Hey Big Spender: An Ecological Momentary Assessment of Sports and Race Betting Expenditure by Gambler Characteristics

A major obstacle to understanding how expenditure varies among people who gamble is the difficulty of obtaining accurate expenditure data from individual gamblers. To overcome the shortcomings of retrospective self-reports, this study used a prospective ecological momentary assessment (EMA) design to capture these data every 24 or 48 hours. It aimed to examine (a) demographic, psychological, behavioural, and contextual characteristics of high-spending sports and race bettors and (b) the relationship between betting outlay and problem gambling severity. A baseline survey was completed by 320 regular sports bettors and 402 regular race bettors, followed by 15 EMA surveys over 3 non-consecutive weeks. Higher spending bettors were more likely to be male, place more of their bets online, have higher disposable incomes, have commenced betting at a younger age, have more accounts with betting operators, and bet when affected by alcohol. The analyses confirmed the strong link between problem gambling severity and financial outlay on betting. Regular sports bettors who were experiencing gambling problems spent 4 times more than their non-problem gambling counterparts did, and those at moderate risk spent 3 times more. Regular race bettors who were experiencing gambling problems spent 3 times more than the non-problem gambling race bettors did, and those at moderate risk spent twice as much. These results suggest that regulatory and other initiatives that help bettors to limit or reduce their financial outlay on betting should be central to harm minimization efforts in order to reduce the growing number of bettors who experience gambling problems and harm