Yesterday I wrote about a party I went to on Friday night. At this party I met 'Lilly', an Australian who happened to be a dealer in a land-based casino before her current life as a wife and mother. Lilly and I talked about a lot of things, but we also talked shop (as in the gambling industry). I told her about the new legislation in the US and she told me some of her experiences about working as a dealer. Eventually we got onto the subject of gambling addicts.

Gambling addiction is different from what people normally think of when they define addiction. Gambling isn't a substance. Your body can not get physically addicted to it. It can not require a daily dose of it in order to function. Yet there are gambling addicts. That is because gambling is a mental addiction, along the line of obsession and compulsion. It is a mental addiction with a physical side affect, the adrenaline rush when you win.

Lilly told me a story of how she got to watch a player fall into the depths of gambling addiction. Like all addictions it started out innocently enough. A young guy came in with his friends with a sizable stash to play with for his birthday. He's not particularly experienced at the game and he didn't frequent casinos before. He happened to get lucky one day while she was working and won a large sum of money. Instead of walking away and being really happy with his winnings he started to come back regularly to the casino. He could have left after that one day and never gone back to playing. It's not that he made a mistake by going back to the casino. The key mistake was made when he started to chase his losses. He would bet larger and larger amounts thinking that won big win would solve everything. The thing is, it doesn't.

I had a player like that in one of the online casinos I managed. At first he played normally. Actually the guy was a brilliant player who would be up thousands of dollars in a single gaming session. His biggest problem was not knowing when to quit. So he would play all night and all day depositing more and more money and playing it all out. He would spend thousands of dollars in a weekend. More than a few times he would write to me begging for a bonus he could cash out so that he would have enough money to last until the end of the month. He was a regular player and I would give him the bonus. At least a quarter of what he spent in the casino would be placed in his account for him to withdraw. I would even volunteer to expedite the withdrawal so that he could get his money that much sooner if he needed it.

You may be asking yourself why I would do such a thing. He was a regular client who spent a lot and he would send in these heartbreaking emails to the customer service about how he just spent his pension check for the month. Considering his zip code I was never quite sure whether he was sending in these emails to get bigger bonuses or because it was true. Either way it didn't matter to me. We made enough on him to give him a huge bonus if he requested it. I always put the money in his account praying he would withdraw it. He never did. Without fail he would play the money and it would be gone within hours of me placing it in there.

His deposits got bigger and bigger and his emails worse and worse. Finally I called him on the phone to see if he was ok. We talked for awhile and he asked flat out if I thought he was addicted. I told him if everything that he said about his life in his emails was true, then yes he was addicted and I asked him to send me an email stating he was so that I could shut his account. I had also begged him to get help. I had been arguing with myself at the time on whether I should have closed his account without his request when the deposits got to be seriously big and the emails seriously scary. However, closing his account would have required me to give an explanation to my bosses, and I wasn't sure that they would respond well. That's part of what prompted me to call him instead. He said thank you for being so honest, and that was that. He never did send the email, but he also never came back to the casino I worked for. I don't know if he just moved on to somewhere else.

There's a strong sense of personal responsibility in the online gambling world. You have to remind yourself daily that these people are adults who make their own choices and have to live with them. I would have people who would come in, deposit, and then write to the customer service that they are gambling addicts so could we refund their money please? I would always remind them that part of the 12 steps is to be personally responsible for their actions, we are a business and stealing our money to play for their entertainment isn't fair to us, and then I would say no. I would also close their account. Our company policy was to close the account of anyone who wrote in to us stating that they are a gambling addict. They would also have their name added to the block-list, but they could always get in again by writing something similar to their name, or adding an initial. Then I would catch them after the system let them in.

If the industry was regulated in the United States then internet casinos could be required to look for gambling addicts and shut them out. It's not that hard to figure out who is addicted when they play even if you can't see their face. Then the US government could require licensed casinos to place all addicts names on a central ban list. They could do something similar with fraud. They could do something to help the players. Instead they simply banned the industry completely, while giving a huge gaping loophole to those who are desperate to play. Now the only places which will accept US players are the less reputable establishments and no one wins.

Posted on: October 15, 2006

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