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Gambling industry walking a fine line during sporting lockdown – Malachy Clerkin

It’s Thursday night and the darts is on. No, really. Martin ‘Wolfie’ Adams is taking on Scott ‘Scottie Dog’ Mitchell in actual live sport that you can actually sit down and watch. Okay, so it isn’t on TV – you need to stream it on a site called Dartshop.tv. And granted, they’re not actually sharing an oche – they’re in their respective houses, throwing at their own dartboards.
Nor, for that matter, can you actually see either of them. Both players have one webcam, zeroed in on their dartboard and nothing else. The screen is split down the middle, with the Adams board to the left and Mitchell’s to the right. There’s no introduction, no wave to the camera, no walk-on music as they stride confidently from kitchen to spare room. There is just this – two rheumy-lit boards, three darts each flying in from off-screen and the players’ hand reaching in to grab them back every 10 seconds or so.
Icons of Darts, for that is what the competition is called, got out of the blocks in the past fortnight and has had games running morning and evening every day. Last night, the PDC started running their version, calling it Darts Home Tour. Some of the biggest names in the game are in, with the likes of Peter Wright, Gerwyn Price and Dave Chisnall all playing.

Not everybody is rushing to get on board, all the same. Gary Anderson has pulled out because his wi-fi connection isn’t strong enough. The sport’s biggest star Michael van Gerwen has given it a pass too. “It has to be quiet,” he said. “But with a newborn baby, a child of two-and-a-half years and three dogs in my house, it really won’t work.”

Darts Home Tour will be played out for 32 consecutive nights, all of it livestreamed on the PDC website. To take part, each player has to install professional, broadcast-worthy lighting, set up a tripod for the webcam, ensure reliable high-speed broadband to keep the scoring tablet up to date and wear an earpiece connected to a Zoom call for the referee to call the scores. If you’re wondering why go to all this trouble, there’s a line in the press releases that might give a hint.

“The action will also be streamed live on a number of bookmakers’ websites.”

Sport has stopped. Gambling has not. Only this week, Reuters reported that the owners of online firm 888 Holdings were flagging up the growing risks of problem gambling, even as its share price was falling 7.2 per cent. “With people spending more time at home and with increased levels of stress and uncertainty,” said chief executive Itai Pazner, “we are proactively communicating with our customers to provide information on safer gambling and where necessary, offer support.”
Tony O’Reilly, author of acclaimed memoir Tony-10 and addiction counsellor, knows the territory better than anyone. There was a time in his life when a lack of sport would have paused his gambling and made him think he didn’t have a problem. There was a later time when he would have found a way, regardless of what sport was around. He had the same problem both times, just at different stages along the road.
“I had a client last week who had been a couple of weeks free of it,” he says. “But then, through boredom, through sitting in the house with nothing to do, he was flicking through his phone and he found two semi-finals of a cup competition somewhere. I think it was Belarus. He ended up gambling on the two games. It was available and he needed to get that bet on.

It’s Thursday night and the darts is on. No, really. Martin ‘Wolfie’ Adams is taking on Scott ‘Scottie Dog’ Mitchell in actual live sport that you can actually sit down and watch. Okay, so it isn’t on TV – you need to stream it on a site called Dartshop.tv. And granted, they’re not actually sharing an oche – they’re in their respective houses, throwing at their own dartboards.
Nor, for that matter, can you actually see either of them. Both players have one webcam, zeroed in on their dartboard and nothing else. The screen is split down the middle, with the Adams board to the left and Mitchell’s to the right. There’s no introduction, no wave to the camera, no walk-on music as they stride confidently from kitchen to spare room. There is just this – two rheumy-lit boards, three darts each flying in from off-screen and the players’ hand reaching in to grab them back every 10 seconds or so.
Icons of Darts, for that is what the competition is called, got out of the blocks in the past fortnight and has had games running morning and evening every day. Last night, the PDC started running their version, calling it Darts Home Tour. Some of the biggest names in the game are in, with the likes of Peter Wright, Gerwyn Price and Dave Chisnall all playing.

Martin ‘Wolfie’ Adams has been competing in the Icons of Darts series, where players play against each other from their own houses. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Not everybody is rushing to get on board, all the same. Gary Anderson has pulled out because his wi-fi connection isn’t strong enough. The sport’s biggest star Michael van Gerwen has given it a pass too. “It has to be quiet,” he said. “But with a newborn baby, a child of two-and-a-half years and three dogs in my house, it really won’t work.”

Darts Home Tour will be played out for 32 consecutive nights, all of it livestreamed on the PDC website. To take part, each player has to install professional, broadcast-worthy lighting, set up a tripod for the webcam, ensure reliable high-speed broadband to keep the scoring tablet up to date and wear an earpiece connected to a Zoom call for the referee to call the scores. If you’re wondering why go to all this trouble, there’s a line in the press releases that might give a hint.

“The action will also be streamed live on a number of bookmakers’ websites.”

Sport has stopped. Gambling has not. Only this week, Reuters reported that the owners of online firm 888 Holdings were flagging up the growing risks of problem gambling, even as its share price was falling 7.2 per cent. “With people spending more time at home and with increased levels of stress and uncertainty,” said chief executive Itai Pazner, “we are proactively communicating with our customers to provide information on safer gambling and where necessary, offer support.”
Tony O’Reilly, author of acclaimed memoir Tony-10 and addiction counsellor, knows the territory better than anyone. There was a time in his life when a lack of sport would have paused his gambling and made him think he didn’t have a problem. There was a later time when he would have found a way, regardless of what sport was around. He had the same problem both times, just at different stages along the road.
“I had a client last week who had been a couple of weeks free of it,” he says. “But then, through boredom, through sitting in the house with nothing to do, he was flicking through his phone and he found two semi-finals of a cup competition somewhere. I think it was Belarus. He ended up gambling on the two games. It was available and he needed to get that bet on.

“We’re finding that the number of people seeking support has dropped. That would suggest that the lack of sport has made some people pull back. But the problem hasn’t gone away for those people. The problem is the problem. It isn’t sport and it isn’t betting shops.

“That would be my worry. That people think to themselves, ‘Ah sure the gambling is gone now, I don’t have an issue with it’. But then when sport comes back, they have a false sense of security. I know myself, that would have been me away back in the day if this had happened.
“But I also know that later on, I was sitting up at three in the morning betting €1,000 every 30 seconds on the virtual stock exchange. You don’t solve a gambling problem by taking away sport. If it was that easy, everyone would do it. You have to treat the underlying reason for gambling, otherwise it will manifest itself eventually.”
More than ever, the gambling industry is walking a fine line during all this. In normal times, betting companies can legitimately pass themselves off as part of the entertainment business. Ordinary punters having a bit of fun to go along with watching their sport provides plenty of cover. Just as it’s no harm to like a bet, it’s no harm to facilitate one.
But now that sport has almost without exception gone away, the spotlight shines brighter than ever on those parts of the industry that can still make a crust. On Friday morning, Flutter, the parent group that owns Paddy Power-Betfair, announced that overall group revenue for the first three months of the year rose by 16 per cent. To be able to do so at a time of a global cessation of sport is a fairly awesome demonstration of how nimble the major betting companies can be when it comes to making money.

Flutter have been able to absorb a 57 per cent drop in sports betting revenue partly because of a staggering 200 per cent rise in their American gaming platforms in the first quarter of 2020. For the moment, Flutter have continued to pay all their staff salaries without leaning on the Irish Government’s Covid-19 scheme or its equivalent anywhere else in the world. That may change the longer the crisis goes on.
For now, the bigger companies are muddling through. In the industry, there’s talk of one firm turning over a million euro in a single day during the past fortnight taking bets on efootball – that is, punters betting on strangers with handles such as Dangerdim77 and White_Boy1927 playing Fifa against each other. There are markets on teams of Far Eastern kids facing off in battle games like League of Legends and Dota. It’s not a Champions League Tuesday night but it’s not nothing either.
Lower down the food chain, the picture for the smaller chains and independents is understandably a lot bleaker. Of the 814 betting shops in Ireland, 670 are either Paddy Power, Boylesports or Ladbrokes. The remaining 144 are either wholly independent or part of smaller chains like Bar One and Tully. While the bigger beasts can survive by pushing customers towards online casino, poker, roulette and so on, the small-town local bookmaker is starving for sport.

“I don’t foresee all of the betting shops opening when we come to the end of this,” says Sharon Byrne of the Irish Bookmakers’ Association. “Please God we get out of it as a country with as low a number of deaths as possible. That’s the main thing for everybody. But we’re no different to any business. We’ve had a complete stop and the thing we rely on, the actual sport itself, is going to be slow to come back.

“Nobody could have imagined something like this. We had 1,365 shops before the last recession and we’re down to 814 at the start of this one. There will be a marked decline in consumer spend anyway so all small business will suffer to some extent. The biggest issue for betting shops isn’t payroll because the Government subsidy is a great help on that front. The biggest concern is rent. I have so many members ringing me in huge distress over landlords.”
For those firms with an online presence, the past month has been about casting around for sports on which to offer up markets. While it will seem unfathomable to most of the general public that football in Belarus or Nicaragua or greyhound racing in Australia could be of interest to anyone other than gambling addicts, the reality is that they’re providing a small trickle of income in an otherwise frozen business.
Peter Kingston is a trading and content manager with Bar One in Co Louth. Bar One are down to a skeleton staff across the country, with a handful of operators keeping the website going and a few more manning the phones. Most of the calls are older customers keeping up their lotto bets, full sure that if they skip a week that’s when their numbers will come up.
“There’s Hong Kong racing on this afternoon,” Kingston said when we spoke on Tuesday. “That’s a godsend for us. It’s live on Sky Sports Racing. It has a good reputation, it’s being covered well, you will have lads who have expertise and can tip well so that all helps. The American racing is still going so there’s three race meetings in Florida.
“The football in Belarus and Nicaragua is still going. Obviously it’s not massive or anything but it’s there. In all honesty, I would have never even have noticed it before. You would have found it on our site, from our third-party providers. We would use companies like Bet Radar. They provide a lot of the content that we wouldn’t physically be able to source or manage ourselves.

“They provide our odds for that kind of stuff, as they do for a lot of the smaller firms. So that has been pushed to the top of our site and we are taking money on them. People follow along on Livescore. com. We haven’t grown to the size where we’d be able to provide livestreams for people to watch on our site.
“The likes of ourselves, we don’t have poker or casino games online. We have some esports online but we wouldn’t have had at the start of this. We’re adapting with efootball and the like. But we haven’t the vast area of esports that other firms would have.”
In the real world, sport can’t come back quick enough. Whatever about the conglomerates and their ability to extract money online, the smaller firms won’t survive an indefinite stoppage. The one bit of good news they cling to is the fact that horse racing is likely to return quicker than most sports, thereby providing some measure of bread and butter.
Among the general public, the desperate, the bored and the addicted will always find a way. They don’t need the shops to open, they don’t need the PGA Tour to start up again, they don’t need razzmatazz or normality or any of the million things we think of when we think about sport. All they need is a laptop with a split-screen, glitchy footage of a couple of dartboards and the thunk-thunk-thunk of faceless throwers keeping the whole show rolling.
Welcome to sport in the lockdown. Streaming live on your favourite betting site.

It is a journey chillingly captured in one sentence

Great to see that ‘Tony10’ made into the top ten.

Click here to read the full article….

Carlow Nationalist – John Foley Interview with Tony O’Reilly

The problem with virtual sport is all too real
Thursday, April 16, 2020

Tony O’Reilly gambled over €10 million before his addiction caught up with him. As we all spend more time at home, he talks to John Foley about why we need to have honest conversations about our online betting habits

AN interesting email landed in our inbox last week.
“A Ladbrokes punter has turned €0.50 into a whopping €2,133.88,” the headline said.
“With just a handful of football matches taking place across the globe, the Cork-based customer correctly backed six odds-against shots across Belarus, Burundi and Nicaragua at a combined 4,266/1.
“Even though there is very little football going on right now, this fan’s interest in international football has netted him a tidy sum,” the statement from the betting firm gushed. “Picking out six odds-against shots to the tune of 4,266/1 is simply incredible and we take our hats off to him.”Where do we start? Well, there’s the over-excited tone, designed to suggest it’s something to celebrate and perhaps garner a few positive column inches in a newspaper. If only we were all so lucky!
As for the line about “this fan’s interest in international football…” Are we really supposed to swallow the idea that someone was poring over the form from three such diverse countries in a bid to gain an edge? It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a shot in the dark, a bet that, all things being equal, will see you lose your money well over 4,000 times before you win anything.
And as for the fact the punter stood to lose only 50 cent. Sure, what harm is in it?

Tony O’Reilly
Tony O’Reilly is a good man to answer that last question. The Carlow man came to national attention as the man who gambled over €10 million, including €1.75 million he stole from his employers An Post, while he was branch manager in Gorey, before his world crashed down around him in 2011.
After serving a prison sentence, he told his story in harrowing detail in his book, Tony 10, and he now works as a counsellor and psychotherapist.
“When I was at the height of it I was going into the bookies first thing in the morning and I could be gambling on matches in Peru, Argentina, wherever,” he says.
“Because of my court case, I have my full betting history and from my first bet to my last bet, it runs to 1106 pages. You can see the change in the types of bet I made. I wouldn’t have been a connoisseur of Argentinean football or German second division football. But that’s the stuff I started to gamble on because that was the next available thing. When you’re in that betting frenzy and trying to get a bet on, you’re not thinking rationally. I’m not going to wait until Saturday for the Premier League, I need to get it on now.”

Belarus is one of the few countries around the world where regular sport is still being played
Which brings us to today and the effects the worldwide Covid-19 restrictions are having on our lives.
There is no Premier League football on Saturday, or anything else we may be familiar with for that matter. People are spending all their time at home, levels of boredom are high and one vice which is enjoying a boon is online gambling.
Tony wrote a blog about the recent virtual Grand National, organised by bookmakers to replace the Aintree event which traditionally attracts the highest viewing figures for a racing event each year, and is also an annual bonanza for bookies as the casual punter joins the regular gambler by wagering a couple of quid.
The virtual race attracted plenty of positive spin too with the bookies donating over €2.6 million of their winnings to the NHS while €200,000 was given to Irish charities including the Irish Red Cross and the Mater Foundation.
Yes, you could argue the virtual race offered a distraction in these unusual times. It’s just a bit of fun and the maximum bet allowed was just £10. But for Tony, there is a flipside:
“You have to bet online. This introduces a lot of people to this form of betting. In my case, online betting, in-play betting and gambling with credit were the driving force behind my addiction. Online opened up a completely new gambling world to me.”

Tony O’Reilly says virtual events, such as the recent Grand National, will push vulnerable people towards a dangerous world
The current online world is saturated with virtual sports events which can easily suck in the vulnerable.
“There’s nothing else to gamble on but there’s a virtual event every two minutes. So if you have a tendency to gamble, it’s there, it’s on a countdown and suddenly you’re scrambling around to put on a bet.”
He says that in a short period of time, he went from being dismissive of virtual events to being totally immersed.
“At the start I would have seen virtual sports as ridiculous. But at the end it was so normal to me, I was doing it out of habit. As soon as it came up, I’d look at the 14/1 shot. Up you go, €100 each way over the counter and I wouldn’t even think about it.
“The bugle you hear at the start, that would prompt you to do it. That would be a sign and you’re not even thinking about the fact it’s nearly half a week’s wages for some people and it’s all just a cartoon that’s based on algorithms. The outcome of the race is based on the money that is put on it. So it very much exists for the compulsive gambler because there’s no other reason why it should exist.”
The immediate nature of online and virtual gambling means that you never have to wait for your next event. It also means you can get lost down a dark hole far quicker.
“It feeds that desperation to get a bet on, but also that desperation to fix the problem that you’re in because you think you can gamble your way out of a problem,” says Tony. “I was trying to win it back as quickly as I could.”
At a time when there may be more of a tendency to gamble on virtual events, Tony says it’s important that people are aware of their own behaviour.
“People are drawn into various unhealthy ways of coping with anxiety and boredom. That could be bingeing on Netflix, that could be games on your phone. It’s when it starts affecting other areas in your life that you need to act, when you’re not getting out for a bit of exercise, you’re not engaging with family, you’ve gone into yourself. Be aware if you are drifting into something that is becoming obsessive.
“Be aware of your limits, if you feel that you’re gambling more than you would have before. A lot of time we rationalise. We say, well I’m not spending it on other stuff. But it does creep up. When online gambling crept in for me it was something that took hold very, very quickly.”
Tony currently works with Problem Gambling Ireland, a free counselling service based in Waterford and Dublin. He says the number of people who need help is on the rise.
“The service in Waterford is really starting to grow, especially from surrounding areas like Kilkenny, Carlow and Wexford. In Dublin we had a waiting list of over 40 and that was without a full launch of the service. It shows that people are getting into trouble.”
The average age group of those using the service is 25-35 and a lot more women are also looking for help.
The real danger is that betting has become so normalised, particularly around sport. So much so that it’s hardly remarked upon any more. Tony tells a story of one evening many years ago when he used to work in Scragg’s Alley in Carlow.
“I remember one night a group of young lads from a local football club came in and they lined up their phones on the counter, watching the Champions League. They were only 18 or 19, and five or six of them were in the bar, gambling on the games. There was no conversation, it was so normal.”
He argues that there needs to be a three-pronged approach to tackling the problem. Firstly there needs to be proper regulations in place. Ireland still does not have a gambling regulator. The industry effectively regulates itself.
“I know that a lot of the political parties had it in their election manifestos,” Tony says. “I think it’s important to keep it on the table because it will have a huge impact going forward.”
Secondly, he says the industry must put policies in place to protect the vulnerable. And thirdly, people must take responsibility for their own actions and that comes through education.
“We need to recognise when it becomes a problem in ourselves and in others,” he says. “We need to open up a conversation around it.”
It may be virtual sport, but the problems are far too real.
Problem Gambling Ireland is a free counselling service based in Waterford and Dublin. They are currently conducting sessions by phone and Skype/Zoom. Contact: 089 2415401 or info@problemgambling.ie
Gamblers Anonymous gamblersanonymous.ie

The Problem Gambling Podcast

Where co-hosts Barry Grant and Tony O’Reilly discuss various aspects of gambling addiction and their work with people affected by problem gambling. We will also talk to people in Ireland and the UK about their work and experience with Gambling Addiction.

To listen to episodes on Spotify or Anchor FM: Click Here