FOBT's Too high a price for just a flutter?

I can't find the front page article from the Newmarket Journal this week online

"Machine gamblers bet £80m"

1.4 Billion in profits per annum for the bookmaking (    ) industry !

^ Stop putting the ''greenbacks'' in Sky !

Casino-led regeneration was the only real solution for a resort which "has some of the most disadvantaged and deprived communities in the country. Blackpool is in steady but not yet terminal decline.

A quote from a Labour Councillor in the Blackpool Gazette after they lost out to Manchester in the race for a super casino.

Forgive me if I find the whole charade of FOBT outrage more than a little disingenuous.

Well done A.D. , keep up the fight and keep these anti FOBT threads going as the war is still on
for some realistic control legislation for what is a real social and local economic problem, keep it up

Nah, the majority of gambling problems that I here about locally are all todo with these FOBTs
and players are constantly borrowing money of banks, friends and family to feed the addiction
.also petty crime must be a side effect of any involvement with a desperate addiction.

online gambling allows you to set limits on amounts you can lose, but the whole point with these
threads and the watchdog reports is that NO CONTROL methods are used with FOBT and..,.

in fact
all bookmaker managers can see on a monitor how much people are betting and losing and do nothing about it!

you have a bit of a habit of just dismissing views that you don't want to hear clive. it can't be easy being in the immoral minority.

I think you meant moral minority, northanlite ?

Clive is the master of the "clutching at straws" tacticm, whilst Banned-Banks like to throw in the occasional comparison to other forms of gambling to simply deflect from the real debate.

No i definitely  meant immoral wtf

I raise it because it is a valid question.

Plenty more is lost online however because it isn't visible to others it doesn't gain the same profile. Everybody in the pub will know of someone who has lost on the machines because it will have been witnessed by others. When did you last hear someone confide that they had maxed out all their cards online punting? 

The only time such things come to light is when they end up in court.

It doesn’t take a PhD in neurobiology to conclude that slot machines are designed to lure people into a money-draining repetition, just as it doesn’t take expertise in the casino business to realize slots are absurdly profitable – there’s a reason why they outnumber table games 100-to-1. But I wanted to go back to the scientific literature to confirm a faint glimmer of information I retained from graduate school, specifically that slot machines are masterful manipulators of our brain’s natural reward system. Every feature – the incessant noise, the flashing lights, the position of the rolls and the sound of the coins hitting the dish – is designed to hijack the parts of our brain designed for the pursuit of food and sex and turn it into a river of quarters. Or so I remember.

Fortunately, there is a robust amount of research into why slot machines are so addictive, despite being specifically designed to pay out less than people put in. They are, some scientists have concluded, the most addictive of all the ways humans have designed to gamble, because pathological gambling appears faster in slots players and more money is spent on the machines than other forms of gambling. In Spain, where gambling is legal and slot machines can be found in most bars, more than 20.3 billion dollars was spent on slots in 2008 – 44% of the total money spent by Spaniards on gambling last year.


That data was published earlier this month by a psychologist from the Universidad de Valencia named Mariano Choliz in the Journal of Gambling Studies. Yes, such a publication exists! In the background of the paper, Choliz outlines the tricks that slot machines use to keep people feeding them:

Operating on a random payout schedule, but appearing to be a variable payout; i.e. fooling the player into thinking that the more money they play, the more likely they are to win.
“The illusion of control” in pressing buttons or pulling a lever to produce the outcome.
The “near-miss” factor (more on this below)
Increased arousal (where the sounds and flashing lights come in)
Able to be played with very little money; the allure of “penny” slots.
And perhaps most importantly, immediate gratification.
This last point is the subject of Choliz’s experiment, which puts a group of ten pathological gamblers in front of two different slot machines. One machine produces a result (win or lose) 2 seconds after the coin was virtually dropped (it was computer program), the other delayed the result until 10 seconds after the gambler hit play. In support of the immediate gratification theory, gamblers played almost twice as long on the 2-second machines than they did on the 10-second machines…even though the 10-second machines paid out more money on average!

Choliz concluded that the immediacy of the reward was part of what kept people at slot machines, making them so addictive. The quick turnaround between action and reward also allows people to get into a repetitious, uninterrupted behavior, which Choliz compares to the “Skinner boxes” of operant conditioning – the specialized cages where rats hit a lever for food or some other reward. It seems like a cruel comparison, but after my three days walking through the casinos, not an inaccurate one.

Another trick up the slot machine’s sleeve was profiled earlier this year by a group of scientists from the University of Cambridge. In the journal Neuron, Luke Clark and colleagues examined the “near-miss” effect, the observation that barely missing a big payout (i.e. two cherries on the payline while the third cherry is just off) is a powerful stimulator of gambling behavior.

The Cambridge researchers put their subjects in an fMRI machine to take images of their brains while they played a two-roll slot machine game. When the players hit a match and won money, the reward systems of the brain predictably got excited – the activation of areas classically associated to respond to food or sex I mentioned earlier. When players got a “near-miss,” they reported it as a negative experience, but also reported an increased desire to play! That feeling matched up with activation of two brain areas commonly associated with drug addiction: the ventral striatum and the insula (smokers who suffer insular damage suddenly lose the desire to smoke).

Clark and co. conclude that near-misses produce an “illusion of control” in gamblers, exploiting the credo of “practice makes perfect.” If you were learning a normal task such as hitting a baseball, a “near-miss” foul ball would suggest that you’re getting closer – it’s better than a complete whiff, after all. But for a slot machine, where pulling the lever has no impact on the rolls other than to start them moving and start the internal computer calculating, a “near-miss” is as meaningless as any miss.

Nevertheless, it’s this type of “cognitive distortion,” as Clark and colleagues name it, that makes slot machines such effective manipulators of our brains. Those massive, gaudy casino-hotels that I wore out a pair of shoes strolling through last week weren’t just built on a crafty use of probability, they were built on a exploitation of brain functions we are only just beginning to understand.

Not too many put their dole/housing benefit on Betfair Banksie..Unlike you crack-addict machines

Unlike you crack-addict machines

The machines are nothing to do with me.

seems alot of porridge for a little apple crumble, silly man

EG , i was speaking to a woman that used to be a cashier but is now some sort of area manager .
she told me that this is happening alot in her shops , where a worker from india or abroad works in the shops for a year or two and then when they are going back to there country they do a runner with the takings

need to be banned , only an idiot would play them, and that is mug money that can be bet on horse races.

these machines provide a very small industry compared to the other betting options.

"Obviously an illegal form of money-making, but morally not all that different from the legal (for the time being) one that his bosses conduct !"

Or by your logic WFT, it is not that different morally from you taking money off other BF users. (Assuming you've ever backed a winner.)

I am more concerned about the MASSIVE overuse of salt in our food chain,which we are unaware of,and is very harmful.

Here we go again. Let's change the subject. This has got to be a desperate stance.

Let me use the apologist's argument for salt....

Where is the evidence that salt actually hurts anyone ?

Why can't people be allowed to choose for themselves ?

Too much sugar in food is just as bad as salt, but nobody complains about that.

Familiar apologist arguments ?

By the way, I don't use much salt as I am aware of it's overuse. I never eat processed food.

And I never play FOBTs !!