Tavern owners are hoping pull-tab games will strengthen their customer base beginning this summer.
Gov. Mitch Daniels on Wednesday signed a law allowing bars to offer pull tabs and other forms of low-stakes gambling.
“I think everybody is ready,” said Sherry Watson, owner of the Third Base Pub in Anderson.
She estimated that most local bars would use pull tabs to boost sales, and that the games would bring older customers back to her bar.
“I think the pull tabs appeal more toward older people,” Watson said.
Paper pull tabs come in a variety of game styles, but most cost $1 and pay off when the player pulls a perforated tab to reveal numbers that match digits on the outside of the card.
Bars can begin selling the cards July 1.
Business owners will pay taxes on pull-tab revenue plus a state excise tax on each box of the games they purchase.
Watson noted that a crackdown on illegal gambling machines and a generally hard economic times have closed dozens of bars around Anderson in the past few years.
The paper pull tabs are similar to electronic low-stakes gaming machines already played at fraternal organizations.
Dave Davis, trustee at the Anderson Elks Lodge, said he wasn’t worried about his customers going to bars for low-stakes gambling like pull tabs.
“Our members aren’t going to go someplace else to play them,” he said.
The lodge’s roughly 450 members can gamble on two electronic pull tab machines, which are licensed by the state.
Davis said the revenue that the machines brought in was minimal.
“We don’t try to make a dollar on them, but if we do that’s great,” he said.
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