe family members money.
You may have spent money your spouse does not know is gone.
You may feel intense pressure to make the number smaller before anyone discovers it.
But gambling is not a debt-repayment strategy.
If gambling reliably produced money for you, you probably would not be reading an article about how to stop.
The financial recovery begins when the gambling stops.
Then you can determine:
exactly how much you owe;
the interest rates;
minimum payments;
which bills are urgent;
whether accounts need to be closed or restricted;
whether credit counseling or another financial professional would help;
what repayment is realistically possible.
The number may be painful.
But an accurate painful number is better than a hidden number that keeps increasing.
What If You Relapse?
A relapse does not require turning one gambling episode into a month of gambling.
Suppose you have not played for six weeks.
Then you stop at a bar, put $40 into a machine and lose $300.
The dangerous thought is:
I already screwed it up.
That thought can produce another $500 loss.
Then another gambling session tomorrow.
Instead, interrupt the sequence.
Leave.
Tell someone.
Record exactly what happened.
Identify what preceded the gambling.
Restore whatever barrier failed.
If you removed your ATM limit, put it back.
If you returned to a high-risk bar, stop going there again.
If alcohol was involved, address the alcohol.
A relapse should produce information.
It does not need to produce another relapse.
When Therapy Can Help With Video Gambling
You do not have to wait until gambling destroys your finances, career or marriage before seeking treatment. If you are unsure where you stand, the free gambling addiction test on this site takes about two minutes.
Therapy may be appropriate when:
you have tried repeatedly to stop and cannot;
gambling occupies a large amount of your thinking;
you routinely chase losses;
you are lying about gambling;
debt is increasing;
gambling causes relationship conflict;
you use gambling to escape difficult emotions;
you become restless or irritable when trying not to gamble;
you keep returning despite serious consequences.
Treatment should go beyond telling you that gambling is bad.
You already know that.
Effective gambling therapy is more interested in questions such as:
What function does gambling serve for you?
What triggers it?
What happens immediately before you gamble?
What thoughts keep you playing once losses begin?
How do we make access to money harder?
What needs to change in your environment?
How are shame and secrecy keeping the problem going?
What will replace gambling?
Approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy can help people identify distorted gambling beliefs and change the behaviors that maintain the cycle. (What that looks like in practice is on our gambling addiction therapy page.)
Motivational interviewing can help when part of you wants to stop while another part still wants gambling in your life.
Acceptance-based strategies can help you learn to experience urges, anxiety or disappointment without automatically acting on them.
The specific therapy matters less than whether treatment directly addresses the mechanics of your gambling.
Gambling Treatment Is Becoming More Explicitly Recognized in Illinois
Illinois also made a significant statutory change in 2026.
On July 24, 2026, Governor JB Pritzker approved Public Act 104-0626, originating as SB 2749.
The law expands Illinois' Substance Use Disorder Act to explicitly incorporate gambling disorders, including prevention, counseling, referral, treatment and recovery efforts. Capitol News Illinois reported that the change allows gambling disorder to be treated on its own rather than only alongside a substance use disorder, and the state reserved $15 million in FY2026 for gambling-related treatment and prevention. How this ultimately interacts with Medicaid coverage is still developing.
That change matters because gambling addiction historically has often been treated as an afterthought compared with alcohol and drug problems.
Clinically, it should not be.
Gambling disorder can cause devastating financial, occupational and relationship consequences even though there is no substance entering the body.
The absence of intoxication does not make the addiction less serious.
What I Would Do Today If I Wanted to Stop Playing Illinois VGTs
If you are reading this because you lost money last night and genuinely want to stop, do not make a complicated 12-month recovery plan today.
Do these things first:
Do not return to the location where you usually gamble.
Reduce your immediate access to cash.
Tell one person what has been happening.
Write down exactly how much you lost. Do not gamble to recover it.
Identify the situations most likely to put you back in front of a machine.
Consider Illinois self-exclusion for casinos and sports wagering even though VGTs are not yet included.
If alcohol reliably leads to gambling, change the drinking situation too.
Schedule professional help if you have repeatedly tried these steps and keep returning to gambling.
You are trying to build a system in which an impulse does not automatically become a gambling session.
That is the beginning of recovery.
Illinois Gambling Help
If gambling is causing serious problems and you need support, help is available.
You can call 1-800-GAMBLER or text GAMB to 833234 to reach the Illinois Gambling Helpline. The National Council on Problem Gambling also operates a national line, 1-800-MY-RESET (1-800-697-3738), by call or text.
The Illinois Gaming Board maintains information about its statewide Self-Exclusion Program for casino gambling and sports wagering.
If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide or believe you may harm yourself because of gambling losses, debt or another crisis, call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or go to the nearest emergency department.
Financial losses can feel overwhelming in the hours immediately after a gambling episode.
They can be addressed.
Do not make an irreversible decision because of money.
Gambling Therapy in Chicago and Illinois
I work with adults struggling with gambling problems through Chicago Addiction Therapy, in person in Logan Square and online across Illinois and Minnesota.
A large part of my practice focuses specifically on gambling: sports betting, casino gambling, online gambling, video gaming terminals, options or cryptocurrency trading that has become compulsive, and the cycle of chasing losses.
My approach is practical.
We look closely at the actual gambling behavior:
What happens on payday?
What happens after the first loss?
Where is the money coming from?
What happens when you drink?
What are you hiding?
What barriers have you tried?
Why did they fail?
What would make gambling substantially harder tomorrow than it was yesterday?
Stopping gambling usually requires more than understanding that gambling is harmful.
It requires changing the system around the gambling.
If you have been sitting at Illinois video gaming terminals telling yourself one more spin, one more $20, one more chance to get even, the goal is not to become better at walking away after the tenth bet.
The goal may be to stop placing the first one.
If you would like to talk, schedule a consult and we will figure out where to start.
Last verified: September 2026. Illinois video-gaming and self-exclusion regulations are changing. The Illinois Gaming Board has formally committed to incorporating video gaming into its Self-Exclusion Program, but VGT self-exclusion is not yet operational as of this update.