Online Gambling Trends: Decline of the Intelligent Gambler

“The gambling boom has combined with technology to attract more less skilled users.”

Online gambling is seen as beneficial to most associated with the gaming industry—from platform vendors, to gaming providers, to casino corporations, to users, all the way to the state governments that regulate online activity.

Goodbye Intelligence

However, the market dynamics of the online format is catching one stakeholder between the sides: the intelligent gambler. The sophisticated millennial generation savvy with tech tools and conditioned to rapid calculations should by all rights be experiencing an uptake in winnings in the new online format in games of calculated odds such as blackjack—but alas, the casinos seem to have noticed and adapted to protect their profits accordingly.

The Millennial Player

The rise of the digital age has paralleled another unrelated movement: the expansion of land-based casino gaming across the U.S. over the past quarter-century and the global poker boom and online gaming explosion of the 2000s. This exposed more people than ever to games of chance, accelerating the development of individual knowledge of strategy and gaming, giving rise to the millennial player generation.

Recent Online Gambling Boom Brings More Players

Online gambling reaches more unskilled players than ever, enabling casinos to cut losses incurred by millennial players who kept beating them. The way to cut costs was to remove blackjack and other games of skill.

Bonus Round: The Hybridization of Online Skill Games

Instead, online casinos have taken to offering “less-skilled” games of skill. These games have far less outcome variance between the abilities of the most and least skilled players, with the skill-based features reserved for the bonus round—in other words, every player has the same chance of qualifying for the skill round.

A great example of this new form of hybrid game is Pong, based on the original video game offered by Atari beginning in 1972. The new video slot game was introduced by Bally Technologies at the 2004 Global Gaming Expo, equipped with a bonus round in which the player would play a 45-second round of the original Pong game, with the player's result directly affecting the payout.

The appeal of this type of hybrid skill game was the statistical variance between the results of the best and worst player: a scant and predictable 7 percent. IGT's Centipede and GTECH's Zuma are among the games following suit with skill-based bonus features.

The "Death" of Blackjack

At the same time, online casinos have been adding features to their technology to eliminate their risk of loss from card counting, the key skill component of blackjack and other card games including poker.

One such feature is the continuous shuffling machine (CSM), which increases user engagement by speeding up games while eliminating the possibility of card-counting.

A second feature is the shifting of the odds payout on blackjack on all deck alternatives, from 3:2 payouts adjusted to 6:5 payouts, thus adding 1.39% to the house advantage. This may seem like a small figure to the player, yet represents a huge savings to the house, and an adjustment of time-honored odds payout at the cost of the skill player.

The Disappearance of the Millennial Player

Millennial players are being discouraged from learning and applying strategy. The target market of online casinos shrinks in share, but increases in quantity as globalization enables rapid cost-free delivery of unskilled and low-skilled games.

Video enthusiasts are being attracted to replace millennial players. Online casinos will be pleased with the development; however, gaming purists will have to wave goodbye to the participation of a whole new generation of strategists.

Sadly, the economic dynamics of online gambling are changing the definition of iGaming, at the cost of gambling's most enduring - and perhaps endearing - group of users.