The Morality of Gambling

Something far too rarely discussed in the online gambling world is the dark side of gambling. There are current situations both in Norway and in Sweden where people have used the confidence of employers and families to gamble with 10 million kronor or more (more than 1 MEUR) of their own, their employer's and their families' money.

This is nothing short of horrible and completely unacceptable!

It is very bad from a moral perspective but also from a business and branding perspective. The online gambling sites involved have no or very little local presence in Sweden and Norway and probably do not care about the consequences, just do high-fives and love the sweet cash injected in their bank accounts. In a licensed world their licenses should be revoked, but my guess is that they do not have a European gambling license.

At Mr Green we do not reason like our online casino competitors. We offer an entertainment service. Online casinos are about entertainment, a little break from everyday life and a relief from the stress and pressure from work, family and convention. I am not a fool. Casinos are not about making the world a better place, but very few services and products do actually make the world a better place. It is entertainment. If you feel entertainment as such is a bad thing, well then I guess you can stop reading here.

The Dark Side of Gambling

However, there is a dark side to online gambling. There are abusers and gambling addicts who can not control their entertainment and turn it into a personal disaster. This was my main concern prior to joining Mr Green and developing the business idea into a full-blown online casino web site. Gambling has a great potential to destroy people's personal economy. Still there is a great interest in gambling and it is one of the most interesting things you can develop online in 2008 if you are not working at Google and it is basically a wonderful and hyper-competitive business case for marketing and high-tech development geeks. Also, casino games are fun. How could you combine an online casino web site with some social consciousness? Was it even possible?

We believe online gambling to be entertainment. Just like the movies, reading a book or listening to a great tune sung by Mr Tony Bennett. Any comparisons to drugs, sex trade or guns is therefore moot, even though we get arguments like "so what's next if you fail this one? guns?" all the time. I have written a few (non-published) books. When writing them, no one suggested I should change trades into running guns or starting a prostitution ring. Why is it different with casinos?

I guess the answer lies in the great risk of abuse. Online casinos are very addictive. You play fast and furious. If you compare a casino to lottery, you may buy a lottery every week, while you play on the French Roulette every two minutes. This creates a situation where you are tempted to try to "win back losses" and other types of risky behavior.

Some companies in our arena claim that abuse and addiction is for society to handle. However, I do not think one can blame society or even say that society need to arrange for the treatment for damages caused by products or services put on the market by yourself. Therefore, I think we have responsibility to do everything we can to ensure that our services are enjoyed by people who can handle it.

Online Gambling Provides Opportunity

There is a big difference between online and offline gambling. In online gambling we have an opportunity to monitor and find abusers. That is much harder in offline gambling. If you buy lottery tickets you can do it anonymously in fifty shops in the same day and no one would suspect that you were an abuser. If you deposit money fifty times in an online casino the management will notice. You are not anonymous playing in an online casino.

So basically, what I think needs to be done is:

Try to make users set limits to their gambling prior to starting gambling. We call this Grönt Spel or green gaming and we will continuously enhance this functionality.

Monitoring of behavior and try to identify abusers and addicts. The first thing is always to find the abusers.

Confront users with risk behavior. Sometimes a phone call makes a big difference. Some players can handle to play with larger sums, while others can not handle playing with even lower sums.

Treat abusers. This is the hardest part. It is very hard to find good working treatment for gambling abuse. In for example Sweden very few clinics can offer working therapy. Most clinics just lock the abusers in, which is not really a very nice and long-term way of treating this, also with very poor outcome. We would need come cognitive based therapy for gambling addiction, even though this is one of the hardest thing to treat (just alongside alcohol addiction).

Online gambling is regulated and should be. However, very little says that monopolies are better suited to deal with gambling addiction than private initiatives. On the contrary private initiatives are often more far-going than the state monopolies. Why? Well, it is really bad for business to bring on customers that loses all they own and then some. It will create bad publicity, it will hurt your brand and from a moral perspective you will have a really hard time living with yourself. At least I would feel that way.

After all, this is supposed to be fun. Therefore, casino operators that allow users to play for millions, well, they should be banned and their licenses revoked.But then of course, they probably do not have any licenses. And this is why casino should be regulated in every EU country. Non-licensed companies should not be allowed to offer their services. It is all about the morality of gambling.

Mikael Pawlo
Managing Director
Mr Green