Keno 'is a lottery,' Wills says
The Arkansas Scholarship Lottery Act passed in March does permit "keno" style gaming, which could be interpreted as permitting keno parlors.
One could imagine several keno machines set up in a convenience store or other places of business registered with the Arkansas Lottery Commission, and some have recently said that this is beyond what the voters had in mind when the lottery act was passed.
Rep. Robbie Wills, D-Conway, Speaker of the Arkansas House of Representatives, said the lottery act was written to allow the lottery commission a free hand in deciding what form the lottery will take, and in the earliest draft of the act, a long-standing prohibition of keno is repealed provided that the game operate under the lottery commission.
Despite a public perception that keno is an "exotic" form of casino-style gambling, Wills said, "keno is a lottery" and could be used to fulfill the lottery act's intended purpose of generating money for Arkansas scholarships.
Keno is defined in Webster's dictionary simply as "a game resembling bingo." Typically, players pick a series of numbers in the hopes that a series of randomly generated numbers will match theirs. The only difference between keno and the conventional scratch-off lottery tickets, Wills said, is that the players pick their numbers rather than having them assigned.
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The form it could take in the Arkansas lottery, he said, would be "a wide number of players across the state playing the same game and they see the results of that game on a closed-circuit terminal."
At the other end of that closed circuit terminal would be the state-run drawing of numbers, either from a hopper or computerized random number generator.
It is gaming on video monitor-equipped machine, he said, but not video gaming, which is prohibited by the lottery act except at horse and dog racing facilities, of which the state has one each.
Video gaming, Wills said, involves "an interactive device where the player does something and the only game being played is between the player and the machine."
"That's what's called a lottery of one, basically, where I'm sitting down and playing a one-on-one lottery game," he said. "That is just a cute way of having slot machines."
In recent days, Wills has received criticism of the possible inclusion of keno in the state's lottery plans.
"Until last week, I had not gotten any kind of concerns or complaints from anybody about whether the lottery commission would do keno or any other type game," he said, adding that concerns should be directed at the lottery commission itself, which is charged with structuring and regulating whatever games may be included. "First of all, all of this is up to the discretion of the commission, and they haven't been directed or instructed or even had it suggested to do anything along those lines. We wrote this act with the input we heard from the people, and the people said they didn't want slot machines or any kind of casino-type thing set up under the auspices of the lottery."
Other than those two prohibitions, he said, "It's up to the commission and I really don't want to get into advising them on how to run their business because we've worked really hard on this bill where they could do that without political influence or the governor or legislature trying to get into the day-to-day business of running it."
Wills said he doesn't "really have an opinion on whether they should do it or shouldn't do it," but if the lottery commission is convinced that keno is against the wishes of the public, commissioners have several ways to ensure that it doesn't happen.
Arkansas Lottery Commissioner Joe White of Conway said that at this point whatever debate there may be over keno is moot.
"I don't think that it is even on the radar screen of the commission or the director at this point," White said. "If we ever looked at that, it's going to be a long time away."
Right now, White said, the commission is busy with the day-to-day tasks of getting a "traditional" scratch-off lottery up and running by the end of October. In his talks with the administrators of Tennessee's lottery, he added, he's heard that keno-style gaming contributes a "miniscule" amount to the lottery proceeds.
"Everybody doesn't agree, but at the end of the day it's going to make it possible for a lot of Arkansans to attend school that wouldn't otherwise have had the opportunity, and that's going to start in the fall of 2010 with the first scholarships," White said.
(Staff writer Joe Lamb can be reached at 505-1238 or by E-mail at joe.lamb@thecabin.net. Send us your news at www.thecabin.net/submit.)