‘Pokie in your pocket': How Aussie teens are getting hooked on gambling

News.com.au

a day ago

'Betting on horses, dogs, footy, basketball — in class, during lunch, all that.'
In a viral TikTok interview earlier this year, a 17-year-old student made a stunning admission.
'People in your class bet?' asked Steve Ryan, co-founder of matched betting website The System.
'One hundred per cent — majority of them,' the teen said.
'Do the teachers not say anything?' Ryan asked.
'Teachers don't see it,' the student replied, adding that some were aware of the problem.
'Oh well, yeah, we'll talk to some of the younger teachers saying, 'Oh, I've got a multi on.' They just don't really care,' he said.
The teen revealed that unlike warnings about pornography, there was no gambling awareness education at his school.
'It's not mentioned in our school,' he said. 'I haven't heard anything about gambling in any of my classes.'
The System, which claims to 'show Aussies the dangers of gambling and then teach them how to make profit' through risk-free matched betting, humorously captioned the clip, 'Are Aussie teenagers doomed?'
But it's a serious question.
Australians lose an estimated $31.5 billion a year on gambling — the highest per capita losses in the world — but more worryingly, many Aussies start well before the legal age of 18.
Experts say the rise of social media gambling influencers, the proliferation of sports betting apps and illegal online casinos, and 'conditioning' from an early age through gambling-style 'lootboxes' in video games, are turbocharging the problem.
'Covid changed everything when it came to gambling,' said Nicola Coalter, a Darwin-based psychologist and gambling expert.
'It took us online so much, that's when the exponential growth in gambling participation seemed to happen. In my private practice I have seen people as young as 16 around gambling and sports betting. I've worked with someone who lost $20,000 in two days.'
Psychiatrist and author Dr Tanveer Ahmed said maybe five years ago he wouldn't have thought to ask a 15-year-old patient about gambling.
'I might ask them about vapes, marijuana, excessive video games, but this is quite a new thing you might ask them,' he said.
'There's more evidence of adolescent gambling and it's partly driven by the online space. The earlier you are exposed to it the more likely you are to develop addiction.'
Various self-reported surveys, including by NSW and Victorian state governments, have put the rates of underage gambling in Australia at about 30-40 per cent.
Among 18- and 19-year-olds, that figure rises to nearly half (46 per cent).
More than 902,000 under-20s have gambled in the last year, of which 600,000 were aged 12 to 17, according to recent analysis by the Australia Institute.
Putting that figure in perspective is a truly startling comparison.
'Australia's teenagers are now more likely to gamble than they are to play any of Australia's most popular sports,' the Australia Institute's Matt Saunders and Morgan Harrington wrote in a March discussion paper.
'The 902,717 12- to 19-year-olds who gamble is more than the 484,490 who play soccer, or the 439,773 who play basketball, which are the two most popular sports among this age group.'
Their report warned teens were 'losing big'.
'Annual expenditure on gambling among teenagers is an estimated $231 million, or an average of $86.72 per teenager per year,' they wrote.
'Of this, 12- to 17-year-olds spend around $18.4 million a year on gambling activities — this is about $30 a year for each underage teenager that admits to gambling. This is relatively small compared to the $213 million a year spent by 18- and 19-year-olds. This is $321 per 18- and 19- year-old, or a staggering $698 a year if limited just to those who do gamble.'
Luca Kante, 23, one of the country's most popular gambling influencers with nearly 230,000 followers on Instagram, has 'gambled since the day I turned 18' and firmly believes 'if you're an adult you can make your own decisions'.
The former Griffith University student stresses, however, that 'with age, I'm very big on that'.
'If you're underage that is just absolutely a no-no,' he said.
But Kante conceded at least some of his fans were underage, saying he had been approached in public for a photo by followers as young as 16.
'Obviously I'm not going to say no to a photo, but I'm just going, 'How do you even know who I am?'' he said. 'Times have changed. Vaping and stuff, I didn't do that [when I was their age]. It's the same with gambling.'
Dr Ahmed said there was a 'huge overlap' between excessive social media use, excessive video game use and gambling.
'There's a gamification component, there's a chase reward, you lose time in a type of flow state where you're totally absorbed,' he said.
'It's such a sophisticated way of exploiting the adolescent brain, which is extra-impulsive and desperate for social approval, and their reward circuits are still immature so they're just super exposed. It is essentially a dopamine hack.'
Addiction to video games and gambling are both now clinically recognised behavioural disorders, and there are growing calls for excessive social media use to be added to major diagnostic systems like the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the World Health Organization's International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD).
All three rely on ever more sophisticated methods of hacking the human brain's reward systems — which have been well understood since American psychologist B.F. Skinner's famous 'Skinner box' experiments on rats and pigeons nearly in the first half of last century.
'This isn't just content, it's behavioural modelling,' Ms Coalter said.
'These influencers are walking reinforcement schedules. From a behaviourist perspective, those accounts are textbook examples of what's called operant conditioning.'
The key element of operant conditioning — a concept in behavioural psychology pioneered by Skinner — is the randomness of rewards.
Just like a pokie player never knows when they'll hit a feature, the 'doomscrolling' social media user is waiting for that next interesting post to pop up on their feed.
'That unpredictability drives engagement,' Ms Coalter said.
'It's the same old reinforcement loop under a new skin. That same schedule drives both pokies and compulsive social media use. Scrolling becomes the cue, gambling becomes the behaviour — cue, behaviour, reward loop. When we're young we might not be able to gamble yet, that's OK, it's all being cued up for us.'
She added, 'We're watching a whole generation get conditioned into gambling the way they were conditioned into scrolling.'
From finely tuned 'return rate' algorithms and 'losses disguised as wins' to physiological stimuli like colourful characters, upbeat jingles and even the smell of the gaming room itself, the pokies industry has turned the art of separating punters from their cash into an exact science.
'[Electronic gambling machine] design very successfully employ psychological principals to maximise users' bet sizes and machine usage,' Monash University gambling researcher Dr Charles Livingstone wrote in a 2017 policy paper.
'These characteristics have the effect of increasing the addictive potential of EGMs.'
But Ms Coalter said sports betting apps and other types of gambling popular with teens could be equally harmful.
'Pokies [are designed] to extract as much as possible within a short amount of time,' she said.
'When it comes to other types of gambling, those reinforcements are still at play, just timed differently. Modern sports betting and apps, that's just like a pokie in your pocket.'
She added that for impressionable young teens, watching their favourite influencer gambling online was a powerful 'social learning' tool.
'The ones watching those getting rewards with money, attention, with clout, that's like vicarious reinforcement,' she said.
'It's pretty powerful. The reward might not be money, it's often the emotional stimulation.'
Indeed, she noted at least part of the appeal was watching influencers lose eye-watering amounts.
'You've got these influencers saying things like, 'I lost $10,000 last night but it's part of the game,' and young people nodding along in the comments,' Ms Coalter said.
'They're not just influencers, they're behaviour shapers. We're watching what often is referred to as disordered gambling behaviour get rebranded as content. That's not informed choice, that's learnt behaviour. We didn't let tobacco influencers target kids but that's essentially what's being done at the moment.'
Dr Ahmed agreed that the glamorisation of gambling losses was insidious.
'Underneath that is 'I can afford to lose that',' he said.
'It's a bit like going off a big jump with your mountain bike. There's an element of flexing, I think males in particular can be attracted to that.'
More broadly, Dr Ahmed said teens increasingly viewed the online environment as a place to rebel, making gambling 'quite attractive on that front because it does feel a bit naughty'.
He said it was 'not dissimilar' to the appeal of controversial influencer Andrew Tate.
'Tate will have some misogynistic idea but wrapped up in a lifestyle that's attractive for a lot of young men — great body, hot women, going on nice holidays,' he said.
'You can be popular, you can buy nice stuff, and linked to that here's this fun thing you can do with your friends. That's more attractive to adolescents. They're going to be very socially driven, it's all about peer belonging. They're all about self-comparison, they're more impulsive and they're less able to quantify risk.'