Young Australian gamblers at risk from group betting trend

Recent studies reveal that group betting is dealing considerable damage to young Australian gamblers. A recent phenomenon, group wagering allows multiple people to contribute to single wagers via online betting apps.

A study funded by an Australian Research Council is currently underway to discover gambling’s shifting nature, especially with its move from gaming machines in an establishment to betting on mobile devices.

RMIT University associate professor Dr. Lauren Gurrieri said that although mobile betting was already gaining popularity, gambling firms capitalised on it after it blew up during the pandemic era.

“We saw different social arrangements changing around sports betting. WhatsApp groups, for example, became really popular. People who were isolated in their homes were still able to engage with their friends and harness new ways of being together — and betting at the same time,” Dr. Gurrieri revealed.

“They harnessed social media technologies to enable that same type of social practice to occur [within the apps].”

Riley Pershouse, one of the people interviewed, revealed that, like several young men in the country, he placed bets on sports with his friends. The activity is now a central feature of group conversation amongst them.

He disclosed that they would regularly move from having a non-betting related conversation to talking about the “betting odds of a horse we think might get up”.

Pershouse claimed that while he was addicted to sports, he was not as tied to gambling. Every few weeks, he would fund his gambling account with $5 to place bets on sporting activities like European football, American basketball, and Australian cricket.

Over the past few years, Pershouse and his friends have made use of the group feature in the gambling app on their phones that allows them to contribute money while jointly placing bets.

“It just makes it so easy to go around to a mate’s place, and you put in five bucks, 10 bucks on the horses or whatever — and boom, there’s your afternoon sorted,” he admitted.

“If you do it in groups, there’s the peer pressure aspect, but there’s also the fun of bagging out a mate if he loses. If he wins, everyone’s happy and do it more.”

Pershouse disclosed that the betting company offered his group free bets weekly to keep them on the app and encourage them to use the feature. He said the offers included free bonus bets between $10 to $100, which ultimately made his group stick around.

Dr. Gurrieri noted that gambling firms regularly offered inducements and incentives to customers via digital marketing. In addition to the considerably saturated advertising market, this has made it a task for young people to avoid gambling content.

Dr. Gurrieri also mentioned the abundance of several forms of gambling advertisements during live sporting events and how harmful sports betting applications with targeted individual promotions can be. These include receiving pop-up banners, targeted texts, and emails to encourage customers to place more bets.

“There’s a constant lure to re-engage with the applications,” she added.

A Gamblers Anonymous meeting attendee in Nundah, Craig, revealed an increase in the number of people seeking help for gambling addiction in the Brisbane suburb. He said young people with gambling problems make up a majority of the meeting’s attendees, and many of those gambled in groups.

He also claimed that the effect of group betting is twofold because when the group gets a win, everyone celebrates, and the adrenaline rush is “four or five times higher”. Losing is also better in this case because when it is done as a group, “it doesn’t seem as bad”.

According to Hayden Cahill, a QUT Ph.D. student working on the same study with Dr. Gurrieri, findings reveal that young people feel more connected to their peers through group betting.

“I’ve had a participant talk about how sort of dropping insights in relation to sports betting is like a way to kind of help with conversation among friends. So we can see that in terms of socialisation that sports betting is helping to shape people’s relationships, but also becoming ingrained in their relationships,” Cahill explained.

“It is a kind of social, cultural phenomenon that we have going on at the moment.”

A representative for Australia’s peak body for licensed wagering providers, Responsible Wagering Australia, pointed out that it was too early to identify behavioural trends due to the relatively new nature of group betting in gambling apps.

The peak body highlighted the benefits of group gambling in terms of “player safety and harm minimisation”. Unlike other unmonitored betting platforms, group betting allows gamblers to get “the full suite of player safety tools, such as deposit limits and taking a break/time out”.

Peer monitoring is another advantage of group gambling because the members of the group will be able to keep each other in check when the situation arises.

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