Who uses custom sports betting products?

Abstract

Background

The expansion of online gambling in the UK has been accompanied by an increase in the number of novel betting products, particularly for soccer. The present research investigates which types of sports bettors are the most likely to use novel gambling products called ‘custom sports bets’ (CSBs), which allow gamblers to create their own unique bets.

Method

A large-scale, cross-sectional survey of online sports/horse racing bettors (n = 789, 32.7% female). The survey collected two measures of CSB usage and four validated gambling measures: the Problem Gambling Severity Index, the Gambling Related Cognition Illusion of Control Scale, the Short Gambling Harm Screen, and the Consumption Screen for Problem Gambling.

Results

Overall, 62.0% of participants reported having used a CSB, and those who had used a CSB did so on an average of 29.4 days over the last year. Overall, 16.0% of participants who had used a CSB were current problem gamblers, compared to 6.7% among those who had not. CSB users reported an average of 2.3 out of 10 possible gambling harms, compared to 1.5 harms for those who had not used a CSB. The illusion of control scale was significantly positively correlated with whether participants had ever used a CSB before, but not with past-year frequency of CSB usage. The usage of CSB products was most strongly associated with the frequency of gambling consumption.

Conclusions

Overall, these findings suggest that CSB products raise distinctive concerns around consumer protection for frequent sports bettors which deserve further investigation.

Keywords:

• Gambling
• problem gambling
• gambling harm
• gambling consumption

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Matthew Rockloff for a number of helpful suggestions that greatly improved the text.

Disclosure statement

In the last three years Philip Newall has contributed to research projects funded by GambleAware, Gambling Research Australia, NSW Responsible Gambling Fund, and the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation. In 2019 Philip Newall received travel and accommodation funding from the Spanish Federation of Rehabilitated Gamblers. In 2020 Philip Newall received an open access fee grant from Gambling Research Exchange Ontario. Rebecca Cassidy has, in the past 3 years, received travel expenses from government departments and from organisations which derive their funding from government departments (including through hypothecated taxes on gambling) including the University of Helsinki Centre for Research on Addiction, Control and Governance; the Alberta Gambling Research Institute; the New Zealand Ministry of Health; the New Zealand Problem Gambling Foundation and The Gambling and Addictions Research Centre at Auckland University of Technology. Rebecca Cassidy also paid to attend industry-sponsored events and attended free, industry-supported events in order to conduct anthropological fieldwork. Elliot Ludvig was co-investigator on a grant funded by the Alberta Gambling Research Institute that ended in February 2019. The other authors have no interests to declare.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/u4m6w, https://osf.io/u4m6w and https://osf.io/u4m6w. To obtain the author's disclosure form, please contact the Editor.

Notes

1 The original preregistration states that Beta regression would be used for the continuous measure of custom bet usage. However, it is recommended that fractal regression (a similar technique) is used instead of beta regression when a significant proportion of the data is at one of the end points, as is the case here (Stata Corp 2019).

Additional information

Funding

Funds for this study were obtained through the Goldsmiths Anthropology Department Impact Fund.