In March 2020, something happened that would normally be almost impossible to arrange as an experiment.
Casinos closed.
Betting shops locked their doors. Slot halls went dark. Horse racing was disrupted. Football leagues stopped playing. Sporting calendars that had supplied bettors with something to wager on almost every day suddenly became empty.
For millions of gamblers, the question was no longer whether they wanted to gamble.
For a while, many simply couldn’t gamble the way they normally did.
What happened next tells us something important about gambling behavior.
The obvious prediction
At the beginning of the pandemic, there was an understandable concern within the gambling industry and among researchers.
If people could no longer visit casinos or betting shops, wouldn’t they simply move online?
The logic seemed convincing.
A casino player unable to reach a roulette table could open an online casino. A sports bettor without football might try virtual sports, slots or another gambling product. People were also stuck at home, often bored, stressed and spending much more time on their phones.
Some gamblers did exactly that.
But the overall picture turned out to be considerably more complicated.
Germany accidentally conducted a gambling experiment
Germany provides one particularly interesting example.
During the first lockdown, casinos, gambling halls and betting shops were closed. Researchers later studied 612 people who had participated in higher-risk gambling activities exclusively offline before the lockdown.
If gambling demand were easily transferable, we might expect a substantial migration to online gambling.
That wasn’t what researchers found.
Among casino gamblers in the study, 64.1% stopped participating in higher-risk forms of gambling during the shutdown. Among sports bettors, 37.1% stopped.
Migration online was surprisingly limited. Depending on the gambling product, only around 7.7% to 10.9% switched to online gambling.
Think about what that means.
Remove the casino, the journey to the venue, the familiar machines, the staff, the other players and the physical ritual surrounding gambling — and for many people, gambling itself decreases.
The game may only be one part of the habit.
Switzerland saw something similar
Researchers studying Swiss land-based casino players found another interesting pattern.
Among 110 casino players surveyed following the first lockdown, 55% reported gambling during lockdown. Overall gambling intensity fell significantly.
Among the people who continued gambling, online gambling increased — evidence that substitution certainly existed.
But even among those continuing to gamble, total gambling intensity decreased.
So the simplistic story that “casinos closed and everyone moved online” doesn’t hold up particularly well.
Some migrated.
Some experimented.
Some continued.
And many simply gambled less.
Sports bettors faced an even stranger world
For sports bettors, COVID removed not only the betting shop but much of the underlying product.
There was suddenly almost nothing to bet on.
A British study examined 3,866 people who had regularly bet on sports before COVID. During the initial lockdown, 29.8% of male sports bettors and 33.4% of female sports bettors stopped gambling altogether.
Others behaved very differently: 17.3% of men and 16.5% of women started participating in a new form of gambling.
The same external shock therefore produced very different reactions.
For one gambler, removing football removed gambling.
For another, removing football encouraged exploration.
That distinction matters.
Gambling is partly a game of cues
We often describe gambling preferences as though they exist independently inside the player.
“I’m a slot player.”
“I’m a blackjack player.”
“I bet football.”
But behavior is also attached to routines.
Friday evening might mean driving past a casino.
A salary payment might trigger a casino visit.
Watching Champions League football might automatically involve checking the odds.
Sitting at a particular bar might mean playing a nearby machine.
A notification might prompt someone to open a betting app.
Over time, the surrounding circumstances can become part of the behavior itself.
Then COVID abruptly broke millions of those sequences.
The gambler was still there. The money might still have been available.
But the trigger had disappeared.
The casino isn’t just where gambling happens
This is particularly important for understanding land-based casinos.
Consider everything surrounding a casino visit.
- The drive.
- The entrance.
- The greeting.
- The loyalty card.
- The first drink.
- The walk toward a favorite area.
- The sound of the floor.
- The familiar machine.
- The people the player recognizes.
Perhaps dinner follows. Perhaps friends are involved. Perhaps gambling is simply one component of a Saturday-night ritual that has been repeated for years.
An online slot can reproduce the mathematics of a slot machine surprisingly well.
It cannot automatically reproduce that ritual.
COVID demonstrated how important that distinction can be.
When the physical environment disappeared, some players looked for a digital replacement.
Others apparently lost an important part of the reason they gambled in the first place.
But there was another group
The story shouldn’t be romanticized.
For some gamblers, lockdown created exactly the opposite conditions.
Isolation increased. Stress increased. Normal routines disappeared. Financial uncertainty became widespread. Phones and computers became an even larger part of everyday life.
In a UK study of 1,028 adults, overall gambling participation, frequency and weekly expenditure declined during the first lockdown. But the most engaged gamblers did not show the same reduction despite gambling opportunities becoming more limited.
People whose financial circumstances had deteriorated were also more likely to report that their gambling had increased.
That gives us perhaps the most interesting lesson from the entire episode.
There is no single “gambler response.”
The same event can push gamblers in opposite directions
Imagine two regular casino customers.
Both visit twice a week.
Both spend similar amounts.
Both appear equally loyal in a casino database.
Then the casino closes for three months.
Player A stops gambling almost completely.
Player B creates several online accounts and begins gambling from home.
Before the closure, their transactional histories might have looked remarkably similar.
But psychologically, their relationships with gambling were very different.
For Player A, gambling may have been heavily connected to place, routine and social experience.
For Player B, the underlying motivation may have been sufficiently strong that removing one channel simply redirected the behavior into another.
Revenue data alone would have struggled to reveal the difference.
A crisis did.
What happened when gambling returned?
There is another fascinating implication.
If environmental cues help maintain gambling routines, interrupting those cues for long enough can weaken the routine itself.
Researchers studying gambling during the pandemic have therefore raised an intriguing possibility: temporary closures did not merely prevent gambling while venues were unavailable.
For some people, the interruption may have provided an opportunity to reduce or reconsider their gambling.
That doesn’t mean closing casinos periodically would automatically solve gambling problems.
It means something more subtle.
Habits need continuity.
Break the continuity, and sometimes the behavior changes.
The lesson goes beyond COVID
The pandemic was extraordinary, but the principle isn’t.
A gambler moves to another city.
A favorite casino closes.
A smoking ban changes the experience.
A player gets married.
A new job changes working hours.
A casino changes its loyalty program.
A favorite machine disappears.
A player takes a long holiday.
Any of these events can interrupt an established gambling routine.
Casino operators often think about such events primarily as customer-retention problems.
Behavioral science suggests another way of looking at them.
They are habit interruptions.
And after an interruption, the player does not necessarily return to the same behavior.
Some return more frequently. Some switch products. Some switch channels. Some switch casinos.
And some discover that they don’t miss gambling nearly as much as they expected.
The strangest lesson from the empty casino
For decades, the gambling industry has invested enormous effort in understanding what makes people play.
COVID accidentally helped reveal something equally important:
What makes people stop?
Sometimes it isn’t a dramatic loss.
It isn’t an intervention.
It isn’t someone deciding that gambling is bad.
Sometimes the usual Friday night simply doesn’t happen.
Then it doesn’t happen the following Friday either.
The casino lights eventually come back on.
But the habit that used to bring someone through the door may already have changed.
And perhaps that is the most interesting thing about gambling behavior.
We tend to think the game creates the habit.
Sometimes the habit is everything surrounding the game.
Sources and further reading
- Hayer, T. et al. — Research on the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on offline gambling behavior in Germany, published in Frontiers in Psychology.
- Research on gambling behavior among Swiss casino players during the COVID-19 lockdown.
- UK research examining changes in sports betting and gambling participation during the first COVID-19 lockdown.
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