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You can play them legally in Las Vegas and Louisiana, but not in Houston.

They’re slot machines, and making them legal in Texas is one way the Legislature may consider as a way to raise money for schools.

Legal or not, slots are already very popular, raking in millions.

KHOU-TV

Will Texas take a gamble?

When they began opening casinos in Louisiana, people in Houston like Al Lakhani began boarding buses.

“I go about two or three times a week,” he said.

The casino express runs all day and night, seven days a week.

They’re packing them up by the busload, hauling gamblers from Texas over to Louisiana. Some say, wouldn’t it be better to keep them here and tax them in Texas?

Maxwell Cross goes to Louisiana about once a week but said he’d rather stay in Texas.

“If you could drive 30 miles as opposed to driving 150, I’d come here!” said Jim Ebbs of Gulf Greyhound Park. “It’s becoming a very common way for the states to make good revenue.”

Some states, but not Texas, are allowing dog and horse tracks to offer slot machines.

Gulf Greyhound figures its business would grow as fast as the greyhounds run, and the state of Texas would get a piece of the action.

“There’s estimates of up to a billion dollars a year,” Ebbs said.

A billion dollars in taxes that presumably now gets lost to Louisiana.

The Legislature has turned down the idea in the past but along with proposals for full-blown stand-alone casinos along the Texas Gulf Coast, it could be considered once again this session.

Because now, Texas isn’t just losing money to Louisiana – it’s losing millions in Houston in untaxed gambling going on around the clock in illegal game rooms operating across the city.

Last year, 11 News showed how the illegal neighborhood casinos were often unchecked.

Maybe because if prosecuted, operators face only a misdemeanor charge and the Legislature has so far failed to toughen the law.

The money is tantalizing: an operator of a laundromat on the southeast side told 11 News he’d been offered $700 a week to allow just one slot machine to be set-up in his business.

He refused.

But is gambling really a good way to raise tax money?

“If we do it in Houston, it will be too convenient for everybody to go,” Lakhani said.

Of all people to say no was Lakhani, the gambler we found heading to Louisiana.

He said it’s addictive. and making it an effort to play by having to go to another state is a good thing.

“That’s the biggest problem, gambling when you make it so accessible; people who can’t afford to go, go there just so they can make extra money to pay the bills,” he said.

That is the downside and what Texas will have to once again consider as it debates how much more legalized gambling is worth the risk.