It could be just days until Ohioans are able to legally wager on reels of spinning fruit pieces that yield jackpots when lined up in a row.
    Just don’t call them slot machines. They are games of skill under a newly adopted definition by Attorney General Marc Dann, who has moved to regulate the devices.
    Several hundred of the machines are sitting in warehouses in Columbus and Massillon, waiting for final certification from Dann’s office that could come as early as next week.
    A Nebraska-based marketer, Mike “Jake” Kroeger, plans to be in Columbus on Wednesday and Thursday to hawk the machines as the only legal gambling devices in Ohio.
    Gambling opponents say the attorney general’s actions will flood Ohio with machines that require no more skill than slot machines but offer lower payouts.
    Dann aides say, paradoxically, that legalizing the devices might reduce their numbers. The machines have proliferated in storefronts, gas stations and other sites because authorities could not tell which were legal.
    Dann’s office last week declared a spinning-fruit game called Match Um Up a legal game of skill. The game features four electronic “reels” of fruit, each arranged in a constant pattern of 128 pieces. A player who memorizes the pattern can stop each reel at the same point, causing the fruit pieces to line up in a jackpot-yielding row.
    That makes Match Um Up a game of skill, said David A. Kopech, attorney for the game’s manufacturer, Castle King LLC of Charleston, S.C.
    “If somebody is really, really good at it, they can beat the machine every time,” he said.
    Dann’s office OK’d the devices on the advice of a consultant, Gaming Laboratories International, which it had hired to distinguish legal games of skill from illegal games of chance.
    Dann says games that are at least 51 percent skill-based will be allowed to operate. The announcement came as Dann settled a case with Castle King contesting the legality of another gambling device. Because Match Um Up is similar to the other game but less complex, it’s a legal game of skill under terms of the settlement, said Peter M. Thomas, chief of Dann’s executive agencies section.
    No other game manufacturers have formally applied for certification, Thomas said yesterday. Ohio Skill Games, whose Tic Tac Fruit game was declared illegal by former Attorney General Jim Petro, plans to submit its devices for testing, company president Jay Young said in a statement.
    Officials in Dann’s office say hundreds and possibly thousands of gambling devices are operating in parlors, bars and other businesses across Ohio.
    “I don’t want to suggest that most of the machines that are out there are legal games of skill,” said Thomas R. Winters, first assistant attorney general. “I think that once all is said and done, we’ll find that most of these are illegal.”
    Still, the prospect of any state-certified “slot machines” worries gambling opponents.
    “The attorney general is standing up for the wrong side on this one,” said Rob Walgate, vice president of the Ohio Roundtable. “He’s standing up for the gambling industry and their lobbyists more than he is for the people of Ohio.”
    Voters in November defeated a ballot measure that would have allowed 31,500 slot machines and earmarked some of the profits for scholarships. Walgate’s group led the fight against the plan.
    Dann’s aides said they could not explain in detail the process for measuring skill. Winters said the attorney general’s office relies mostly on information compiled by its consultant. The New Jersey-based Gaming Laboratories International declined to comment.
    The apparent lack of clarity unsettles gambling skeptics such as Roger Horbay, president of Game Planit, a Canadian company that consults with gambling-addiction centers and game manufacturers.
    “I think that these so-called skill games are another level of deception,” Horbay said.
jnash@dispatch.com