The Casino Is an Hour Up 29. The Next One Wants Your Pocket.

It takes about fifty minutes to get from my street off Battleground up to the parking deck at the Caesars in Danville, and that is if you don’t stop at the Bojangles in Reidsville, which everybody stops at, so call it an hour and change. I made the trip on a Saturday at the tail end of August with my neighbors Earl and Linda, a retired couple who have been driving up there most Thursdays since the big building opened and were dying to show it to somebody new. I went mostly to see it for my own self. I’d read the coverage back when it opened, the jobs and the tax money and the old mill. But reading about a casino and riding up to one in the back of a Buick with two people who already have a favorite row in the parking deck turned out to be pretty different things.

The part that stuck with me afterward wasn’t the casino, to be honest with you. It was Linda on the ride home with her phone out, checking a ballgame she had twenty dollars riding on through one of the sports apps, and Earl saying, mostly to the windshield, that the day they put slot machines on the phone he’ll save himself alot of gas money.

He was joking, mostly, but I’ve been chewing on it for about a month now.

Past Reidsville the road goes quiet

If you haven’t been up 29 in a while, the stretch north of Reidsville is pine trees and pasture and the odd fireworks stand with a hand-painted sign out front, and then you roll through Pelham and you’re in Virginia before anybody has made much of a fuss about it. Danville comes up quickly after the line. It’s a river town that ran on tobacco and cotton for the better part of a hundred years, and Dan River Mills was the name on alot of paychecks there until the textile work went wherever textile work went, overseas mostly, and the mills wound down through the 2000s and left a whole lot of brick sitting empty along the water.

The casino went up on the old Schoolfield site, which used to be the mill’s finishing plant. Danville voters approved it in a referendum in November 2020. It wasn’t close either, the yes side won by better than two to one, which tells you something about how a town feels after twenty-some years of driving past a closed plant on the way to somewhere else. Caesars opened the permanent building on December 17, 2024. Earl and Linda went up that first week.

Earl swears his uncle hauled cloth for one of the mills back in the sixties, though Linda says it was a cousin and he’s mixing them up again. Either way neither one of them sees anything odd about a casino standing where the plant used to be, and I’m not sure I do either. It’s a strange thing to put on an old mill site, sure, but it has the lights on in it, which that site hadn’t had in a good long while.

Count the plates in the parking deck

Anybody from the Triad will notice this inside of about two minutes. Walk the deck and read the license plates and an awful lot of them say First in Flight across the top. I didn’t go and count every single one, I’m not that kind of person, but Earl reckons it’s about half and I wouldn’t argue with him. There were Guilford dealer frames and Forsyth ones and a couple from out in Alamance. Also a church van from somewhere around Eden, which I am choosing not to think too hard about.

It adds up once you look at a map. Before Danville, somebody in Greensboro or Winston or High Point who wanted to sit down at an actual slot machine legally had to go a long way to do it. Harrah’s Cherokee is four hours out in the mountains on a good day. The Catawba Two Kings place in Kings Mountain, out past Charlotte, is closer to two. Danville cut that to under one. Nobody in Raleigh voted for it, a Virginia city did, so the money that leaves Triad wallets at those machines gets taxed in Virginia.

That last part has not been lost on folks in the General Assembly. In the summer of 2023 there was a real push in Raleigh to open casinos in a few rural counties, Rockingham among them, which is about as close to the Triad as you can get without being in it, and the argument you heard over and over was Danville and all that North Carolina money rolling up 29 into somebody else’s budget. People in Rockingham County packed into hearings that August, plenty of them dead set against it, and the whole idea fell out of the budget talks by September. It hasn’t come back in any serious way since, at least not that I’ve seen.

Meanwhile the betting moved into the house

Here’s the number that I keep coming back to. In the first twelve months after mobile sports betting went live in this state, people in North Carolina bet $6.6 billion through those apps, going by the state Lottery Commission’s own figures. I had to read that twice. It switched on at noon on March 11, 2024, for anybody 21 and over, and it went from zero to that inside of one year.

You see it everywhere now and I do mean everywhere. Sit at a bar downtown on a weeknight and count the phones lit up with a betting app. It’s a weird sort of quiet, everybody watching the same game on the TV and then looking down at their own little version of it in their lap. My barber has a parlay going most Saturdays. My nephew, who is twenty-three and has never once remembered my birthday, explained a same-game parlay to me at Thanksgiving like he was teaching a night class at GTCC.

What the state didn’t do is the casino half. You can bet on the Hornets from your couch in Winston, but you cannot legally play a hand of blackjack or spin a slot for real money on that very same phone, online casino games are still not legal here. A handful of states have gone ahead and allowed it, New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Michigan among them, and the companies running the sportsbooks would very much like North Carolina to be next in line. So Earl’s crack about the gas money might be more of a forecast than he meant it to be, though I’m not about to tell him that.

Britain has been doing the phone part for nearly twenty years

I’ll admit I’d never paid much mind on how other countries handle any of this until that ride home, and then I went down a rabbit hole one night when I should have been asleep. The place that has had the longest run at it is Britain, where online casino play has been legal and regulated since their Gambling Act came fully into force in 2007, and where most of the play happens on phones now, same as everywhere.

What surprised me was how many rules they’ve had to stack on top of it over those years. You can’t gamble on a credit card at all over there, they banned that in 2020. You have to prove your age and who you are before you put a single pound in, which is before you’ve won anything, not after. There’s a national self-exclusion scheme called GamStop where you sign up one time and it shuts you out of every licensed site in the country at once. I’d have liked to explain that to Linda’s sister. She spent last winter trying to quit three betting apps one at a time and kept finding a fourth.

And since the spring of last year there’s been a cap on online slots, which honestly is the one I didn’t see coming at all. Anybody 25 or older can bet five pounds a spin at the most. If you’re 18 to 24 the limit is two pounds, and it only covers slots, roulette and blackjack aren’t in it. Call that a little under seven dollars and a little under three at today’s rate, give or take, which is a lot less than the buttons go up to on some of the machines up in Danville according to Earl, who would know.

To see how all of that looks from the player’s side, I spent an evening clicking around one of the licensed British sites. Swift Casino holds a licence from the UKGC over there and runs its mobile casino through any phone browser or through apps for iPhone and Android, with the same login and the same balance whichever way you come in. I couldn’t sign up, to be clear about it, the British site is for people in Britain and it ought to be, so this was me looking in through the window and nothing more. Even from out here you can see how much of their rulebook gets built straight into the site, the age check comes before any money moves on account of that being the law there, and the responsible gambling tools get a whole page of their own instead of a pamphlet taped up by the restroom.

The case for leaving it an hour away

I want to give the other side its due, because there is a real one. The drive is doing something. It’s an hour each way and it costs gas and you have to tell somebody where you’re headed, and Earl and Linda set a number at the kitchen table before they leave the house and they stick to it, mostly, on account of there being nothing left to do once it’s gone but walk back out to the car. Linda has gone over it once that Earl knows of. The phone in your pocket has none of that drive to it. It’s in your hand at the DMV. It’s on the nightstand at two in the morning when you can’t sleep, and I have personally watched one come out under the table at a wedding reception, I won’t say whose.

Britain’s setup has plenty of critics of its own too, over there and over here. From what I read, most of the protections I’ve listed came in late, after years of stories in their papers about folks losing serious money on their phones, and the slot caps took a government white paper in 2023 and then another two years of back and forth before they actually kicked in.

So if North Carolina does go and put casino games on the phone someday, and given how fast the sports betting went I believe it might could happen sooner than people think, the useful part of the British story is the stuff they had to tack on afterward. We could just start there. The credit card ban, for one, costs nothing to have on day one. Self-exclusion that works across every site with a single sign-up would be the other big one. And the stake cap, the one that took them till last year to get around to, is short enough I could write it on a napkin at the Bojangles.

Honestly I don’t know where I land on the bigger question, whether it should happen here at all. I don’t most days. Linda leans yes, and she is the one with the parlay, so take that however you like.

The drive back down 29

We left a little after nine. Earl drove, Linda dozed most of the way to Pelham and then woke up to check her game, which had gone the wrong way in the eighth inning, and she said a word I won’t print here. Somewhere around Reidsville she put the phone face down on her knee and said she was going to delete the thing, then didn’t. Earl kept his eyes on the road and told her the Bojangles would be closed by now anyway. Nobody said much after that.

If you or somebody you ride with has gone past the point of it being a fun Saturday, the state’s own problem gambling program, More Than a Game, runs a free line around the clock at 1-877-718-5543, and you can text them as well. Linda’s sister finally gave them a call this spring. She said the woman who picked up was kind about it and didn’t make her feel stupid, which was the part she had been dreading the most.