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Amidst a halcyon 2022 for American gaming, a quieter success story is playing out: the adoption of cashlessness in casinos. As I write this, Parx Casino—far and way the highest grosser in Pennsylvania— has fostered a new Sightline Payments cashless-play solution, one that will be supported on the Light & Wonder digital platform upon which Parx operates. That’s 3,000 slots, 200 table games and 50 poker tables, all gone cashless.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. Truist Securities analyst Barry Jonas reported that, at Penn Entertainment, “The cashless gaming rollout continues, with [management] seeing higher frequency visitation and greater gaming spend per trip from adopters.” Its supplier is Everi, whose product is represented in 38 Penn-branded casinos across 14 states.

Even traditionally hidebound Las Vegas is taking notice. Sin City’s two premier locals-casino operators, Station Casinos and Boyd Gaming, are going cashless. Where they go, others are certain to follow.

In Station’s case, International Game Technology has deployed its Resort Wallet and IGTPay cashless gaming modules atop the IGT operating system already in place. If you want to play slots without the hassle of carrying currency, the Google Play and Apple App stores stand ready with STN Cash, downloadable to your phone. We’re not sure how we feel about players maxing out credit cards or draining bank accounts to fund slot play but cashless gambling is here to stay, following much regulatory hesitation.

For Station punters, another advantage in the digital-wallet system is that they no longer have to brandish their Boarding Pass to obtain loyalty points, as that feature will be resident on their smart phones. This is prevalent at all of Station’s flagship casinos, and is being implemented through its smaller Wildfire and Barley’s brands.

Boyd, for its part, has opted for in-house, slot-centric Boyd Pay, available at 14 Boyd-owned properties spanning Nevada, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio. Approval is pending in Louisiana, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Illinois and Mississippi. “We’re hopeful that will happen throughout 2023, but obviously the timing is entirely up to the regulators,” says company spokesman David Strow. (A table games option is coming to Las Vegas early this year.)

We wish we could be as optimistic about i-gaming but legislators are stubbornly resistant to entering that space. Despite the recent addition of Connecticut to the i-casino ranks, we are still only talking about six states out of 50, most of them bunched on the more-liberal East Coast. Severing sports betting from i-gaming has undoubtedly retarded its adoption, as have fears that it’s some kind of gateway drug to gambling addiction. Indiana, Illinois and New York State may take up the gauntlet this year but we are not holding our breath. Thank you, Sheldon Adelson. Not.