Study Shows Almost 40% of Gamblers Overestimate Risk Behavior

Bet on Awareness, the campaign with a focus on harmful gambling behavior conducted by award-winning safer gambling software Mindway AI, testing agency and standards organization in online gambling, eCOGRA, and CasinoReviews.net, has come to an end. 

A “Gamified Reinvention of the Self-Test”

The study, which was aimed at investigating players’ gaming habits and risk assessment, collected data via a card game created with the help of Mindway AI’s Gamalyze tool. 

Mindway AI chief executive officer Rasmus Kjaergaard described the tool as one that can encourage players “to understand their risk profile and their decision making while they are gambling.”

He added that Gamalyze is a “gamified reinvention of the self-test” which makes self-testing “more user-friendly, engaging and actionable” compared to standard questionnaires applied to players.

181 of the 236 initiated games were assessed via this tool with the help of neuroimaging and analyses. 

Elements like player sensitivity to loss and reward and sensitivity to win frequency were also under scrutiny. 

Each of the assessed games received a numbered “risk score.” Players were asked to guess their risk score. 

The two numbers were then used to determine players’ perceptions of their own risk-taking. 

94 of the 181 analyzed games fell into the higher risk category with the remainder of 87 games falling into the lower risk categories. 

Around 16.5% of the study participants underestimated their gambling risk-taking while 39% of them overestimated the risk. 

Most games (110) fell into the –10 to +30 assessment range, which would suggest the average player likely perceives their gambling risk-taking as either close to or over the actual risk-taking. 

Winning, More Motivational Than Losing

The study also addressed players’ sensitivity to loss, revealing most (47) of the games indicated a 0-10% sensitivity to loss. 

In other words, players are more motivated to keep gambling by winnings than losses. 

The same measurement recorded a rather even spread across the 0-100% sensitivity brackets. This proved that rewards are the ones that actually motivate ongoing play.  

However, 91 games fell into low to moderate persistence brackets (0-30%), showing most players do not tend to be too persistent in pursuing wins after reaching a certain point.  

CasinoReviews.net’s product owner, Nikoleta Kuncheva, praised the campaign for highlighting “critical areas where intervention is needed.”

The Bet on Awareness campaign was originally announced at the end of March as a way to mark an important milestone in responsible gambling efforts worldwide while offering users innovative methods to control their spending.