According to the recent series of reports released by the Responsible Gambling Trust, an unfavorable light was shined on the use of fixed-odds betting terminals in the United Kingdom’s sports betting shops. The studies show that unemployed people, problem gamblers and ethnic minorities are more likely to play these machines and bet the maximum £100 wager.
The study was conducted by three companies, Featurespace, NatCen Social Research and Geofutures and used the dataset of the 4K users of FOBTs taken from a sample of players who had owned loyalty cards at bookmakers. The people behind the research pointed out that that the results are don’t represent all FOBTs users but only highly endangered players.
The feature that was most criticized is the max wager of £100. The research of the Responsible Gambling Trust revealed that these bets represent only 0.26 percent of all bets on FOBTs. Most of the £100 wagers have occurred in bundles and 80 percent of the gaming sessions include £100 wagers containing more than one max wager.
Furthermore, according to the research, approximately 16 percent of all players placed at least one wager of £100, but numbers go up to 24 percent for bettors aged 44-54 and 20 percent for those aged higher than 65 years-old. In comparison, the percentage of bettors aged 18-24 that have placed at least one £100 bet is 9.
Numbers related to ethnicity reveal that 38 percent of black players wagered one £100 bet, compared to 32 percent of Asians and 14 percent of white people. Furthermore, unemployed holders of loyalty cards were more likely to place £100 bets more often. Self-employed individuals got the highest numbers i.e. 23 percent on the maximum wager prevalence scale.
Lastly, 18 percent of the bettors with incomes below £10,400 had bet one max wager compared to 13 and 15 percent of them earning between £10,400 and £32k while 19 percent of them earning higher than £32k had been making a max bet at least once.