Virginia Beach will start enforcing laws that make possessing, operating, or playing “skill games” criminal activity.
In 2020, the Virginia General Assembly enacted laws that declared such games to be illegal gambling devices. A lawsuit was filed in Emporia Circuit Court challenging the skill games ban and the court entered an injunction.
On October 13, a ban on electronic skill games in Virginia went back into effect after the state Supreme Court vacated the injunction that allowed thousands of the betting machines to remain in gas stations, bars, and convenience stores.
“Although at times it is difficult to determine where a particular activity falls on the speech/conduct continuum, no such difficulty is present when the activity being regulated is gambling. We long have viewed gambling as conduct that may be heavily regulated and even banned by the Commonwealth as an exercise of its police powers,” the panel wrote in its order.
