A third of online gamblers in Pennsylvania feel they’ve had a problem with their gambling, a new survey finds
The number of people looking for help with a gambling addiction has grown since online gambling became available to Pennsylvanians in 2019.
More people in their 20s and 30s in Pennsylvania are seeking help for gambling problems, state officials say, and a new survey shows that one in three Pennsylvanians who gamble online feel their gambling habits are a problem.
In 2022, about 11% of Pennsylvanians had gambled online, according to an annual survey intended to gauge the impact of legal online gambling in the state. Sports betting was the most popular form of online gambling, followed by online slots and online fantasy sports.
The typical online gambler, according to the survey, is a married white man in his mid-to-late 30s, making over $50,000 a year, who prefers sports betting and gambles for “enjoyment.” Pennsylvanians living in the southwest quadrant of the state are most likely to gamble online, the survey found.
Online gambling is a significant — and growing — business in the state, generating $1.2 billion in yearly profits between the 14 websites approved to run gambling operations, said Ellen DiDomenico, the deputy secretary of the state Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs.
Some of the hundreds of millions in tax revenue produced fund a number of gambling addiction treatment and prevention programs, and state grants pay for dozens of licensed counselors to treat under- or uninsured people addicted to gambling.
Each year, the state releases a study based on the most recent version of a regular survey required under the law legalizing online gambling. Here’s what it showed for 2022:
More types of games, more people playing
The number of people looking for help for gambling issues has grown since online gambling became available to Pennsylvanians in 2019, said Josh Ercole, the executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania. Ercole’s group runs the state hotline, 1-800-GAMBLER, which people who feel they may be addicted to gambling can call for help.
In 2019, he said, the organization fielded 1,134 hotline calls from people looking for help with their gambling. By 2022, the organization fielded 2,621 calls, more than double than in 2019.
The demographics of people who have called for help have also changed, he said. Before 2019, most of the hotline’s callers were 35 to 55-year-olds; more recently, 25 to 34-year-olds are its most frequent callers.
“We suspect there are more problems because there’s more types of games, and more people playing them,” he said.
A separate state study looking at all people who called the helpline during the 2021-2022 fiscal year found that 23% of callers identified slots as their “most problematic” form of gambling. An additional 20% of those who called for help said they had the most trouble with online gambling.
“We also feel that there’s probably more awareness of the helpline services now,” Ercole said.
Some online gamblers say they are trying to cut back
According to the most recent survey on online gambling, about a quarter of people who gambled online said they had tried to cut down, control, or stop their gambling in the last year.
About 10% said they had either gambled longer, with more money, or more frequently than they wanted to, or needed to gamble with more money to feel the same excitement they had when they began gambling.
Just over 5% said they had been “preoccupied” with gaming or gambling.
None of the respondents reported borrowing money or selling possessions to gamble.
At the hotline, people seeking help with gambling can get connected to outpatient treatment or to a recovery support group like Gamblers Anonymous, which neither supports nor opposes gambling expansion in Pennsylvania, given how widespread the options already are.
A member named Walt, who’s active in a number of local support groups and asked to go by his first name to protect his privacy, said his preferred method of gambling was in person.
But, he said, the compulsion to gamble can have little to do with where or how you do it. “Gambling is always there, regardless of whether someone’s come up with a new thing,” he said.