I was chatting on messenger today with a friend of mine from the US while I was working on an article. 'John' and I had grown up together and had known each other since Freshman Algebra in high school. I had mentioned to him that I had been given a months notice from work and he had asked what happened. I mentioned the anti-internet gambling legislation and how it has affected the industry, killing off eighty to ninety percent of everyone's business. As such there was no way the guys I worked for could afford to keep me and I was given notice. During the conversation I sent him a paragraph from the article I was working on about personal responsibility and gambling addiction. He told me about a friend of his that he plays with in Arizona (he's a musician). This friend has a problem with gambling. He even went to the casinos around the state and asked to be added to their ban list. I asked John if his friend ever played online. "Nope," he answers. "Why?" I ask. "It doesn't hold the same kind of rush as playing in a casino around the people. That's why I don't play online either."

I think that's one of the saving graces of playing online and in a way it counterbalances the supposed addiction one gets by playing alone and unsupervised. In a land-based casino people goad you when you are winning to play more. They don't even have to know the winner, observers will stand on the side of the roulette wheel just to get a look and cheer on someone winning. There's no group cheering you on when you play alone at home. All of your wins and losses are your own private ups and downs. It takes a lot of the addictive rush out of the games. I would suggest a study be done about it, but I wouldn't trust anything coming from a gambling source (online or otherwise) as they would have an agenda and I doubt this would be thought of by anyone else.

I remember reading an article about internet gambling well before I ever worked in the industry. It talked compared internet gambling at home to allowing a heroin addict access to their drug twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in the privacy of their own home. It sounded terrible to me. I even had an interview for a job in online gambling well before I ever got into the industry. I was offered the job and turned it down because I didn't want to work in internet gambling. I saw the industry as seedy, just as most politicians in the US do. Then I lost my hi-tech marketing job during the dot-com bust and after three and a half months of unemployment I swallowed my pride and applied to an online casino company. They needed someone in the marketing department. Keep in mind I wasn't yet married and I didn’t have children. Back in those days I had the time and energy to work out five days a week. The manager saw me with my blond hair, heels, and moderately short skirt (it wasn't that short, it was a J. Crew skirt after all) and offered me the job with a nice salary. Pride wasn't an issue anymore, eating was more important.

I don't even own a pair of heels now. I got rid of all of them after I had my first son. For some reason that pregnancy just made me completely off-balance and I kept falling, even after my son was born.

After a month my boss was fired and I was switched into customer service. Two months later I was the team leader of customer service training to become the manager. The manager moved to Australia and I moved into his job six months later. From there we opened more casinos, I started data-mining to lower our fraud rate, and I took total control of everything that went in and out of my department. I hired and trained staff. It was wonderful. There was no fire too large for me to handle and I always knew when something was fishy about a group of players.

I got to see who the players really are, especially our regular ones. I could tell which players were addicted. I would say the percentage in the group was well under one percent. The rest were regulars who played their budget every week. One was a woman who had a broken hip and was playing to alleviate the boredom, another was a pensioner who would put in her $20 every week and when that was finished, would switch to play for fun.

Then my son was born and my priorities changed. I decided staying home with him was more important. I was approached by the people who own this portal while I was at home with my first son. The original plan was for them to open an online casino and for me to run it. The writing was meant to be temporary.

I won't be writing about gambling for much longer. The industry is tightening its belt.

Most people in the United States will not be affected by the new legislation. No jobs will be affected in the US, since no online casino operators were allowed to be based there. Countries like Antigua, Barbuda, and Gibraltar in terms of lay-offs and missed taxes. None of these countries are big enough for the US to be bothered. All for economic protectionism and a nanny state.

Posted on: October 31, 2006

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