Former pro-poker player turns the tables on gambling

Australia’s Alliance for Gambling Reform believes the UK numbers would be applicable to Australia, or much higher. Australians are the world’s biggest gamblers. It is hoping to convince local banks to provide similar access to anonymised financial transactions.

Tony Mohr, the alliance’s chief executive, said most research on gambling used tiny samples, and was usually based on interviews. Because of the stigma, people often lied or underestimated how much they spent gambling.

Using anonymous banking data to understand gambling harm was groundbreaking.

“It reveals that the conventional prevalence studies of gambling harm underestimate the scale and dimensions of harm from gambling,” Mr Mohr said. “Australian banks have an opportunity to do what Lloyds has done, and work with academics to better understand gambling harm in our communities.”

Dr Newall said he gave up gambling because it seemed immoral and inherently wasteful given profits come from those who lose.

“The more moral thing was to stop trying to make money from gambling that way … And use my knowledge to balance out the table a bit between the skilled players and the unskilled players,” he said.

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“Gambling games always operate where one person makes money off another.” The loser was usually less skilled and less informed than the winner. “If you can’t spot the sucker [at the table] you are the sucker,” Dr Newall said, quoting an old poker saying.

He mostly played online with cash rewards. “It is a lot of effort, requires an incredible amount of concentration and effort. You have to be able to lose $10,000 and not care about it. It is quite a solitary existence.”

Interested in game theory, economics and statistics, he believes he is the only researcher specialising in gambling to have once been a high-stakes professional poker player.

His most gratifying experience was appearing before a House of Lords committee in the United Kingdom educating them on how young people “get hoodwinked” into gambling. “The young me wouldn’t have imagined being in the House of Lords,” Dr Newall said.