Abstract
There is an increasing trend for online sports betting to be identified in gambling treatment services as the principal gambling activity that leads to harmful consequences. The structure of sports betting in online settings has changed extensively in the last 5 years in response to developing information technology, and these changes appear to have increased the inherent risk associated with online sports betting. There is a current need to understand disordered patterns of sports betting in online settings, in order to commence the development of strategies to identify and, where possible, mitigate harm. Therefore, a systematic grounded theory study was conducted, utilising behavioural data and in-depth interviews with a sample of 19 online sports bettors who met the criteria for problem gambling, to produce a substantive outline of the salient sources of harmful participation in modern online sports betting. The core category to emerge was an Online Sports Betting Loop that was facilitated by new structural features of modern online sports betting such as live betting, cash out, micro-event betting and instant depositing. In addition, participants indicated that the immediate accessibility and the ubiquity of online sports betting marketing made it challenging to control sports betting involvement. The emergent findings demonstrate that attention must be directed towards creating mechanisms to reduce patterns of continuous online sports betting by increasing breaks in play in the structure of the activity and enabling customers to restrict usage of features that are associated with disordered play, such as live betting.
Highlights
Developments in information technology have enabled the gambling industry to expand its commercial offerings significantly with respect to sports betting (Gainsbury 2012; Hing et al 2016b)
There is an increasing trend for online sports betting to be identified in gambling treatment services as the principal gambling activity that leads to harmful consequences
The structure of sports betting in online settings has changed extensively in the last 5 years in response to developing information technology, and these changes appear to have increased the inherent risk associated with online sports betting
Summary
Developments in information technology have enabled the gambling industry to expand its commercial offerings significantly with respect to sports betting (Gainsbury 2012; Hing et al 2016b). Recent research has observed that online sports bettors who have a higher severity of gambling problems tend to place a higher proportion of their bets using mobile phone technology (Lopez-Gonzalez et al 2018; Lopez-Gonzalez and Griffiths 2018). Existing literature indicated that sports betting conducted online could increasingly be categorised as being impulsive in nature compared to in-venue betting (Hing et al 2018a, b). This is in sharp contrast with recommendations for responsible gambling, which is principally making informed betting choices and keeping betting within predetermined, affordable time and spending limits (Hing et al 2016a). Recent research from Australia has indicated that between one third and one half of all bets placed online were considered by participants to be impulse bets rather than carefully evaluated betting selections (Hing et al 2015, 2018a, b), and it is widely acknowledged that impulsive betting is predictive of gambling problems (Hing et al 2015, 2016b)
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