KVIG Informative

A single bill, passed in the final weeks of the 1931 Legislature with almost no opposition, turned every county in Nevada into licensed gambling territory overnight. The state did not ask who was actually running the games for another 24 years — and the regulatory machine built to close that gap is the same one that now oversees an $11 billion-a-year industry.

Gov. Fred B. Balzar signed Assembly Bill 98 into law on March 19, 1931, legalizing wide-open gambling across Nevada, according to a research report published by the Nevada Legislature’s own Legislative Counsel Bureau. The bill passed the Senate 13-3 and the Assembly 24-1, the report states, and became Chapter 99 of the Statutes of Nevada 1931.

Phil Tobin, a Winnemucca rancher serving his first term in the Assembly, sponsored the measure, according to a resolution the Nevada Legislature adopted in 2007 recounting the bill’s history. It took effect immediately on signing, according to the Legislature’s research report, leaving no transition period between illegal gambling and licensed gambling anywhere in the state.

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Mayme Stocker became the first person issued a gaming license under the new law, according to a finding aid for the Stocker Family Papers held by UNLV Special Collections and Archives. She had already been running the Northern Club at 15 E. Fremont St. in Las Vegas since 1920 — 11 years before the law that made her business legal.

Stocker’s husband, Oscar, could not appear on the license, the finding aid states. He worked for the railroad, and his employer’s policy against gambling association kept his name off the paperwork his wife had been operating under for more than a decade.

The 1931 law created no state licensing board and no background-check requirement, leaving control to individual counties, according to the Nevada State Archives. That arrangement held for 14 years: the Legislature did not require state casino licenses or tax gross gaming revenue until 1945, when it placed gambling under the Nevada Tax Commission, the archives record.

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Even the 1945 law created no investigative arm. The State Gaming Control Board did not exist until the 1955 Legislature created it with the power to run comprehensive background checks on license applicants, and the Nevada Gaming Commission was not organized until 1959 to oversee the board, according to the Legislature’s research report.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board now oversees an industry that produced $11.2 billion in gaming revenue across 305 casinos in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2025, according to the board’s own published abstract. Every background check the board runs on a license applicant today exists because the Legislature that legalized gambling in a single afternoon in 1931 waited nearly a quarter-century to ask who was actually running the games.