Young men more likely to chase casino machine losses, says RGT
Chronic loss chasers on B1 gaming machines in UK casinos have been described as “disproportionately likely to be young, male and heavy-spending players” by the Responsible Gambling Trust (RGT), on the back of a study into B1 machine player behaviour in casinos.
The research was funded by the RGT and was carried out by researchers from the University of Liverpool and University of Salford, looking into loyalty card data from over five million visits to Grosvenor casinos made by more than 855,000 visitors between 2012 and 2014.
Out of approximately 15,000 players studied, 2% showed a significant tendency towards chasing losses and 27% of all players studied had at least one six-month period where they had a statistically significant tendency to chase losses between sessions.
A total of 28% of all visits to casinos involved play on gaming machines, excluding visitors that entered casinos for food and drink only, and 21% of visits involved gaming purely on machines for 2014, though that number had risen from 17% for 2012.
It was found that a large majority of users were very occasional visitors, though in 2014, more than 1,200 customers gambled at a casino twice a week or more on average.
Professor Ian McHale, Professor of Sports Analytics at the University of Manchester Salford, said: “The broad picture we found is that typical casino users play to a modest scale, with visits lasting about an hour and incurring a loss of around £25. However, our findings underline the need for regular monitoring of play for ‘between session loss chasing,’ which holds significant potential as a means of identifying at-risk players and designing appropriate interventions.”
The data suggested that a vast majority of players will not play for long sessions over several years, as 3% of those who had a session of five hours or more in the first quarter of the review were found to be persistently returning for five-hour plus sessions three years later.
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