This was different. Le Jeune – and by extension Entain – clearly had a point to make. What the long-awaited Gambling Regulation Bill ends up looking like is anyone’s guess at this remove but evidently, there is a worry within the heavy hitters of the gambling world that it could end up having some teeth to it. While history would suggest they don’t have a lot to be nervous about, they evidently don’t want to concede too much ground.
When he did, his response leaned heavily on a survey done by the Gambling Commission in the UK towards the end of last year.“We in the UK have been measuring rates of problem gambling for many years and those years include a period in which online has gone from effectively zero of the market to being a substantial amount of the betting market.
Well, we can certainly deduce something from the fact that Entain chose this survey among all the other gambling surveys to quote from. We can deduce something from the fact that Le Jeune didn’t quote the UK government’s Gambling Harms Review report from last September, which drilled down into six different studies into the effects of gambling and came to the conclusion that participation in online gambling for at-risk gamblers was double that of the general population.
Beyond all that, the notion that you need a study to show that online gambling is more dangerous than retail is clearly ridiculous. You can’t sit up to two in the morning playing money-swallowing casino games in your local Ladbrokes. For retail gambling, you have to get up and go to the physical building to place a bet. You have to hand over actual money. All of this is easier, quicker and less immediately impactful when you do it on your phone. A child knows this.