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Catherine Lawson, Canwest News Service Published: Saturday, May 31, 2008
OTTAWA -- "There's a Frenchman, a Canadian, a Vietnamese, a Portuguese, a Mexican, an Egyptian ... " So begins the frequently broadcast commercial for PartyPoker.net. It's a funny ad, with a cute punchline: "And their butts are getting kicked by my Mom at Party Poker."
It's just one of several ads for PartyPoker.net, a free site where you can learn to play poker with virtual money. If you want, you can watch all the ads on the website, including the funny yet creepy one where an octogenarian beds a buxom blond. "Good at bluffing? Play PartyPoker.net."
And then there are the ads for Party Poker's competitors in the play-for-fun market. UltimateBet.net's spot compares the online gaming experience to the thrill of the race-car track. The arty black-and-white spots for Full Tilt Poker all end with the same invitation: "Learn, chat and play with the pros."
To the casual viewer, it may seem curious that big dollars are being spent promoting sites where you can play poker for free. What the ads never mention is that these dot-net sites all have dot-com doppelgangers where you can play poker with real money. Lots of it. Or that online gambling, worldwide, is a $15-billion-a-year business -- up from $12 billion two years ago.
And while these ads do not appear to be aimed at any particular age group, some observers are concerned this marketing juggernaut will lead to an alarming increase in the number of young gambling addicts.
Jeffrey Derevensky is co-director of McGill University's International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems. He says a recent study revealed "25 per cent of kids who gamble on the Internet are what we call probable pathological gamblers."
It varies from study to study, but from 1.5 per cent to three per cent of the adult population is vulnerable to problem gambling. For youth, the rate is two to four times that.
"Young brains are not fully mature," explains John Macdonald, an addiction therapist at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. "Kids tend to feel bulletproof."
There are many barriers that keep young people away from conventional gambling. They're banned from casinos and not allowed to buy lottery tickets. If they meet to play poker, the stakes are usually small.
The Internet, however, has no hours of operation and no bouncers. "The good news is you generally need a credit card," says Mr. Derevensky.
A particularly dangerous time is when a young person leaves home for university, armed with a credit card. Both Mr. Derevensky and Mr. Macdonald have counselled students whose obsession with online gambling led them to drop classes.
Mr. Derevensky says young people are also targeted with e-mails and pop-up ads on related sites.
"It's advertised like crazy," he says. "Celebrities endorse it. It looks glamorous."
The websites with the big advertising budgets are but the sparkly tip of the proverbial iceberg. Toronto gaming law specialist Michael Lipton estimates that worldwide there are about 1,300 websites offering gambling, including poker, blackjack and sports betting.
CasinoCity.com, a website that monitors (and subtly promotes) online gaming, puts the count closer to 1,900.
"The genie's out of the bottle," says Mr. Lipton, who adds governments in Canada should start regulating to get some proceeds from the windfall. The United Kingdom has recently begun to do so, and some of the bigger companies are publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. In the United States, an attempt by Congress two years ago to ban online gambling was a dismal failure.
Under the Criminal Code, it's illegal to advertise games of chance (like scratch-and-win tickets) or mixed skill and chance (like poker), with the exception, of course, of those run by provincial lottery corporations. By promoting the free "learn to play" poker sites, the television ads don't contravene any laws.
There are no specific inducements on the free dot-net sites to switch to play for money on the dot-coms. However, do a Google search for Full Tilt or Party Poker, and it's the dot-com sites that appear at the top of the search list.
Another very subtle method has been identified by Mr. Macdonald at the Centre for Addiction. "You can get very good on a free site and get all fired up to take it on for real," but, he has observed, "Highly skilled players won't hang around the free sites."
Mr. Macdonald, who has been counselling addicts for 11 years, says online gambling has become "a significant problem" in the past four years. In particular, he noticed a spike during the 2004-2005 NHL lockout, when a dearth of hockey led programmers to televise more poker tournaments.
Youth are more attracted to online gambling because the design of the sites is similar to video games. "We've raised a generation of kids on video games," says Dr. Derevensky, who adds that young people expect these online games of chance to function like video games and reason that the more they play the better they will become.
"We did a focus group with kids. They tell us that poker is not gambling," says Dr. Derevensky. "It's a sport because they see it on TSN."
Dr. Derevensky, who stresses he is not opposed to gambling, says the only defence is education. It's not just kids who need to be educated, but also parents who encourage kids to have a poker tournament in the basement as a safe alternative to a night out drinking. "Parents need to learn that what looks like a fun, innocuous game may escalate," says Dr. Derevensky.
Parental controls on the home computer are the only way to keep under-18s away from online gambling. The sites merely ask players to declare they are over 18. Party Poker goes further than most in that it has a list of suggestions on how to prevent kids from accessing its games, including keeping credit card details secret and creating separate profiles for everyone who uses the home computer.
Governments are slowly awakening to online gambling. In Canada, there is one entity scrutinizing online gaming -- the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, situated on Mohawk land outside Montreal. Chuck Barnett of Mohawk Internet Technologies said in an e-mail interview that there are about 65 licensed iGaming operators under the authority of the KGC. "This translates into roughly 475 online sites."
According to the Criminal Code, only provincial governments can licence gaming, but except for a smattering of prosecutions, online gambling continues.
Lipton, the lawyer, says it's in part because the Mohawks have a strong constitutional argument that gambling is part of their "ancient customary rites."
Although the KGC is a major player, Antigua, Costa Rica, Gibraltar and the Isle of Man also license sites.
These self-proclaimed regulators work to ensure programs are cheat-proof and payouts are prompt, not to keep underage gamblers out of the game.
Mr. Barnett says the Mohawks have stepped in to fill a vacuum. "While other governments and territories have chosen to avoid the issue and actually attempt to prohibit its existence, we have instead accepted the responsibility of providing the safest, best-regulated environment in the world."
Mr. Lipton says governments have the choice to "tolerate or regulate" because the experience in the U.S. proves bans don't work. The 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act put the onus on banks to disallow transactions through gambling sites. A couple of companies, including Party Poker, withdrew from the American market, but the rest just rewrote the fine print on their sites ("Before playing in our real money games, please check with your local jurisdiction regarding the legality of Internet gaming") and continued as usual.
"The Internet is worldwide and you can't go into people's houses and stop them doing what they've been doing," says Mr. Lipton.
No matter how old they are.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=555568 |
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发表于 2008-6-1 21:23
