Gamblor’s World

By ANTONELLA ARTUSO, QUEEN’S PARK BUREAU CHIEF, Thu, November 22, 2007, Ottawa Sun

TORONTO — The Ontario minister who oversees the lottery corporation says he’s confident it has a handle on the “insider” wins problem.

“It’s a fair game,” Public Infrastructure Minister David Caplan said yesterday.

The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation has disclosed the number of ticket retailers and OLG staff winning $50,000 or more in jackpots has increased since it began cracking down on insider fraud last November.

Over the past year, one in 20 big jackpots went to insiders.

The OLG says it’s just being more vigilant in tracking insiders.

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Posted: 21 November 2007 | Subscribe Online writes Natalie Valios

You probably don’t see yourself as a gambler. But many of us - about 32 million to be precise - have participated in some form of gambling in the past year. And when you look at the number of ways in which we can lose our money - from playing the National Lottery, bingo or gaming machines to betting on the horses, doing the football pools or visiting casinos - odds are that most of us gamble more often than we believe.

Since the Gambling Act 2005 relaxed rules on advertising for casinos and online gambling sites and introduced powers to license so-called super-casinos, fears have been raised about a possible surge in problem gamblers. Just before the British Gambling Prevalence Survey 2007 was published two months ago there was a flurry of media stories predicting exactly this.

But they were wrong. Contrary to speculation, the number classed as problem gamblers - more than 250,000 - is about the same as in the last prevalence survey in 1999. And the number of adults who gamble has fallen by about one million in the past eight years.

However, with more than £10bn expected to be lost by punters next year, Mark Griffiths, professor of gambling studies at Nottingham Trent University, denies claims of scaremongering over the problem.

“People seem to think there’s no problem because it has stabilised,” says Griffiths, who co-authored the prevalence study. “But a quarter of a million adult problem gamblers is a public health issue.

“Problem gambling can negatively affect significant areas of a person’s life, including their physical and mental health, employment, finances and relationships.”

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Author: James Ihaka
Source: New Zealand Herald
Published Date: Nov 23, 2007

Full Document:
NEW ZEALAND — Desperate poker machine gamblers are stripping homes of essential fittings to finance their habit.
Some Housing New Zealand tenants in South Auckland have ripped carpet, ovens, stair rails, doors and water cylinders from their homes and sold them to scrap yards and pawnbrokers.

A Manurewa woman, who did not want to be named, told the Herald her husband’s problem gambling had escalated from spending “$10 every now and then” to selling his family’s hot water supply and oven for his pokie fix at a local bar.

“He ripped out the hot water cylinder and sold it for $230 at a scrap metal yard,” she said. “I think it was later that week when he took the oven and sold that too - it didn’t seem to bother him that we had two children to feed.”

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