Pennsylvania’s highest court has handed down what could prove to be the most significant gambling decision in the Commonwealth since casino gaming was legalized. In a June 15, 2026, opinion, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that so-called skill-game machines are subject to both the Pennsylvania Gaming Act and the Crimes Code, overturning years of lower-court decisions that had allowed the devices to operate in a legal gray area.

For more than a decade, skill games spread across Pennsylvania in convenience stores, bars, restaurants, clubs, gas stations and dedicated gaming parlors. The Supreme Court noted that the machines “have been held to fall into a legal gray area outside of the reach of both the Gaming Act and the Crimes Code,” a situation that allowed thousands of devices to flourish throughout the state without the oversight applied to casino gambling.

The industry has long argued its machines are games of skill rather than gambling devices.

Speaking on a special episode of Behind the Bets in PA, Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board Chief Counsel Steve Cook explained that the growth of skill games was closely tied to Pennsylvania’s long-established legal test for determining gambling.

“Pennsylvania has through the course of a series of court decisions what’s called the predominant factor test,” Cook said. “If skill predominates, it’s 51% or more skill over chance, then it would not be gambling under historical Pennsylvania case law.”

Cook said Pennsylvania’s approach differed from states where any element of chance can make a game illegal gambling.

According to him, “it’s that predominant factor test by which skill games entered the market” and eventually expanded across the Commonwealth.

The Supreme Court’s reasoning and the Follow Me dispute

The Supreme Court traced that legal history back to the 1983 case Commonwealth v. Two Electronic Poker Game Machines, which he...