Online Gambling Addiction


Problem gambling (ludomania) is an urge to gamble despite harmful negative consequences or a desire to stop.
As defined from Wikipedia.

Online gambling addiction refers to the excessive amounts of time and money spent on online gambling. When the person attempts to reduce the amount of time and money spent on the activity they suffer withdrawal symptoms such as irritability and anxiety.

Problem Gambling in our society is not uncommon to find. Just look around and you might realise how addiction to gambling can ruin our and our families’ lives.

Such is the advancement of the new media and technology of this century that has caused a stir in online gambling. Online gambling is basically just as it sounds like, its like being in a casino in the comfort of your home. Online gambling, similar to a casino, has a wide range of games that can be found in the actual casinos.

The similarities between online gambling and the casinos would most obviously be that real money is being involved. Gamblers that frequent the real time casinos can be found playing real casino games such as poker, roulette, blackjack, slots and even baccarat. All these, are available online too and just a click away. New media sites such as facebook and other online forums have advertisements for these online gambling sites from time to time too. I personally have seen quite a few on them on facebook.

There are many many online gambling softwares available for download. Examples would be FullTilt Poker, Pokerstars.net, Bwin.com and Everest Poker, just to name the few. Basically, these sites operate in such a way that they entice users to play at their sites by giving them “bonus-es” on the amount of money they deposit into their gambling account on their site.

Money is deposited into the account via visa or mastercard, therefore making the injection of funds into the account as simple as clicking here and there.

There is a thin line separating controlled gambling and addicted gambling. Sure, some people have made their fortune thru online gambling and many aspire to be like them, but face it, similarly to the real time casinos, the majority of online gamblers lose their initial deposits into the software and keep reloading and reloading with dreams to make it rich through sheer luck.

Pros –

1) They allow you access to casino games, example; poker, blackjack, at the comfort of your house, office and school.

2) Younger gamblers that have not reached the legal age for patronising the casino can be found at online gambling sites.

Cons –

1) Addiction.

Addiction to such online gambling sites could prove very costly. Easy access to casino games wherever the gambler may be only creates more opportunities for the gambler to gamble. Furthermore, one factor that should be taken into account would be the fact that the ability to inject funds into the gambling account can be done within a matter of clicks.

When such ease of injecting funds is available at whim, what is the likelyhood that the gambler would reload cash in terms of chips each time he goes bust? Also, taking into account that because of the advancement of new media, advertisements of such sites are freely available on many other kinds of servers and the younger generation will definitely be exposed to such dangerous material.

2) Not knowing when to stop.

There are many stories of people who gamble all their money away and have to borrow from company around them just to lose them all again. While online gambling does not give you that window to borrow money from your friends, it allows you to keep injecting funds that are deducted from your bank account. If a person does not demonstrate self-control and is addicted, the amount in his or her bank account would just keep dropping. Furthermore, as i highlighted above that most gamblers on these online sites are under the legal age of the casino requirements, who’s account are they using to inject funds? Their parent’s accounts.

3) Potential Bankruptcy.

What happens when bills, instalments and whatnot need to be paid, yet you’ve busted your bank account? There’s no way money would just drop from the sky and solve all your financial woes. Now what if you hadn’t got addicted on to online gambling, what if you had not spent a single cent on attempting to get rich from online gambling. If you had not spent all that cash trying to get rich, you would have enough to pay for your expenses.

Yepp. Down the dustbin.

I did a small survey of about 30 participants, which mainly consisted of my friends who engaged in online gambling.

Out of 30 participants, 28 of them have lost money on online gambling so far. Thats a whooping 93.3%!!

Out of these 28 that have lost money, 7 of them have lost more than $500 so far!

And as for the remaining 21 of them, half of them have quit knowing that online gambling were of absolute no help to their lives.

As for the others, they are continuing to sink deeper and deeper into dept as they borrow money on a constant basis just tide over week by week.

New media has allowed the young these days to be involved in such inappropriate activities. Mega online networking site facebook even has the application to play poker on their server. With the amount of children and teenages on facebook, most of them would have already tried the game and with the already large group of facebook users turning to online gambling to get more of a “kick” rather than playing with fake money at facebook, more teenagers would follow in their footsteps, and the root of these problems? Publicity as a result of New media. I am not saying that new media is harmful to the people, in fact, new media has helped us alot by giving us instant updates on world issues. New media is like a double-edged sword. It can help us but yet it can harm us at the same time.

However, there is no denying that new media will facilitate online gamblers to be addicted because of the easy access to online casinos. Something has to be done to filter out all these opportunities (that may result in an addiction) from appearing on new media sites. Taking poker applications off facebook could be a step that we have to take in order to prevent the addiction of online gambling.

Another step that can be undertaken would be to emulate the methods the Integrated Resorts in Singapore operate. For example, exclusion orders could be put into place. This would be able to restrict access to online gambling sites. For example, putting a ban from the computer’s IP address by the user’s family could work.

This is video is a small insight into problem gambling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohBDEZLQA64&feature=related

Descriptions taken from:

www.wikipedia.org

http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/o/online_gambling_addiction/intro.htm

Thank You For Reading! Have A Nice Day!(: