Harvard Concludes Bwin Poker Study | internet poker study

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Harvard Concludes Bwin Poker Study | internet poker study
by No Luck Needed member ttwna2k for NoLuckNeeded.com

A Harvard Medical School study has found that 5 percent of poker players on the Bwin.com website displayed possible signs of problematic gambling behaviour – a similar proportion to that found among Bwin’s online casino customers, but significantly higher than among Bwin’s sports betting players.

The recently-published internet poker study tracked the actual consumer behaviour of over 3,400 new poker sign-ups on the Bwin.com website over a two-year period beginning in February 2005. The research claims to be the first ever study into the behaviour of online poker players to use real-time data rather than self-reported information, and follows similar studies already conducted by the Harvard researchers into gambling patterns among Bwin’s sports betting and online casino customers.

The poker research - conducted jointly by the Harvard Medical School and the Division on Addictions in Cambridge, Massachusetts - found that 5 percent of the total sample gambled in disproportionately larger amounts than the vast majority of poker players.

The average poker player among the full sample was an active Bwin customer for a period of six and a half months after signing up to the service in February 2005 and participated in one poker session every three days during that period, staking an average of €13 per session. The poker player’s median net loss across the period was €106, signifying an average loss per session of just €1.80.

However, the 5 percent ‘most involved’ poker players were active Bwin customers for over 18 months after February 2005, playing poker an average of 1.5 times per day during the period and staking €89 at each session. The more active players lost an average of nearly €2,000 during the period as a whole, signifying a “slightly higher” average cost per session of €2.40.

According to the study, the “disproportionate distribution” of total gambling spend among the top 5 percent of more involved poker players could offer signs of possible addictive gambling behaviour as the willingness to place higher wagers “carried with it the highest risk for financial problems associated with disordered gambling.”

But the research also found that the 5 percent of more involved gamblers also reacted differently as their poker losses increased over the period. While the majority of players chose to reduce both the time and money they spent playing poker as losses mounted over the period (and vice versa), the subset of more involved players reduced only the amount of money they spent gambling as losses increased, but continued to gamble equally as intensely in terms of sessions per day.

The study notes: “The majority of individuals moderated their behaviour based on their wins and losses – exhibiting ‘rational’ betting behaviour. This suggests that, at the population level, losing discourages ongoing play and winning encourages continuing play.

“The subset of most involved poker players devoted much more time and money to this activity than did the rest of the cohort. We might have expected that more intense involvement would limit duration: Perhaps the expenditures would become a burden and/or the time spent would interfere with other activities. This was not the case; the duration of play for the more intense players was three times longer than the majority of the sample.”

Taken alongside previous Harvard research, the study could suggest that online poker and casino games both attract a larger degree of more extreme gambling behaviour than found among sports-betting customers.

Previous research into customer behaviour on Bwin’s casino website equally found more intensive gambling activity among 5 percent of online casino gamblers, significantly higher than the 1 percent of 44,000 Bwin sports betting customers that were shown to display signs of extreme gambling behaviour in a study published in mid-2007.

The Harvard researchers had hypothesized that poker would be more in line with sports-betting than casino gaming in this regard, as “both sports gambling and poker playing are chance games that incorporate a measure of skill.”

The potential political implications of such findings are acknowledged by the Harvard researchers.

They note: “Politicians, advocates and researchers alike have expressed concerns about the potential public health impact of internet gambling. Unfortunately, the validity of such concerns is unclear. Although gambling in general is now widely recognised as a potential object of addiction, researchers know little about the ways that different types of gambling might influence the development of addiction.

“Internet gambling, for example, can take many forms (e.g. casino-type games, lotteries and poker), but we do not know whether different forms pose differential risk to health. Internet poker is of particular interest because of the current popularity of poker.”

But the fact that 95 percent of the Bwin poker sign-ups gambled in modest amounts is also significant, according to the researchers. “In this research, we provide evidence that supports the findings in our previous research that most subscribers who gamble on the internet do so moderately,” they state.

Posted:30.04.2009, 09:43

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