Video lottery terminals is the game of choice among Quebec's problem gamblers, a new study reveals.
If you're born to lose there's a pretty good chance this is what you look like: you're a guy, you're single, you didn't go further than high school, you're pulling down no more than $40,000 a year and there's a fair to middling chance you like to play video poker.
Not actually James Bond at the baccarat table, but statistical analysis always has a way of bringing you back to Earth.
After more than a decade of hypotheses, bitter fingerpointing, human destruction and the sound of a provincial government furrowing its brows all the way to the bank, a high-end survey of just who is betting and losing their money in Quebec's gambling industry has been published.
The study's scale is so big (9,000 persons surveyed over a nine-month period last year) it's been divided into two reports - one dealing with Quebecer's gambling behaviour and the amount of pathological gambling that can be linked to a particular game; the other providing an overall look at gambling and its potential for addiction throughout Quebec.
The good news is the number of gamblers in this province has remained relatively stable over the period between 1996 and 2002. The bad news is the pool of addicted gamblers could number as high as 56,000 Quebecers, while as many as 62,000 could be "at risk" - possibly on their way to joining those floundering in pool No. 1.
But even then, Robert Ladouceur of Laval University's centre for gambling treatment and prevention, which co-produced the study, points out that's good news insofar as those numbers have remained stable during the period six-year period studied.
Just why that occurred, however, is a matter of debate.
"Over the past seven years there has been an expansion in the (availability) of gambling," he says, "But there has been no increase or decrease in the number of problem gamblers."
Ladouceur speculates that increased medical and media scrutiny on the dangers of problem gambling may have actually kept those numbers stable. But he would like to see a long-term study following the "at risk" group to see how many walk away from the table.
Given the study of a billion-dollar gambling operation run by the state cost $175,000 in government funding, it would seem taxpayers got some bang for their buck with the survey.
"The Health Department had just created a treatment program for problem gamblers in Quebec and we needed to find out an idea of how many we might have and what their characteristics might be," says Serge Chevalier, a sociologist at the Quebec Institute of Public Health.
"Which means it needed a (survey) sampling from each type of game (of chance)."
Not surprisingly, the study found 81 per cent of Quebecers gambled at least once a year, gambling in this case defined as anything from playing the lottery to engaging in a floating poker game with friends and family to hoping against hope at the bingo hall.
That number is down from the 90 per cent researchers tallied in 1996 and is a decrease researchers speculate could be attributed to increase media scrutiny on the dangers of pathological gambling or to would-be players simply disappointed with the casino experience who walked away.
Video lottery terminals seem to attract the highest proportion of problem gamblers (14 per cent) and with an average annual per player take of $884, provides the provincial government with a larger take of gambling losses than the other games it runs.
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