THE NUMBERS GAME

Daily Mail, a UK newspaper which is well known for its sensationalized opposition on online gambling sported a headline this week that “there is nearly 200,000 people that are hooked on online gambling”. They pointed that it is the Labour government’s too lax gaming laws that causes to create nearly 15000 new gambling addicts in one year alone.
This was concluded when the newspaper took a survey numbers from the Gambling Commission that shows around 5.6 percent from over 16s had participated in remote gambling in 2008, which is noted higher than in 2007 which is only 5.2 percent. These percentages were applied against the total population of UK with 2.7million online gamblers. This is an increase of 198,000 from the previous year.
An unidentified expert claimed that 7.4 percent of these players will be problem gamblers which mean an increase from the Daily Mail newspaper’s perspective of 14,700 over from last year.
Daily Mail failed to mention that remote gambling per se has a low percentage increase. The biggest increase in gambling must pertain to punters that go to National Lottery. This is the fact pointed during the debate by Britain’s Sport Minister Gerry Scutcliffe. The newspaper also failed to mention that there are different meanings of addictive gambling or “possibly problem gambling behavior”. Definitions to it are notoriously imprecise and inconsistent. People who bet more than twice a week can already be classified “at risk”. An increase in the number of people gambling online does not necessarily mean a significant increase also of addicted compulsive gamblers if calculated against the entire population of Great Britain.
It is also suggest by the Daily Mail reports that an average amount of debt for every problem gambler can be amounted to GBP 17,500. The newspaper also noted that online poker and bingo has increasingly become popular especially among women.