Online Gambling And Slots ‘Dangerous Games’ On The Rise During Quarantine

To combat this scourge , they ask that young people have real leisure alternatives because they “play for fun” and that “the precarious structures behind it do not go unnoticed.”

On average, two out of every three people under the age of 30 surveyed when leaving gambling houses claimed to have addiction problems, something that the study attributes to the fact that pathological gambling has skyrocketed with the increase in these rooms. The causes are underlying the precariousness of youth and the situations of vital discomfort that they face due to the limited resources of psychological support.

In this scenario, their main claim is to work on coordinated policies between administrations to end addiction and its derived problems, with the support of the new Gaming Law that they see as very necessary but not as restrictive as it could be by not ending addiction. the slots in the bars.

As concrete actions, those responsible for the analysis ask that young people be able to access quality public leisure alternatives that do not pose a risk to health, especially in areas where there are not so many spaces for them to have fun. “Gambling houses are always an option,” Mañas lamented, to point out that “one of the motivations for starting is to earn money.”

This means, for the Youth Council, that there is a structure of youth precariousness behind that is conditioning it, in view of which it demands that “it not go unnoticed and try to end it”, taking into account that young people face temporary rates 92%, 28% unemployment and 46% inactivity: “If what they want is to earn money and become emancipated, they look for these alternatives, they have to be taken into account.”

But the study also shows that around 25% of the players start to “alleviate their discomfort”, which may also be related to the chronification of poverty among young people and the mental instability and anxiety they suffer from their uncertain future.

By gender, 46.6% of the minors surveyed admitted to playing at some time compared to the percentage of 13% among girls, although in other areas such as bingo there are no differences. And by age, the proportion of pathological players between the ages of 18-30 is up to 20 times higher than that of the youth population.

The most frequent online games in children’s leisure, according to the study, are sports betting (22%), online poker (3.7%), online casino (3.3%) and other bets from mobile devices (1%). To this is added that the vast majority of minors who gamble do so in bars.

Sports betting is positioned as the most frequent game among minors, on average between one and three times a month, starting in bars and ending in specialized rooms, given the advantage of playing in company and in an attractive environment.

Among those who play regularly, users of private games such as bingo (30%), casino games (28.9%), poker (28.5%) and slots (26%) have more addiction problems. Of course, the highest rate of youth addiction among regular players is in online gambling, both face-to-face and telematic, up to 52.6% in slots or 48.7% in bingo.