MORE INTERESTING INFO FROM BWIN STUDY OF ONLINE SPORTSBETTING

20 July 2007

High-stakes women gamblers who use the Internet to wager on games win more often than men, according to a Harvard Medical School study

The Bwin-sponsored Harvard Medical School study of online sportsbettors continues to reveal interesting and useful information on betting demographics and patterns.

The latest results released from the 40 499-person study "favour women as exhibiting more effective sports gambling behaviour than men,'' wrote Massachusetts-based author Richard LaBrie and his team of researchers. The results of the study, to be published later this year by Berlin-based Axel Springer, were carried in Bloomberg news service reports Friday.

Women wager higher stakes with more intensity than men. According to the study's sample, women risked an average Euros 15 ($20.17) per wager and bet 15 percent more often than men in a defined time period. Men, who comprised almost 92 percent of the study's sample, wagered an average Euros 11 per bet.

The study used data from Bwin Interactive Entertainment AG, an Austrian online bookmaker. The conclusions are based on eight months of gambling patterns directly observed from player records in 2005.

The survey's biggest bettors were 50 percent less likely to lose than smaller players, according to the 16-page report, titled Assessing the Playing Field: A Prospective Longitudinal Study of Internet Sports Gambling Behaviour.

People who wagered a median Euro 44 per bet lost 9 percent of the time, while people who wagered Euro 1 per bet lost 18 percent of the time.

"Individuals who made larger wagers lost proportionately less than individuals who made smaller wagers,'' the researchers said. "These players place extreme amounts of money at risk but extreme losses did not moderate their play.''

Earlier reports from the study cast doubts on assertions that online sportsbetting is addictive.

"The findings reported here do not support the speculation that Internet gambling has an inherent propensity to encourage excessive gambling among a large group of players,'' according to the report. The authors recommend further study to test whether Internet gamblers fail to "meet other obligations."

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