Into the battles being waged over whether online gambling must certanly be regulated in america, one major argument has been that online games could result in a high rate of gambling addiction. The idea is that the increased access to gambling services and products means that people many vulnerable to addiction has an instant pipeline that enables them to pay money they can’t pay for to reduce.

It is something that generally seems to make sense on a level that is intuitive but the data that’s being collected so far isn’t backing it up. A series of studies from the Harvard Medical School’s Division on Addiction has discovered that the vast most of Internet gamblers aren’t addicts, and are, in reality, really casual gamblers who are quite good at setting limits for themselves.

Studies Conducted with bwin

The studies were completed with the cooperation of bwin, which provided researchers usage of data on tens and thousands of players whom continued different online casino games over a period that is two-year. The research included activities betting, poker, and general casino gambling. And in each case, 95 percent or a lot more of the gamblers studied gambled in moderation, while only one to five percent were said to demonstrate ‘intense gambling behavior.’

In the case of the casino gambling study, significantly more than 4,000 case studies were examined. The average player gambled only once every two weeks, losing about 5.5 percent of the money they wagered over a nine-month period. When it came to activities bettors, another study looked over 40,000 players, and found that the median gambler had been making 2.5 bets every 4th time, with the wagers averaging $5.50.

Another study by the University of Hamburg, built to help supplement the work being done at Harvard, seemed exclusively at poker players. More than two million online poker players were analyzed over the course of six months. The median player was at the tables just for 4.88 hours over that period, and the majority of players were paying less than a dollar per hour in rake.

Typical Gambler Spends Little Online

None of this is meant to say that compulsive gambling isn’t problem, or that issue gambling doesn’t occur on the Internet. But it will suggest that the extent to that the Internet exacerbates such dilemmas has been exaggerated. Area of the cause for this may sleep in the way the information is presented: researchers used medians to show exactly what the ‘typical’ gambler looked like, largely just because a percentage that is small of’ gamblers significantly affect the typical figures.

That research backs up past numbers that have come out of surveys, such as one conducted in 2007 by regulatory body eCOGRA. That study discovered that online poker players typically played 2 to 3 times a for an average of one to two hours, and that they paid about $1.20 an hour in rake week. That study also unearthed that players just took about 6 percent of these bankroll to a table an average of, meaning most players exercised reasonable bankroll management while playing.

One reason that the access supplied by on the web gambling has not caused a spike in addiction could be due to the differences between brick-and-mortar venues and their Internet counterparts. Researchers have found that a ‘playground’ model in a casino, one that uses hot colors, moving water, and green spaces, happens to be most successful for encouraging individuals to gamble. These features can’t be included for most online gambling users although some sites have tried to boost the casino feel by using live dealer games.