Anyway Records

The first time I ever stepped foot inside a poker club I could feel my gut tighten as I walked through the door. Just the thought of losing even a small fraction of my meager savings was enough to cause my body to spasm in trepidation.

And yet I was immediately seduced. The place seemed to convulse with frenetic activity. Players shoved piles of money across the gaming tables as they playfully antagonized their opponents. Long-time regulars laughed together about the legendary gamblers that had struck it big or gone broke. Losers grieved and berated the dealers, while winners gloated and tossed them fat tips. The symphony of fortunes swelling and collapsing was, to me, enchanting.

Over the next few years the online poker boom reached its height, and I spent a good deal of time in the privacy of my home, gambling on the Internet. I enjoyed the speed and convenience of playing online: In a matter of seconds, I could use a debit card to deposit money into my account and play several different tables at once. I also liked certain aspects of being anonymous. There was no physical audience present to be embarrassed in front of when I made a foolish play or lost a lot of money. If I busted my account, I could simply close my laptop and try again some other day, and no one else had to know.

But despite both the efficiency and accessibility of gambling online, I still often found myself craving the inside of a poker club or a casino. The games offered in brick and mortar institutions were the same as the ones I could find online, so what then was the allure of these places that made me forgo the obvious comforts of gambling in my own room?

* * * 

For decades, those who tried to study the habits of gamblers have been frustrated by one crucial complication: a lack of reliable data. Studies often have to contend with unreliably small samples sizes and monitoring environments that don’t effectively simulate those of gambling establishments. The misreporting of statistics—both intentional and unintentional—by study subjects also compromises findings. But with the emergence of online gambling, researchers have an unprecedented opportunity to collect large amounts of unbiased data about gamblers as they operate in authentic gambling environments.

And they’ve unearthed one finding in particular that is noteworthy: Overwhelmingly, Internet gamblers exhibit a remarkable amount of restraint.

A series of studies conducted by the Harvard Medical School’s Division on Addiction, aimed at providing public policy makers with empirical research about Internet gambling, have reached a few general conclusions about the behavior of online gamblers. In partnership with bwin, a large European gambling site, the researchers were able to collect and analyze the data of tens of thousands sports bettors, online casino gamblers at Pkv Games, and poker players over a period of two years.

From these studies, a prominent, unifying theme emerged: In each gambling category, the vast majority of players gambled infrequently and in moderation, while a small subset of players (between 1 percent and 5 percent) exhibited intense gambling behavior that far exceeded that of the rest of the sample.

Out of over 4,000 online casino gamblers examined, the median betting frequency over a period of nine months was once every two weeks, with a median outcome of around a 5.5 percent loss of all money wagered. One analysis of the roughly 40,000 sports bettors examined determined that participants placed a median of 2.5 bets of $5.50 every fourth day. And researchers at the University of Hamburg, in a study intended in part to supplement some of the work accomplished by the Harvard Medical School, found that from the over two million online poker identities they observed over a period of six months, the median player played only 4.88 hours and most players paid less than a dollar in rake fees per hour per table. (The separate studies placed emphasis on the median values, as they derived that the small group of intense gamblers drove up the mean values considerably.)