The smoking ban is now in place, let the games begin.

For some restaurants, the ban may prove to be a boon. Examples from restaurants in other states with bans have shown life after a ban is possible, and can even lead to an increase in business with non-smokers filing into restaurants previously deemed too smoky for their patronage.

Waterloo's Southtown Restaurant and Lounge beat the trend by going smoke-free more than a year ago. At the time, the owners invested in a major renovation and prepared to welcome a whole new clientele while hoping to keep their trusty regulars. They reported a business boom after going smoke free.

Some bars may see their business hurt by the ban, with smokers deciding to stay home where they can sip a cold one and smoke to their hearts' content.

And yet others will test their creative mettle in looking for loopholes in the law.

One possible source is a section of the law that allows for outdoor smoking at establishments where food service is only incidental to liquor sales. The threshold appears to be if only prepackaged foods are served with beverages. Will there soon be a shortage of shrink-wrap machines?

In other jurisdictions, creative entrepreneurs (and their merry bands of lawyers) have sought interesting ways to skirt the law. In most cases the loopholes were closed shortly thereafter.

Minnesota implemented a smoking ban last fall. Not too long afterward some bar owners found their loophole, one which allowed smoking in theaters by actors in the course of a performance.

Soon a few dozen bars around the state proclaimed themselves theaters, with all of their patrons actors. Some created a theme in which the actors played themselves as they behaved prior to the smoking ban.

In Colorado, a 2006 smoking ban included an exemption for cigar bars. An earlier exemptions for casinos was repealed in 2007. To the surprise of almost no one, casinos started declaring themselves cigar bars and highlighted selling cigars and cigarettes to meet a requirement that tobacco products make up a certain percentage of the sales.

That brings us back to Iowa, where the biggest game of all was already won by the casinos back in April.

The state's casinos used millions of dollars in tax revenues (and a powerful lobbying effort) to convince the legislature of the need to be exempted from the smoking ban.

In case you missed previous editorials, we still believe the casino exemption stinks. But at least our casinos aren't going to become cigar bars.