Overtime: Long-Term Trajectories of Play among Highly-Involved and Less-Involved Online Sports Bettors

Session Title

Session 2-3-B: Identifying Gambling Patterns to Reduce Harm

Presenters

Sarah E. Nelson, Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance; Harvard Medical SchoolFollow

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation

Location

Park MGM, Las Vegas, NV

Start Date

24-5-2023 1:30 PM

End Date

24-5-2023 3:00 PM

Disciplines

Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms | Epidemiology | Substance Abuse and Addiction

Abstract

Abstract: Online sports wagering is a popular and still growing gambling activity around the world, with new markets recently opening in the U.S. Like other types of gambling, it can lead to devastating financial, social, and health-related harms. The current study examined the actual online sports wagering activity of a cohort of 32,262 gamblers who subscribed to a European online betting platform in February 2015 to (a) understand how sports betting might have changed in the decade since our initial analysis of online sports wagering, (b) examine the types of sports wagers that subscribers place, and (c) examine two-year longitudinal play patterns and self-exclusion rates among highly-involved and less-involved bettors. We found that sports wagering behavior has remained relatively stable over time, with a small subset of subscribers exhibiting disproportionately high engagement. These highly-involved subscribers placed more in-game bets, but were less likely to engage in parlay betting than less-involved subscribers. The highly-involved subscribers were less likely to discontinue gambling after their first 8 months of play, and some were more likely to self-exclude; however, among those who continued gambling, highly-involved gamblers were no more likely to increase or maintain their gambling activity than others.

Implications: This study extends previous work by examining the types of bets online sports gamblers place, how their play patterns change over time, and how involvement relates to self-exclusion. This work has implications for understanding the relationship between gambling involvement and gambling problems, and how sports bet type might signal risk.

Keywords

sports gambling, self exclusion, gambling problems, gambling records

Author Bios

Sarah E. Nelson is the Director of Research at the Division on Addiction, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Nelson’s gambling work includes studies of internet gambling and daily fantasy sports play, evaluations of responsible gambling programs including Voluntary Self-Exclusion, assessments of gambling treatment systems, and the development of predictive models based on early online play patterns to detect subscribers who are at risk for gambling problems.

Funding Sources

Entain PLC (formally GVC Holdings PLC), a sports betting and gambling company, provided primary funding for this study. The Division on Addiction receives additional funding from a variety of federal, state, local, and private sources, as described at https://www.divisiononaddiction.org/funding-statement/.

Competing Interests

The Division on Addiction, through which Dr. Nelson receives her salary, receives funding from a variety of federal, state, local, and private sources, as described at https://www.divisiononaddiction.org/funding-statement/. In addition, during the past five years, Dr. Nelson has served as a paid grant reviewer for the International Center for Responsible Gaming (ICRG), GambleAware, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She has also received travel reimbursement and speaker honoraria from the ICRG and Responsible Gaming Association of New Mexico. She received honoraria funds for preparation of a book chapter from Universite Laval and publication royalty fees from the American Psychological Association, and received course royalty fees from the Harvard Medical School Department of Continuing Education.