Every hour of 2026 so far, day and night, players in Kankakee County have put about $5,562 more into video gaming machines than the machines have paid back out. That is about $133,500 a day.
Since legal machines arrived in the county in the fall of 2012, players here have lost $365,974,439. They fed roughly $1.49 billion in cash and tickets into the machines to lose it.
In September 2026 there were 142 licensed locations and 818 machines in the county, about one machine for every 130 residents.
The Bourbs downloaded every monthly location report the Gaming Board has published for the county, 169 months of them, and added them up. “Lost” here means what the Board calls net terminal income: cash put into a machine minus cash paid back out. It is the players’ loss and the machines’ take. It is not any one business’s profit; most of it is split three ways, which we get to below.
2012: “It won’t be a huge revenue generator”
The machines came in the fall of 2012, just as a federal judge sentenced Jimmy LaCost, whose company had run illegal video poker machines in 67 bars and stores around the county for decades. Town boards had spent the spring and summer deciding whether to allow the legal version.
Kankakee Mayor Nina Epstein described the county’s mayors’ thinking this way in April 2012: “Our stance was either we’d all support it, or we would all not support it”.
Bradley Mayor Bruce Adams said that month: “The nice thing about it is we’re going to use that [revenue] for infrastructure improvements. It’s not to fatten the bottom line”.
Bourbonnais was the cautious one. Its board allowed machines only in places with full liquor licenses. “It won’t be a huge revenue generator for the village,” Mayor Paul Schore said in July 2012, adding that he expected only two or three businesses to have machines.
The county’s first legal machines reported $476,947 in losses in the last four months of 2012. In 2013, the first full year, players lost $5,996,259. By 2019 the figure was $23,846,010.
Then the machines were shut off for the pandemic, twice. When they came back, the money jumped. In 2021 players lost $36,173,384, half again as much as in 2019. Every year since has set a new record.
In 2025 players lost $44,618,214, up 4.4% from $42,731,821 in 2024.
2026 is running ahead of that. Through September, losses are $36,444,740, up 9.0% from the same nine months of 2025. September alone was $4,147,329, up 17.7% from September 2025.
Players’ losses in Kankakee County, by year
Net terminal income (cash in minus cash out), all licensed locations. 2012 is September to December; 2026 is January to September.
Show the numbers as a table
| Year | Players lost | Months |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | $476,947 | 4 |
| 2013 | $5,996,259 | 12 |
| 2014 | $10,248,721 | 12 |
| 2015 | $13,130,174 | 12 |
| 2016 | $16,540,835 | 12 |
| 2017 | $19,399,700 | 12 |
| 2018 | $21,817,343 | 12 |
| 2019 | $23,846,010 | 12 |
| 2020 | $15,927,529 | 12 |
| 2021 | $36,173,384 | 12 |
| 2022 | $38,473,234 | 12 |
| 2023 | $40,149,527 | 12 |
| 2024 | $42,731,821 | 12 |
| 2025 | $44,618,214 | 12 |
| 2026 | $36,444,740 | 9 |
Source: Illinois Gaming Board monthly location reports, Sept. 2012 to Sept. 2026, summed by The Bourbs. 2020 includes two statewide COVID shutdowns. Lighter bars are partial years.
Where the money goes
Of every $100 players fed into a Kankakee County machine in 2025, about $24 did not come back out. That $24 is split by state law:
- The state takes 30% of net terminal income. In 2025 that was $13,373,066 from this county.
- The town or county where the machine sits takes 5%. In 2025 that was $2,243,352 across 14 local governments.
- The remaining 65%, $29,001,797 in 2025, is split by private contract between the business that hosts the machines and the terminal operator that owns and services them. The Gaming Board does not publish that split. Industry practice is roughly half each, so a typical bar or gas station keeps about a third of what its players lose.
The tax was 30% from 2012 until mid-2019, then 33%, then 34% from July 2020, and 35% since July 2024. The local 5% has never changed.
Add it up since 2012. Players have lost $365.97 million. Towns and the county have kept $18.30 million, 20 dollars lost for every dollar of local government revenue. The state has taken $103.0 million. In fairness to the industry, that 20-to-1 figure counts only what towns keep; roughly another third of the money stays with the local bars, gas stations and clubs that host the machines. It measures what the public gets, not what stays in town.
Town by town
Here is what each local government received in 2025, before a set of adjustments discussed below:
What each local government received in 2025
The 5% local share of net terminal income, by the town or county each location reports under, before the 2025-26 adjustments described below.
Source: Illinois Gaming Board monthly location reports, 2025, adjustment rows excluded.
| Local government | 2025 share | Locations reporting | Biggest single payer | Its share of the town total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kankakee | $790,309 | 49 | Kankakee Gas N Wash | 8.2% |
| Bradley | $428,760 | 25 | Lacey’s Place | 14.3% |
| Manteno | $332,482 | 14 | Brake Time (Route Manteno LLC), Route 45 | 16.6% |
| Bourbonnais | $203,516 | 9 | Lenny’s Gas N Wash | 48.4% |
| Kankakee County (unincorporated) | $176,776 | 12 | Wash N Winnie’s of Manteno Inc. (Winnie’s Bourbonnais, 1873 Armour Rd.) | 28.8% |
| Momence | $99,894 | 7 | Wash N Winnie’s of Momence | 34.0% |
| Aroma Park | $95,033 | 7 | Wash N Winnie’s of Aroma Park | 32.2% |
| Herscher | $39,892 | 5 | 171 On Main Inc. (Herscher Restaurant & Pub) | 37.9% |
| Essex | $29,781 | 4 | Korner Keg & Kitchen (Main Street Bar and Grill) | 54.2% |
| Grant Park | $24,521 | 3 | Flanagan’s Pub | 50.2% |
| St. Anne | $14,645 | 3 | Maue Enterprises LLC (Buckwild Cafe & Gaming) | 91.8% |
| Hopkins Park | $14,413 | 3 | Pinnacle Gas Inc. | 47.3% |
| Reddick | $11,133 | 1 | Bankers Pub | 100% |
| Limestone | $3,832 | 1 | Cams & Cues Inc. | 100% |
Swipe the table sideways to see every column.
Bourbonnais: one gas station
The village that expected “two or three businesses” has grown the fastest of any town in the county. Losses in Bourbonnais went from $861,299 in 2019 to $4,011,189 in 2025, up 366%. The unincorporated county is next at 200%, then Essex at 161%.
Almost half of that is one location. Lenny’s Gas N Wash at 5916 N. Convent St., a large truck stop licensed for 10 machines instead of the usual 6, has been the county’s biggest single gaming location in both 2025 and 2026. Players lost $1,939,631 there in 2025. Its 10 machines produced $98,526 for the village, 48.4% of Bourbonnais’s gaming revenue that year. The top three sites produced 74.4%. The biggest month any county location has ever recorded was at Lenny’s: $214,179 in March 2024.
Bourbonnais is changing. It had 9 gaming locations in 2025 and 13 in September 2026, including its first gaming cafes, approved in 2025. As new sites came on, Lenny’s share of the village’s gaming money fell to about a third of the 2026 total through September. The Gaming Board’s summary of local rules still lists Bourbonnais as “Limited: Class A, F or G liquor only” under its 2012 ordinance; how a gas station qualified is a question The Bourbs is putting to the village.
Aroma Park: $2,860 per resident
Aroma Park has about 655 residents and seven gaming locations with 40 machines. Players lost $1,873,532 there in 2025. That is $2,860 for every man, woman and child in the village, the 26th-highest figure among 974 Illinois municipalities with population data.
That number says where money is lost, not who loses it. Aroma Park draws players from Kankakee, the river towns and beyond, and the Gaming Board does not record where players live. The same caution applies to every per-resident figure in this story.
What the number does show is dependence. Gaming money was 9.9% of Aroma Park’s general fund revenue in its most recent state filing, the highest share in the county. Essex was next at 6.6%, then Manteno at 4.3%; Kankakee, Bradley and Bourbonnais were all about 2% or less.
Manteno: “We have enough”
In February 2019, Manteno Mayor Tim Nugent told the Daily Journal: “We haven’t licensed any new ones in the last few years. We have enough”.
Manteno has roughly held to that on location count: 12 reporting locations in 2019 and 12 in September 2026. Machines went from 62 at the end of 2018 to 72.
Losses nearly doubled anyway: $3,495,049 in 2019, $6,549,047 in 2025, up 87%. Roughly the same places, a few more machines, far more money. Manteno’s biggest site in 2025 was Brake Time on Route 45, at $1,090,104, one of the county’s four 10-machine truck stops.
Kankakee: a third of the county
In October 2016, Mayor Nina Epstein said, as two new gaming cafes prepared to open: “I don’t see this as economic development. The city is making some money, but this doesn’t add to the quality of life”. The city then had 37 gaming locations and 171 machines.
In September 2026 Kankakee had 46 locations and 271 machines. Losses rose from $6,725,101 in 2016 to $15,563,077 in 2025, about 35% of the county total. The city has received $6.80 million from the machines since 2012.
Bradley, whose mayor promised the money for infrastructure in 2012, has received $3.83 million since then. How any town has spent the money is not something the Gaming Board data can show.
The machines
$654 a day from one machine
Divide a location’s 2026 losses by its machines and by days, and you get what one machine takes in a day. The county median is about $115. The top of the list is far from the middle:
What one machine takes in a day: the top five
Players’ losses per machine per day, January to September 2026. Dashed line: the median of the 145 locations that reported in 2026.
Source: Illinois Gaming Board monthly location reports. Each location’s net terminal income divided by its machine count times the days in each month it reported.
Show the numbers as a table
| Location | Town | Per machine per day, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Kankakee Gas N Wash, Court St. | Kankakee | $654 |
| Consignments and More Inc. (Winnie’s Loose Moose) | Kankakee | $593 |
| North Hobbie Inc. (Slim’s Pourhouse) | Kankakee | $537 |
| Winn 2 of Manteno Inc. (a Winnie’s) | Bradley | $516 |
| Lenny’s Gas N Wash | Bourbonnais | $511 |
The Court Street Gas N Wash has 6 machines and ranks second in the county for total 2025 losses at $1,274,653. It has taken $12.13 million since it opened in late 2015, the most of any location in the county’s history; Lenny’s, open since October 2020, is at $10.47 million. Second on the per-machine list, under an unlikely corporate name, is the Winnie’s Loose Moose gaming cafe on North Hobbie Avenue, whose six machines took $1,022,634 in 2025. Third is Slim’s Pourhouse, a bar a block away.
Truck stops and cafes
Four locations hold the “large truck stop” license that allows 10 machines instead of 6: Lenny’s and Road Ranger in Bourbonnais, Brake Time in Manteno, and Ricky Rockets on East Court Street in Kankakee. They were 2.8% of active sites and took 9.9% of 2025 losses.
Gaming cafes, the storefronts built around the machines rather than food or drink, were 27 of 141 active sites in August 2026, about 19%, and took 32.5% of 2025 losses. Bars and restaurants were 57% of sites and took 40% of losses. Site types are assigned from names and licenses, so a few could be misclassified.
Three companies
The machines belong to terminal operators, not to the bars. Three operators run 125 of the 141 sites active in August 2026, or 88.7%: Accel Entertainment of Burr Ridge, a publicly traded company, with 44; J&J Ventures Gaming, owned mainly by Oaktree Capital funds, with 42; and Renville Gaming, founded by a Kankakee family, with 39. Renville has 74 locations statewide, more than half of them here.
Four locations have been running since October 2012, the first full month: the Quality Inn & Suites and Mac and Frankies in Bradley, Brookmont Bowling Center and Slim’s Pourhouse. Sites turn over. In 2025, 12 locations started reporting and 14 stopped. In the first eight months of 2026, 14 new ones came on, the most since 2021, and two more in September. In all, 229 licenses have reported since 2012.
Neighborhoods
We placed each active location in its census tract. Tracts below the county median income held 48% of the county’s residents in 2025, 59% of the machines, and 59% of the losses. Leave out the tracts with gas stations and truck stops, which draw travelers, and the share of losses in lower-income tracts rises to 63%. The link between a tract’s income and its machines per 1,000 residents is negative but modest, a correlation of -0.33.
Three caveats. Losses are counted where they happen, not where the players live. A third of all 2025 losses happened within a mile of an I-57 exit, at 29 locations with 177 machines, and truck stops pull in people from far away. And 30 tracts is a small sample.
Of the active sites we could map, none is within 100 feet of a school or of a church, the legal limit, though our church list is incomplete and geocodes can be off by more than that. Thirty-two are within 1,000 feet of a school.
Help and harm
The state’s own estimate, from a 2021 survey, is that 3.8% of Illinois adults have a gambling problem and another 7.7% are at risk. There is no county-level estimate.
The Bourbs could find one Gamblers Anonymous meeting in the county, listed for Thursday evenings at Riverside Medical Center in Kankakee; check gamblersanonymous.org for the current schedule. We found no state-funded gambling treatment provider located in the county.
Statewide, Illinois had 58 certified gambling counselors as of June 2026, and state spending on gambling treatment has averaged about $1.5 million a year since 2020, according to a June 2026 Capitol News Illinois report. The state’s 30% share from Kankakee County alone was $13.4 million in 2025.
Illinois has a self-exclusion program, with about 16,000 people enrolled, that lets a person ban themselves from casinos and sportsbooks. It does not cover the machines in bars and gas stations. In September 2026 the Gaming Board passed a resolution committing to bring video gaming terminals into the program, and on Oct. 22 it unanimously approved proposed rules, which now go to a legislative review committee. Its administrator says the system could be running in 2027; the state’s contract with the vendor upgrading the terminals sets a Dec. 31, 2027 deadline to finish that transition.
In 2013, Kankakee police chief Larry Regnier described how the city’s 2011 raid on illegal video poker machines at a Jeffrey Street convenience store began: “A relative came in and told us his sister had put her monthly social security check into those machines, so we investigated it”.
In 2014 the owner of Slim’s Pour House told the Daily Journal, “We’ve been opening at 6 a.m. for four years.” Players had put $172,000 into his five machines that April and walked out with $123,000.
Every town was paid 5.15% for a year. Then the state took it back.
Between December 2025 and May 2026, rows labeled “Prior Period Adjustment” appeared in the Gaming Board’s monthly reports for Kankakee County. Each subtracted money from a town’s share and added the same amount to the state’s. Across 14 local governments, the rows moved $64,552.64 to the state. Kankakee lost $11,633.87 twice; Bradley lost $10,000 and then $2,498.15; Limestone lost $7.84.
The data show a pattern. For every one of the 14 units, the adjustment equals one thirty-fifth of its local share for the state fiscal year that ran July 2024 through June 2025, within a few dollars. During those 12 months, the local share paid out was 5.15% of net terminal income instead of the 5.00% the law sets.
July 2024 is the month the tax rose from 34% to 35%. A local share of 5/34 of a 35% tax is exactly 5.15%. The simplest reading is that the Gaming Board computed the local share on the old formula for a year, overpaid every town in Illinois, then recovered the money in installments without a public notice. That reading is The Bourbs’ inference from the data. The Bourbs is asking the Gaming Board to confirm the cause, say whether towns were told, and say how much was recovered statewide.
One practical effect: the towns’ 2025 figures in the table above are about 3% high for January through June 2025.
Before the machines were legal
Kankakee County did not start gambling on video machines in 2012. It started paying taxes on it.
LaCost Amusements, run by Kankakee businessman Jimmy LaCost, supplied illegal video poker and slot machines to 67 locations in the county, and federal filings put the take at more than $6 million over five years. A jury found he had structured about $6.4 million in cash deposits to stay under bank reporting limits. In October 2012 a federal judge sentenced him to a year and a day and ordered the forfeiture of $4,285,829, 300 machines and nine properties. The Daily Journal noted the sentencing came the same week Illinois turned on its first legal machines. The bars that had hosted LaCost’s machines could now host legal ones.
The only public vote on the machines anywhere in the county came in Herscher, where a citizen petition put a ban on the April 2013 ballot. Voters rejected it, 54% to 46%.
What we’re still checking
The Bourbs has reviewed the ownership and disclosure filings that businesses submit to the Gaming Board when they apply for a license, along with state campaign finance records and local officials’ economic interest statements. Some of what is in those filings raises questions about what was disclosed and when. Owning a gaming business is legal, and a mismatch between one form and another is a question for the people involved before it is a finding. We are seeking comment from the officials, businesses and the Gaming Board before reporting further.
We are also asking the City of Kankakee how it has booked gaming money against a 2022 pledge about receipts above a cap, and the Gaming Board about the truck stop licenses and a new rule on operators that own the buildings their machines sit in.
Records requests are being filed with the Gaming Board, the county clerk, the county and the towns involved. We will report what comes back. Starting with the October report, The Bourbs will also publish a Slots Scoreboard each month when the Gaming Board posts new numbers.
How we did this
The Illinois Gaming Board publishes a monthly report for every licensed video gaming location in the state: machines, amount played, amount won, cash in, cash out, net terminal income, tax, state share and local share. The Bourbs pulled the Kankakee County rows for every month from September 2012 through September 2026, 169 months and 17,093 location-months, from the Board’s public report tool.
Every figure in this story was recomputed from those rows. “Lost” is the Board’s net terminal income. Yearly totals are calendar years unless marked fiscal. Per-machine figures divide a location’s net terminal income by its machine count times the days in each month. Town figures use the town each location reports under. Chebanse and Cabery report under Iroquois and Ford counties and are excluded.
Statewide comparisons use the Board’s statewide location file. Its county total for Kankakee is about 0.5% higher than ours because it includes a few sites filed under neighboring counties, which is why some published per-resident figures read $421 rather than our $418; either way the county ranks 40th of 101 counties, against a statewide $248. State fiscal-year totals published by the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability run 2% to 3.5% under the Board’s monthly sums for FY2019 onward.
Quotes come from Daily Journal articles, each checked against the archived text. Site types and operators come from the Board’s licensee and operator files. The data files and scripts are available on request.
Data & methods: open the Kankakee County Slots Explorer →
Download the location-by-year data (CSV) · monthly county totals (JSON)
Get help
- Illinois problem gambling helpline: call 1-800-GAMBLER (1-800-426-2537) or visit helplineil.org. Free and confidential.
- Gamblers Anonymous, Kankakee: a Thursday evening meeting is listed at Riverside Medical Center, 350 N. Wall St.; check gamblersanonymous.org for the current schedule.
- Self-exclusion: the state program covers casinos and sportsbooks now; video gaming terminals are scheduled to be added in 2027.
Tell us
If you work in a place that hosts machines, run one, regulate one, or have lost money in one and want to talk, write to The Bourbs at thebourbsnewsletter@gmail.com. We will not publish your name without your permission.
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