With impressive drives, tough putts, and maybe some shanks and slices of outrageous fortune, golfers at a Las Vegas event raised more than $150,000 to fund research into problem gambling.
The money from the 25th annual Golf Classic sponsored by the American Gaming Association and the Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers will go to the International Center for Responsible Gaming, with the event’s cumulative contribution approaching $2.8 million.
“Responsible gaming is vital to every operator, regulator, and supplier worldwide,” said Dave Kubajak, senior vice president of sales, marketing, and operations at JCM Global, which has been the tournament’s presenting sponsor every year. “We support what the ICRG has done and continues to do to research cause and treatment.”
ICRG president Art Paikowsky said the exact amount raised by the May 8 event wasn’t yet tallied, but it should be $150,000 to $200,000. In the classic’s first years, the annual total was closer to $10,000.
The center has become a global leader in funding scientific research on problem gambling, with links to 2,000 experts around the world. Paikowsky said the U.S. government doesn’t fund such studies. Some states spend a portion of their gambling-tax revenue on RG messaging, but none has contributed to ICRG, he added.
Learning about causes and treatments of problem gambling is far different from being against gambling in general. “There’s been gambling on this planet for thousands of years, so it’s not going away,” Paikowsky said. “What we can do is understand it better, then give the industry tools to keep people safe.”
The sold-out Golf Classic featured a record 28 sponsors and 116 golfers playing at MGM Resorts’s Shadow Creek Golf Course. Participants represented online and sports betting, as well as traditional casinos. Additional events included a charity raffle and a silent auction featuring autographed sports memorabilia and various Las Vegas experiences. “Players could also buy mulligans, not that anyone needed them,” Kubajak said.
Money raised by the classic goes to ICRG’s unrestricted research fund, allowing it to be used for any study approved by the group’s independent Scientific Advisory Board and peer-review panels. Most studies take two to three years. In some cases, a donor chooses to fund a study already approved by the board – $180,000 for a two-year study, $450,000 for a three-year.
“The work product is not how much money we raise, (but) how many studies we have ongoing,” Paikowsky said. A record 30 projects are underway, with four of them examining gambling among young adults, which the center sees as an emerging issue.
A three-year study that will wrap up soon focuses on whether advertising increases problem gambling among sports bettors. Paikowsky said results will be published this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Another study is examining the effectiveness of messages encouraging people to call a hotline if they think they have a gambling problem. “Maybe the messages should say something else,” Paikowsky said. “People who have a gambling problem don’t want to be made to feel guilty for it. How do we engage people in such a way that we don’t judge them?”
While most of the center’s money comes from gaming-industry contributions, the ICRG process ensures that fact doesn’t influence which research projects get funded or how the findings are reported. An independent Scientific Advisory Board determines funding priorities and grant applicants’ project proposals go before independent peer- review panels. ICRG policy stipulates that the Scientific Advisory Board is solely responsible for deciding which research proposals get funded.
“Integrity is everything,” Paikowsky said. “People are just waiting to say your data is corrupted, especially if the data actually demonstrates that something may not be as harmful as people thought. The research we do is bulletproof.” Results of ICRG studies have been published in more than 500 academic journals.
The center, founded in 1996, began because of the lack of scientific research on problem gambling, which led to unsubstantiated and inaccurate information being presented to regulators, lawmakers, and the media.
Paikowsky said studies have shown that about 2 percent of people have a diagnosable gambling disorder, while another 3 percent to 5 percent meet the criteria for problem gambling. The number of people affected might be increasing because of the growing number with access to legal gambling, including online, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the percentage is higher.
That’s one issue being considered in one of the studies about young adults, say, 18 to 26. “If we see larger percentages of younger people having a gambling problem, that’s a societal risk,” Paikowsky said. “We want to keep a close eye out on that.”
