State Aims to Lift Curbs on a Lottery That Beguiles

But Pronto Lotto’s real business takes place in the carpeted, hushed area where its most devoted customers watch video screens from a scattering of tall silver tables, hour after hour, day after day.

The players — mostly men, about a dozen at any given time — come on their lunch breaks or after work to study the screens, which are programmed with the Quick Draw lottery game, and flash a new set of winning numbers every four minutes. They have helped make Pronto Lotto the top Quick Draw vendor in the state, selling $3.3 million worth of tickets last year, more than $1 million more than the second busiest location, a World Books shop in Penn Station.

Some stay for just a few minutes. Others play for the length of a workday, repeatedly traversing the few yards between their seats and the cash register as they hand the next wager to a clerk with a dollar bill or two, and return to wait.

“It’s like my job, 24 hours,” Pablo Martinez, 42, joked to an employee on a recent afternoon, flicking yet another losing ticket into a trash can. He had been there since 10 a.m., and did not leave until dinnertime.

Quick Draw has been so popular since its introduction in New York in 1995 that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has proposed eliminating the last remaining restrictions on where the game can be played. Doing so would generate $12 million for the state in the first year, and $24 million in subsequent years, according to a memo explaining the governor’s proposal. Last year the game, which requires players to match numbers generated randomly by a computer, contributed $138 million to the state education budget, up from $103 million just two years earlier.

The proposal has revived the debate over state-sanctioned gambling, amid a nationwide expansion of gambling opportunities of all types, from lotteries to casinos to, most recently, online betting.

Senator John J. Bonacic, the Middletown Republican who is chairman of the State Senate’s Committee on Racing, Gaming and Wagering, has said he has no objection to expanding Quick Draw. But anti-gambling groups have forcefully criticized the proposal, arguing that Quick Draw, like other forms of gambling, extracts money from the people who can least afford to risk it, while also fostering gambling addiction.

As the state has sought to profit more from the game, the Legislature has lifted most of the original restrictions, allowing it to expand from restaurants and bowling alleys to bars and large stores, and authorizing play almost around the clock.

The remaining restrictions prohibit businesses that do not serve alcohol from offering Quick Draw unless they occupy more than 2,500 square feet, and require players to be 21 years old in places serving alcohol. (In other states, the minimum age is 18.) Removing those rules would allow small stores to offer Quick Draw, and would be likely to generate more sales in New York City, where per capita revenues are low compared with the rest of the state.

While the ZIP codes with the highest earnings tend to be in New York City — the neighborhood of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is tops in the state, doing almost twice the business of the second-place ZIP code, northwest Staten Island, according to lottery figures — that is because city neighborhoods are far denser than those upstate.

The proposal would also allow players as young as 18 to play Quick Draw in bars, even though they cannot legally drink there.

“The restrictions have proved cumbersome and unnecessary, and have substantially reduced the amount of earnings that would otherwise be generated by the game,” said the governor’s memo.

Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz, a Brooklyn Democrat who is chairman of the Assembly’s Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Committee, warned in a statement that the age change could result in a generation of new addicts. About one million New Yorkers have already been identified as “problem gamblers,” he said, noting that Quick Draw has been called “video crack.”

With its near-instant results and ease of play, Quick Draw rivals slot machines in addictive potential, said Natasha D. Schüll, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology anthropologist who recently published a book about machine gambling addiction. She said studies showed that players could become addicted to repetitive games three to four times faster than they would to other forms of gambling.