What Video Lottery Terminals Are
A video lottery terminal is a gaming machine that a state lottery operates or controls. The screen shows reels, poker hands or keno boards, and the cabinet takes bills and prints tickets like any slot. The legal point is ownership of the game: the lottery, not the track, is the operator, and the track acts as its licensed agent.
That framing solved a political problem in the early 1990s. Many state constitutions banned casinos but allowed a state lottery, so lawmakers could add machines at tracks by calling them lottery games. West Virginia’s 1990 pilot at Mountaineer Park, with 165 machines, was the first use of video lottery terminals at an American racetrack.
The idea was older than racinos. Bellevue, Nebraska, installed the first VLTs in the country in late 1983, and the state banned them in 1985. South Dakota became the first state to adopt them formally on October 16, 1989, placing them in bars and taverns, and its voters kept the system in a 2006 referendum by 66 to 34 percent.
How a VLT Decides an Outcome
Each VLT connects to a central computer that the lottery controls. When a player presses the button, the terminal sends the wager to that system, which logs it for accounting and audit. What happens next depends on the state’s design, and the distinction is the main technical difference between video lottery terminals and ordinary casino games.
In a central-determination system, the terminal does not generate the outcome. The central computer holds finite pools of results, much like a roll of scratch-off tickets printed in advance, and hands the next result to the machine. New York describes its system this way: it issues predetermined outcomes to every VLT, records all activity and administers prize payments.
The animation on the screen is decoration. Whether the reels stop on three cherries or a blank, the result was fixed the moment the central system assigned it. The simulator on this page walks through that sequence, from the wager leaving the terminal to the drawn outcome coming back, and shows why a near miss carries no meaning.
Other VLT systems use a random number generator inside each terminal, with the central computer monitoring play and collecting revenue rather than issuing results. Oregon and South Dakota use that model for their bar machines. Either way, the state can see every dollar in and out of every machine, which is the feature that makes a VLT a lottery device.
Video Lottery Terminals vs Slot Machines
For a player, video lottery terminals vs slot machines is mostly a question of who stands behind the game. The cabinets come from the same manufacturers, the themes are often identical, and the denominations and bonus rounds look the same. The table compares the two on the points that matter legally and financially.
| Point | Video lottery terminal | Class III slot machine |
|---|---|---|
| Legal operator | State lottery, track acts as agent | Licensed casino operator |
| Outcome source | Central system or terminal RNG, under lottery control | RNG inside each machine |
| Revenue reporting | Every play reported to the state in real time | Periodic reporting to a gaming regulator |
| Typical venues | Ohio and New York racinos, Delaware, West Virginia | Commercial and tribal casinos, Pennsylvania racinos |
| Table games | Electronic versions only in VLT-only states | Live tables where licensed |
The VLT vs slot comparison also matters for tribal gaming. Many tribal casinos run Class II machines, which settle each spin through a networked bingo game. A racino in a lottery state is limited to VLTs even when a casino down the road offers live blackjack, which explains why Ohio racinos have no dealers.
Comparing video lottery terminals vs slot machines on payback is harder, because states publish different numbers. Some report a single net-win figure per venue and leave the payback to be calculated; others publish nothing more detailed than total revenue. Commercial casino slots in many states report a hold percentage by denomination, a level of detail VLT states rarely match.
VLT Payback: What State Reports Show
Ohio’s lottery-run machines give one of the clearest pictures. At Hollywood Gaming at Mahoning Valley near Youngstown, players wagered $1.46 billion in fiscal 2021 and the machines kept $141.08 million as net win. That means about 90.3 percent of every credit played came back to players, and about 9.7 percent stayed with the track and the state.
The statewide figure is close. For one month in early 2021, Ohio’s racino VLTs paid back 90.6 percent across all seven tracks, according to lottery data reported at the time. Ohio’s machines have grown since then: the seven racinos first passed $1 billion in annual net win in fiscal 2019, and May 2026 alone produced $139.3 million.
New York sets minimums for newer game types. When the state approved electronic three-card poker and blackjack on its video lottery network, the new games were required to return at least 92 percent to players. Payback for standard VLT games is tracked by the Gaming Commission through its weekly and monthly reports for each racetrack facility.
Playing a VLT: Tickets, Denominations and Limits
On the floor, a VLT works like any modern slot cabinet. Players feed in bills or a ticket, choose a denomination from a penny upward, and cash out with a printed voucher redeemed at a kiosk. Most terminals offer several games in one cabinet, from video reels to poker and keno, all running on the same lottery network.
Which Racino States Use VLTs
Five states use the term for machines at their tracks in 2026, and in each one the lottery remains the legal operator even where the track owns the building and the hotel. The venue lists below link to the state pages, which include machine counts, racing seasons and the minimum age for each property.
- Ohio: all seven racinos, including Scioto Downs, Miami Valley Gaming and JACK Thistledown.
- New York: racetrack gaming halls at Batavia Downs, Finger Lakes, Hamburg, Saratoga, Vernon Downs and Empire City.
- Delaware: Delaware Park, Bally’s Dover and Harrington, with live tables alongside the terminals.
- West Virginia: Charles Town, Mountaineer, Mardi Gras and Wheeling Island.
- Maryland: Ocean Downs, under a law that calls all casino slots video lottery terminals.
New York’s network is the largest. The Gaming Commission counts more than 17,000 machines at its video lottery facilities, linked to a central system that Everi operates under a contract running through September 2029. Monticello once had 1,090 VLTs plus 20 electronic table positions, but its floor closed in 2019, a year after Resorts World Catskills opened nearby.
Rhode Island ran VLTs at its greyhound track and jai alai fronton from 1992, and both venues later dropped live events, so the state has no racino today. Delaware, Rhode Island and West Virginia once shared a multi-state progressive game called Cashola, linking terminals across state lines through their lotteries.
Where VLT Revenue Goes
Every VLT state divides net win by formula, and the racing share is what ties these machines to a racino. Ohio rules set aside 9 to 11 percent of VLT income for racing and breeding, depending on how much each track invested. At Mahoning Valley in fiscal 2021, the operator kept $93.35 million and the lottery received $47.26 million.
Delaware publishes the most detailed split. Its fiscal 2025 reports show about 38 percent of video lottery net proceeds going to the state, about 11 percent to purses, about 8 percent to machine vendors and roughly 43 to 44 percent to the three tracks. Each figure appears per venue in the lottery’s monthly tables.
New York sends its share of VLT revenue into the state lottery fund for aid to public schools, after commissions to the operators and payments to racing. Maryland dedicates a share of its video lottery revenue to purses, set at 7 percent and reduced to 6 percent after December 2016. The racino revenue guide follows these numbers monthly.