“Online Gambling Soars”
According to a recent report, published by investment
bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, regarding online gambling,
Britain too has been bitten by the Internet gambling bug.
According to the Gaming Board of Great Britain, which oversees
casinos within the United Kingdom, approximately four percent
of British adults have gambled over the Internet in the
last two years, and that number is expected to continue
to increase as online gambling becomes more acceptable
and mainstream.
A brief examination of the history of online gambling
supports that expectation. In 1996 there were only thirty
online gambling sites with annual revenues of 30 million
dollars. Since that time, however, the online gambling
industry has exploded, with the number of Poker web sites
now roughly at two thousand and revenues having catapulted
to a whopping 9.2 billion dollars annually (half of which
comes from the United States). Of course, this increased
opportunity to gamble with such ease and convenience translates
into some hefty total losses for the gamblers. In the same
report by Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, it is estimated
that gamblers lost $237 billion to gaming companies worldwide
and are expected to lose approximately $277 billion a year
by the year 2008.
Presently, betting on sports is responsible for nearly half
(about 45 percent) of the Internet gambling activity, while
other types of gambling account for about 32 percent. Industry
analysts believe that the high percent of sports betting
is largely due to the advances in broadband and cellular
technology, which allows gamblers to place their bets by
cell phone or by hand-held computers. Analysts also agree
that there is tremendous potential for growth in online Poker
(once again due to the American obsession with the game,
but nonetheless a game that is popular all over the world)
and that online Poker could even surpass sports betting by
the year 2008. According to Sportingbet, which just recently
bought Paradise Poker, the biggest provider of Poker sites
on the web, the market value of online Poker is currently
about 1.5 billion dollars, but all evidence indicates that
this value will be seeing a marked increase in the not too
distant future.
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