How Many People Gamble in a Year Around the World?
It’s challenging to determine the number of people who gamble globally over the course of the year. However, here are some, albeit rough, estimates.
In virtually any country you go to, you will find that there are plenty of ways to gamble in the following activities: betting on sport occurences, lotter such as blackjack and roulette.
United States
Here’s a statistic: 4.2 billion people gamble one year world wide. And it looks like they’re all in globally!
The preferred way to gamble with the population. Accordianly, 2.5 billion people want to go for sports-betting, another 1.7 for scratch-cards, and casinos (which means blackjack, roulette and poker (you know, that game invented by the evil Albert Einstein… this should have been called a democracy card) grabbed the bottom with 1 billion peope.
While a lot a gambling can be fun, we should not forget that there are some real addicts in need of helth and support.
Illegal sportsbooks and iGaming sites cost state governments far more than legal gambling brings in to government coffers. Most players are responsible, but gambling is more likely to cause harm when use is concurrent with intoxication.
Australia
It hardly matters which – be it Texas Hold ‘em at a casino, or sports betting over the phone, or one of the groaning red and silver poker machines that pervade the land down under – collectively, when it comes to gambling, Australia is one of the greatest spenders in the world. We have the most people spending the $25 billion-plus we allocate, annually, on gambling. The United States spends less on gambling than we Australians do, per capita. Australia’s expenditure is almost twice that of the United Kingdom, and similar to that of Macau, the world’s gambling capital, per person. Five decades of pastoral openness and numbing sameness have saw us investing more than five times what the Japanese allocate to gambling. almost 80 per cent of Australians seem to agree that this ready access to gambling opportunity seems dangerous to family life This is gambling.
Recently, a parliamentary committee chaired by the late Labor MP Peta Murphy proposed banning advertising on online gambling sites, in line with calls for a general reduction in the prevalence of gambling advertising in our culture. Obsessive gambling is a common and deeply affecting problem across our society; in 2010, some 20 to 30 per cent of the population reported experiencing gambling-related problems, with a range of emotional, financial and relational harms among the consequences. Of these, a significant portion can be attributed to poor mental health and addiction. In the US, between 1.2 and 6.2 per cent of the population are problem gamblers; addiction is a powerful force and one with deep repercussions on the individual’s family and community.
China
Although China is a thoroughly atheist country, occupying the top gambling slot worldwide – thanks both to casinos in its Special Administrative Region in Macau and to its officially sanctioned welfare lottery – the consumption of digital gambling products also extends to illegal sites, circumventing government crypto-blockades via an intricate network of ‘mirror’ sites hosted on innocuous-looking web addresses, often operated by subsidiaries of wagering companies.
From what Insider has observed, most of these mirror sites are operated by Bet365, a UK online betting company. Alternatively, Chinese punters might debut to betting sites through a proxy server. Regular gamblers usually have more than one account, and use different web addresses to visit the site they want, to avoid detection. This is known as ‘smart laundering’.
United Kingdom
In the UK there are a variety of popular gambling pastimes, many of which are now available for gaming online. This popular industry employs hundreds of thousands of people and contributes over billions of pounds to the UK’s economy. The industry sector is also growing at alarming speed. Like any other industry, it is subjected to societal issues and one of them is that humans have a tendency to become addicted to these forms of recreation and may consequently become seriously damaged by such addictions.
A poll in 2020 found that 13 per cent of the population prey to problem gambling. The figures come with a big caveat, however – they’re based on answers to survey questions, not on medical evidence.
It is worth also being reminded again that gambling tends to go hand in hand with other, potentially a lot more destructive behaviour, such as drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco cigarettes and electronic-cigarettes. A recent study shows that, for example, young individuals who gamble tend to drink far more alcohol and consume illegal drugs far more frequently than young individuals who do not gamble.
Singapore
The Singaporean government has taken different precautions to prevent its citizens to gamble. For instance, the government has not only imposed an entrance fee and a ban offered by families to avoid entering the casinos, it has also set up free hotlines and rehabilitation centres for people who have a problem with gambling.
The South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS) is a diagnostic instrument for identifying problem and pathological gamblers. It is inspired by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition.
The 20-item SOGS test can be easily administered by a coupled ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer in face-to-face interview or over the phone. The results can be scored immediately and will be valid for a three-month period since it is associated with higher scores, which means more serious problems. People with higher scores should be more referred to a mental health specialist.
