Casino Guru poll looks into player readiness to seek help for gambling addiction

A new poll published on the Casino Guru Forum has sought to understand player attitudes towards gambling addiction, and how likely they are to seek help.

According to the poll’s results, 37% of all respondents – a sample size of 894 players - said that they had indeed sought help – either online offline, or both.

A small number, 42 respondents said that they were considering it, while 519 people said that they never reached out to any service for gambling addiction.

The 37% who have said to have sought help for gambling addiction is a worrying number, as it suggests that players have experienced harm at a level that is not reflected in most surveys, which mostly pin the number of gambling-related harm at around 5%.

Daniel Dolejsi, the Head of Community in Casino Guru adds: "Whenever we launch a new forum poll, we can usually more or less predict the results. In this case, we were totally wrong, because we expected a much smaller percentage of players who have experience with searching for help related to problem gambling. The results show that the Responsible Gambling section on our website is not intended only for a very limited scope of users, but the potential audience is much bigger."

Of course, Casino Guru’s poll is not as comprehensive as most regulator-commissioned surveys, but the poll still taps into one of the largest databases of players worldwide.

The poll indicates that the actual number of people who may be impacted by gambling addiction – whether indirectly or directly – is in fact much higher. 258 respondents said that they had mostly turned to online resources for help with gambling addiction.

Another 32 respondents added that they had sought help offline, and 43 respondents confirmed that they had turned to both online and offline options.

The poll of course is not free of bias. For example, just because someone has sought help for gambling addiction does not necessarily mean that they are addicted – perhaps they know someone who is, or they have been curious to find out more about the issue.

However, the number is still large enough to suggest that a proper examination of the underlying trends is necessary to define with some specificity the exact level of people who may be impacted by gambling addiction.

The current poll is more or less aligned with another Casino Guru Forum poll’s findings from last year which put the number of people who do not engage with responsible gambling tools was 35% out of all respondents at the time.

One important takeaway from the most recent poll is that online resources continue to play the most important role in helping players get help for their gambling addiction and these findings could serve as the basis of policies that are designed to protect consumers and players.

These results taken in a vacuum are not enough to draw any definitive conclusions, but they still help impress the importance of reinforcing responsible gambling efforts continuously.

Image credit: Casino Guru News