A person gambles on a poker machine at a pub in Sydney, Australia, on September 19, 2022.SYDNEY — For Rhys Wareham, a coffee industry technician from Sydney, the start of Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 did not just mean staying home, but having to stop visiting the pub every afternoon to gamble on poker machines.
Already the world's biggest gambling nation in terms of loss per person, Australia has seen a shift in betting behaviour since the pandemic-forced closure of public venues. But gamblers' loss in online sports betting swelled A$3.2 billion or 80 per cent to A$7.1 billion in the same period, showed figures supplied by industry consultancy H2 Gambling Capital, which excluded credit often rewarded in promotions.
Nearly a year since lockdowns ended, Sportsbet account numbers are barely changed, showed filings from Flutter, whose regular customers include six per cent of Australia's adult population — one million people.An Entain spokesperson said the firm had "more player safety tools than any other operator in the market, including the use of algorithms which help us to detect problematic behaviour and then intervene".
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